#9 Boil Your Leaves

One of my favorite things to eat here is boiled leaves. If there is one thing my neighbors have mastered, it is how to correctly boil some leaves and make it pretty darn delicious. This traditional Mozambican dish called “matapa” is made from boiling leafs and then adding peanut flour, onion, salt, tomatoes, and sometimes coconut milk. It sounds simple and not so appetizing at first, but you’d be amazed how far some peanut flour and coconut milk can take a meal. There are different variations of course with the variety of leafs found in Mozambique. The most typical (and my favorite) is with the cassava leaf. Others include leafs of cauliflower, pumpkin, and several types of beans. Even a local, Northern Mozambican specie of the Acacia tree family offers a lovely tasting leaf to use in a matapa. And as much as I like it, I also like to joke about it as well, because really its just a soup with leafs served with rice. The only leafs I have not seen boiled are lettuce and cabbage, but cabbage comes close when you fry it here. Everything else though you will never need to ask how to prepare it, just boil it, drain it, and add the rest of the ingredients. I really can’t wait to make this back home twenty years from now. This has got to be one of the most fascinating foods to me here because why did I never think to eat a leaf? Why did I always assume to compost them?

#9b Never add Tomatoes in a Matapa made from Cassava

#9c Always Drain and Rinse the leaf from the Acacia Tree

#9d A Grated Green Papaya is Perfect to add to Matapas for Special Occasions

#8a If Plastic Bags Could be Used as Money, We’d be the Sultans of Africa

The trash problem in Mozambique is a tad different from ours back home in the good ol’ US of A. For one, there is very little trash here. And two, if there is trash, it is most likely to be a simple plastic bag. Let us talk a little more about the plastic bag situation here. Once a purchase is made at any kind of store, hut, or a lemonade-type stand outside of a house the client has the right to a plastic bag no matter how much you spend. It could be 6 cents for a pile of tomatoes or one small roll, but you will get a plastic bag. It could be a 3-cent piece of fried dough and you will still get a plastic bag when the actual price equivalent of the bag is the same of the piece of fried dough you just bought. So what ends up happening over time is this large accumulation of plastic bags in your house or as you will see in RULE 8b, plastic bags littering the streets and neighborhoods. And what makes this worse is that these people giving you your merchandise never went to a training program on how to efficiently pack a bag. It could be a roll of toilet paper in one bag and a juice box in another. They’d be fired the first five minutes on the job of any American supermarket. But in the end, it’s not so bad. Rarely do we buy packaged goods whose packages aren’t burnable. The only times really are when we buy a bag of pasta or a frozen chicken. Everything else like beans, vegetables, rice, and bread and just placed in a plastic bag and given to you. Even things like frozen fish and seafood, goat, and pork don’t have pre-existing packages. Just choose your fish or your cut and put it in a plastic bag. Presto!

#8b Nothing Like a Good Sweep to Start the Day

Its interesting here that at the crack of dawn, a family member will arise from the house and start sweeping their property to clean up the trash and liven the place up a bit. Its actually a nice way to pass time, sweeping. Its very therapeutic and relaxing, kinda like raking/designing a Japanese rock garden. Even though the brooms here are just a bunch of twigs, people get some really like looking wavy-patterns and there is nothing like a well maintained dirt patch in front of your house. Its almost like mowing a lawn in a way so that alternate rows appear to be different shades of green based on the angle the blades are sloped and light is reflected. Walking or running across a well swept area is like skiing across a recently groomed blue diamond or tearing up some fresh powder on any untouched part of the mountain. BUT twenty minute later everyone wakes up and this nicely maintained yard becomes a trash zone. The thing that fascinates me is how picky they are about how their dirt looks for the first hour of daylight, but anything after that, anything goes. In general there are trash pits and spots designated to dispose of litter, but those are mainly just guidelines. The idea is that littering is only a temporary act because it will just get swept up the next day by someone else, which is true in a way, but unfortunately only in some areas.