There are some people who can take pictures of food and make it look
appetizing, and who enjoy posting those pictures on the internet. My
friend Lindsey - to this day the only person whose friendship I owe
completely to blogging - puts up pictures on facebook that I
occasionally feel tempted to use as recipes. Suffice it to say that I'm
not one of these food-picture-taking people. I feel about as comfortable
taking a picture of my plate at a restaurant as I would feel, say,
attending the Republican National Convention. But my faithful readers
deserve to know about what I've been eating in Tanzania,apologies for my food photography skills.
Ugali. We
begin our tour with the shapeless blob of starch you see on the plate
above. Shapeless blobs of starch are common as staple foods in Africa,
and Tanzania's version is known as ugali. Largely flavorless
but undeniably filling, ugali serves as a sort of gustatory canvas for
sauces, vegetables, and for the fortunate, meat. It comes in two main
types, corn and cassava. Both are nutritionally marginal and are what an
economist would call "inferior goods," but the cassava-based stuff,
pictured above, is especially looked down upon. Which is really too bad,
because I find it tastier than its maize-based sibling. If you were at a
roadside restaurant in Dar es Salaam and craved the repast pictured
above, you'd want to order ugali dagaa, ugali and sardines. The
usual formula for a meal name is the name of the starch followed by the
name of the protein, with no conjunction in between; thus wali samaki is "rice and fish" and chipsi kuku is "chips [fries] and chicken."
Instant coffee.
Coffee lovers, weep. East Africa may produce delicious coffee beans,
but from what I can tell, most of them are exported elsewhere. Instead
in our office we have the product pictured above, which I drink out of
desperation. In my normal life I take my coffee black, just like Dad
taught me, but this stuff requires a hefty dose of powdered milk and
sugar before I will consider drinking it.
Chipsi mayai. I don't know if there's a term for comfort food in Swahili, but chipsi mayai (the
latter word is pronounced like "my eye!") certainly fits that bill. The
name means "chips and eggs," and it's really just a mass of precooked
french fries glued together with eggs. It reminds me a little of the omelette spaghetti
I enjoyed in Cameroon. The specimen above is topped with shredded
vegetables, and on the side of the plate you can see a pile of salt and a
some pilipili (chili peppers) in case you want a little kick.
It's also good with ketchup, though be warned that the Tanzanian stuff
is watery compared to good ol' Heinz.
Ndizi nyama. This may be my favorite Tanzanian dish so far. Ndizi nyama
means "bananas and meat," and it consists of beef cooked in a
tomato-based sauce with bananas. Not plaintains, mind you, but real,
honest-to-goodness bananas. I haven't tried making it myself, and I can
only assume that they use slightly underripe bananas to prevent the
finished product from becoming chunks of beef floating in fruit puree.
In the other segments of the plate you can see some greens and maharage (beans), which are common side dishes.
Machungwa. It's not my most photogenic moment, but I wanted to illustrate the proper Swahili technique for eating machungwa
(oranges). The oranges here are absolutely delicious, and they're sold
in abundance by the side of the road anywhere you go. They are delivered
sliced in half, often with the rind partially peeled away in an
artistic-looking fashion. Rather than peeling and eating--a procedure I
personally don't much like owing to sticky hands and that bitter white
layer--people squeeze and slurp the juice and pulp. You probably lose
some fiber this way, but it can't possibly be worse than drinking it
from a carton.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Mzungu's Delight in Tanzania
11:51 AM
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