While I love reading food blogs for the variety of emotions they invoke in me (inspiration for new recipes and creations; longing for ingredients and restaurants and stores that exist only half a world away from me; guilt over having a sweet tooth that can´t be satisfied by just a few M&Ms instead of the entire 32 oz. jumbo bag; etc.), I don´t want this to be a blog where I post everything that I eat–I just don´t have the time, or the patience, or the willpower at this point. But I decided to make a special exception to my rule.
Last Thursday and Friday, I spent two days for work in a town called Nova Mambone. This stresses the healthy me out a bit, because it usually means A. no time or place for exercise and B. eating Mozambican food, which is a way to send the scale skyrocketing if I´ve ever seen it. But for one day, I have decided to embrace my realities and introduce those of you who are not so lucky to experience these things, to a day of Mozambican food (all my meals served at the local “motel” in this African town).
This post would perhaps be more accurately titled, “A day of a RICH Mozambican diet,” as many Mozambicans struggle to feed themselves and their families, often subsiding on one meal a day and constantly facing hunger and in severe circumstances, starvation. This is NOT anywhere near the amount of food most people here are eating; rather, it simply highlights some of the options that are available to those who are lucky enough to afford it. Moving on. I hereby present my day in eats, also known as “No Carb Left Behind.” Except only SLIGHTLY less glamorous than Elizabeth Gilbert´s Eat, Pray, Love tour through Italy, from whom I have stolen the phrase.
A pretty good, non-Mozambican start to the day...
Doesn´t look Mozambican, eh? Well, this is what I ate in the morning in preparation of my trip, ready to start the day off right and make good food choices if possible. A few hours after arriving, during the first break in the training schedule, here came nosso matabicho, our breakfast:
Probably the most balanced breakfast ever. Oily pasta (which I may have then drenched with salt in an attempt to make it taste like SOMEthing, even if just sodium) and a chunk of bread. I am ashamed to say that for some reason the oatmeal didn´t do it for me and I ate almost all of this. But I had one of the smallest plates! Doesn´t make it better.
Bonus prize: a chicken foot! Hooray!
A few hours of training later, it was time for almoço, or lunch. Wasn´t sure what to expect, but here it came:
A HUGE plate of oily rice with a huge chunk of oily fried fish and potatoes (there was definitely a fish head in there too). No veggies, unsurprisingly. I ate most of the fish and some of the rice and left the potatoes and the stuff I couldn´t identify. Yum, grease.
A few more hours pass and then comes lanche. Lanchar, to snack, is a crucial thing to understand in Mozambique. You absolutely can not do anything with anyone unless you provide a snack in the morning (around 10:30) and the afternoon (around 4). It is utterly impossible. So right on time for afternoon lanche arrives this baby:
A nice chunk of white bread made with nice refined white flour, with a nice deep-fried egg inside it. This is a staple Mozambican food, the sandes de ovo. You can find it anywhere–when traveling, you can buy them out of big tupperwares from ladies on the street. Who´s scared of cholera? Not me. But this baby was pretty delicious. How I was hungry to eat it, I have no idea.
I went back to the room and resolved to not eat again for a week. (How many of us have ever said this?) and occupied myself for a while until dinner. Which was… not happening. I kept poking my head out and walking around to see, but it didn´t appear til after 8PM. I should have gone to sleep, but it would have been awkward so I joined my colleagues for this jantar (dinner):
Probably my favorite meal of the day. The white stuff is xima (pronounced “shee-mah”… in Portuguese, X is pronounced SH) which is basically just ground up corn flour mixed with boiling water. I admit to kind of loving it, at least when it is slathered in salt and piri-piri (Mozambican hot sauce). I never make it at home, due to its nearly nonexistent nutritional value, but its fun to eat with your hands–pull off a chunk and dip it in the sauce. This was potatoes and goat meat. Yum, goat meat. I ate all the sauce and meat and left the potatoes and left half the xima, not because of willpower but because there was no sauce left. Sad times. Went to my room, resolved again not to eat for a week, laughed at myself and went to sleep.
So there you have it. A day of Mozambican eats.
It is stuff like this that makes it hard to have a healthy lifestyle here. In the States, we all know people–often many people–who are watching their weight/not eating gluten/not eating carbs/vegetarians/vegans/what have you, so it isn´t weird to have people express dietary restrictions or needs. But here, it doesn´t work like that. There´s one thing, everyone gets it, you eat it. If I didn´t eat all this food, sure, it wouldn´t be the worst thing in the world. But I would appear rude to the Mozambicans, be criticized by colleagues and others who don´t understand why I feel uncomfortable, and plus I would still have to pay for it. And wasting food in this country feels like a sin, even for me, coming from the land of indulgence–because there isn´t enough food, so you be lucky for what you have. And dealing with all these different things… I just eat it. I´ll deal with the couple extra pounds later. You only live in Mozambique once. And man those carbs are good.
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ola ! Peço ajuda pra puder fazer dieta segura e saudavel estando em moçambique porque encaro dificuldades nos sites brazileiros , o cardapio deles è diferente e os nomes complicam mais ainda dai que acabo näo achando os alimentos. Peço cardapio com nossas culturas e produtos moçambicanos.. Preciso de diminuir 15kg. Bj