Food

Moni Bantu Boonse! Muli Bwanji?

This week’s topic is one of my favorites: Food!

Surprisingly, I don’t see a huge difference between what we eat here, and what we ate in the States. The main difference is that we cook simpler meals at home, given that we have less cookware, and haven’t yet discovered the spices that we are used to. We eat out more often for lunch (every workday) - Thanks to a catering service (owned by our landlord) that serves home cooked meals at our workplace. However, we eat out less often for dinner.

The selection of restaurants is much more diverse than I expected. There are cuisines from all over the world here - (We’ve seen) Chinese, Korean, German, Indian, Lebanese, Arabic, Polish, American, Italian and Irish (I assume that Irish Pubs serve “Irish food”?!). I was surprised to find Subway here, but not McDonald’s and I was also surprised that I haven’t seen any “African” restaurants (yet).

For lunch, we pay less than $3 per meal, and get excellent food. We usually get to choose between two forms of carbs, two forms of protein, and vegetables. I consider lunch to have a good balance between “local” and “not local”. However, my coworkers have had several long lasting email discussions about how lunch is not “authentic enough”.

Having said that, let’s go through a few items on the menu:

• Nsima/Nshima – This is without a doubt, the “National Food of Zambia”. Locals are very proud of it, and have it on a daily basis. Almost every place I visit, locals ask me whether or not I’ve had Nshima, and how I like it. “Rich people” have it with meat, and not so rich people have it with relish, but everybody has it. Often locals eat with their hands, and the Nshima can serve as a “spoon” to scoop up other food items. Here’s how it’s made. Thanks for the recipe Yanga!

1. Boil water in a big pot
2. Make a thick paste with mealie meal (= cornmeal) and water in a bowl
3. Add the paste to the boiling water to make porridge (the first three steps are known as “kumunyila nsima”)
4. Let the porridge boil for ten to fifteen minutes
5. Add mealie meal and stir with a cooking stick to make “pap”. The pap must be soft enough to roll in your hands like dough (this called “kutyakula nsima)
6. Leave the nsima to simmer for about 5 minutes and serve by dishing out onto plates with a large serving spoon

• Ox tail – This is the one food, that my body didn’t enjoy as much as my mouth did.
• Liver – I believe its beef
• Offals – These are stomach lines and intestines (Don’t look it up at Dictionary.com)
• Tilapia – Very popular among the locals. They eat everything but the bones including skin and head

Potatoes, rice, noodles, sausage, meatballs, pork chops, chicken, beans, vegetables, cole slaw, salad, and “leafy stuff” are other items offered on a regular basis.

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Ketsia is showing us how to eat with hands.

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My favorite juice here

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Tap water is safe to drink here. However, it is hard water and has a lot of minerals. Just to be safe, we boil the water and then filter it. The following is a picture of boiled tap water in our filter. The white stuff on top is supposedly calcium.