Transmission Oil

I ran out of cooking in the village yesterday, so wandered down to the local 'golosale' (grocery) and brought myself a 10c bag of oil- like everyone elses.

That evening I pulled it out to cook with and it had changed from a golden oil consistency to a pale butter-yellow textured consistency.

Now it also happened that I had two young men visiting me at the time- one from Zimbabwe who doesn't speak Ciyawo and one who wants to learn English- both of whom were eating into my precious Ciyawo learning/speaking opportunities with frivolousness about my MP3 player that they were covoutesly making playlists on ... Anyways- I held up the oil and asked what the heck was going on and one of them said 'oh- that's transmission oil' as if it was the most normal thing in the world and continued to flip through Alicia Keys songs which reminded me that I really needed to cleanse my player of her music at the nearest opportunity. A discussion ensued about whether it might be sunflower or peanut oil- but they both agreed that vegetable oil doesn't change colour like that so 'yeah- it's transmission oil- they buy it cheap from Mozambique'. Back to Alicia Keys. Granted she probably does hold more appeal to red blooded males than my cooking oil.

Needless to say I didn't find this explantion very satisfactory. I've heard that the power problems are often due to people draining the oil form transmission boxes for cooking but I didn't think it happened on a massive scale- i mean- this cooking oil is sold EVERYWHERE.

Having to choose between dinner cooked without oil or with oil (even if it was transmission oil) I chose the transmission oil and decided to ask my language helper about it the next day.
'Do they sell transmission oil for cooking?' I asked - ever so tactfully. 'yeah' she replied. 'Isn't that petroleum based - like- really bad for you to eat? Isn't it like cooking with vaseline?' she thought about it for a while 'they sell that one cheap for the poor people- I think you should buy your oil from the supermarket'.
'ok'

Does someone out there in blog land know what kind of oil is used in electical transmission boxes? Surely it would taste bed?! Is there a correlation, by any chance, between this and malawi's horrifically low life expectancy? I'd love to know what's going on.

Thursday 9th July

My language helper visited me in the village today. It was lovely. It was freezing cold and raining most of the day which is very unusual. So it was a perfect day to sit in the house and do language and grammar. But first we sat and chatted and prepared lunch- futali and cabbage…yummm.

Futali recipe.
Approx 1kg sweet potato
About ¾ cup of finely ground raw peanuts
About 1 tblspn salt.

Peel the sweet potatoes whilst sitting on a mat, chatting to your friends. Cut into 2cm rounds. Light your fire. Wash sweet potato and put in pot with water ¾ the height of the potato. Add the salt, put on a lid and steam until just starting to get soft. Pour the ground peanuts (previously crushed and sieved (a coffee grinder will do!) …or brought from the market) evenly over the top. Add more water if needed. Replace the lid and steam until cooked. And peanuts have formed a sauce over the potatoes. Share with friends. Also tastes great cold the next morning for breakfast.
Any staple can be prepared this way: cassava, pumpkin, plantain bananas and white potatoes- but I like the sweet potato version the best.

I am so exhausted - my head is throbbing from talking ciyawo from 11am to 4pm straight. It’s only 7.30- but I gotta sleep.

A Taste of Poverty III

Wednesday to Friday- variations on a theme.

I have discovered that hot restless sleep magnifies the sounds of the night...crickets, the breeze rustling the trees, over-ripe guavas thudding to the ground, the close footsteps and muted voices of the night watchmen- all punctuated by the neighbourhood dogs goading each other into a choir of howls.

I have enjoyed the simplicity of eating within my budget- rice with a little sugar for brekky (the cassava I bought were no good), ugali and greens for lunch and steamed pumpkin with kidney bean 'soup' for dinner. I look forward to ugali at lunch time- but don't seem to to be able to face twice a day :)

Kidney Bean Relish/Soup:

bring one cup of dried kidney beans to the boil with plenty of water in the morning. Take off the heat and cover. In the evening, simmer for an hour or so until soft (pre-boiling cuts 2 hrs of simmering time). In a separate pot heat 0.5- 1cm of oil, add a diced onion and a diced tomato or 2 and some salt to taste and allow to cook 'til tomatoes are breaking up. drain most of the bean liquid into a separate bowl and pour the oil mixture over the beans. leave on low heat for a little while to allow the oil/tomato/onion flavour to permeate the beans.

serve the bean relish with ugali or rice OR If you prefer the soup option, serve the relish into bowls and add the reserved bean liquid to taste. simple and delicious.

Wednesday both my language helpers arrived for the lesson having not eaten one or two of their previous meals. I guessed from their restless lack of concentration and served up anzacs and bananas with the usual glass of water. 'pangali' was said with a shrug or the 'malawian gesture' of clapping both hands together then holding them apart with a resigned shrug- 'there is nothing' AAAAAAAH!!!! How do I respond? they are both very well off by malawian standards- not only do they work for me, one is a teacher and the others husband has a well paid job. If they're running out of food on a regular basis- then what about the rest of the population?Budgeting doesn't work in this culture- the extended families needs come before the individuals - but at the same time- i know my generosity has been factored into the equation. take a deep breath and respond to one at a time....

the power has been on and off a lot this week which hasn't effected me much- except for internet access and the outside taps running out of water haha another bout of divine sense of humour :) I haven't been using my alotted 4 buckets of water a day- partly cos my wrists and lower back hurt from carrying it. By Thursday night everyone elses houses had no lights cos their transformer batteries had run out- but my place was a conspicuous glow of outdoor security lights :)

speaking of lights-I haven't minded spending each evening reading by candle light but I don't feel much like spending Friday night alone with no lights- so Im breaking that one from now on. thought I had better be honest :) well- have a good friday night- I would love to go out fo rdinner with friends and go see a band afterwards...oh the things we take for-granted

A Taste of Poverty III

Tuesday afternoon: Who'd have thought this would become a foodie blog?! well its not your average foodie blog and its definitely temporary. After a delicious lunch of ugali and greens (pictured), I sat down to do my budget...and im scarily close to having spent my (generous) $2/day already.

Rent (equivalent for a 2 roomed, tin roofed ‘apartment’ with shared ablutions), charcoal (fee for using gas stove), soap and candles come to 610MK. 4 Buckets of water a day and food items already purchased brings the grand total to 1515MK. My food supply so far consists of a weeks supply of maize flour, oil, salt, onions, beans and rice, and a few tomatoes, cassava, a pumpkin, a days supply of greens and some peanuts. Im really hoping there’ll be room in the budget for an egg with dinner tonight.

I’ve chosen a bad time to take on this challenge. With harvest still a few weeks away, maize flour is at an all time high price and tomatoes... I dunno why they are so expensive- but they are 20-25 MK each which means if you are working a manual labour job- your days wage could buy you...4 or 5 tomatoes! Go figure.

I also have a confession to make- this afternoon as I was starting my grammar lesson, my blood sugar levels dropped and I got the shakes and couldn't concentrate...so I ate an anzac bikky. I guess it shows that the ugali looks impressive in quantity but doesn't have substance. Esn- then informed me that i could buy a quarter kg of sugarfor 30MK, so, as soon as the lesson was over I stunned a shop keeper and she introduced me to the evening markets- amazing seeing the whole place bustling with people in the cool of the evening and lit with candles!

I ended up having my egg for dinner. yum!

If you like the look of the food - or you're curious to try it -the recipies are all in my blog archives somewhere tagged with 'cooking'. Im amazed at how tasty oil, onion and tomato can be- and how comforting a stomach full of ugali is- Im really enjoying this challenge.

looks like vomit- but tastes great

I know how much you've been enjoying cooking the greens, eggs and ugali recipes that I posted in ' A foreigners guide to Malawian cooking', so I thought I'd continue my 'foodie' blogging with a second installment- and with such a title- how could you resist giving this dish a go at your next dinner party?
I can see it now- everyone relaxing and chatting with their glass of red, enjoying the predinner cheese and crackers...and you walk out proudly with a glass bowl of - lets call it 'peanut relish' -or maye 'peanut soup' (pictured left).
I first had it last week out in a village when a chief invited us for a meal. It was so tasty I asked Swa- if she could show me how to cook it- so today we cooked up a feast. I think it is now officially one of my favourite foods :)

Peanut Relish
1 onion
2 tomatoes
300-400grams of raw peanuts
salt (several teaspoons- to taste)
water




Method:

pound the peanuts into a flour using the method pictured. Also pictured are my fpersistent yet somewhat futile attempts. For us weaklings the alternative is to use a food processor. Finely dice the onion and tomato. Bring half a medium pot of water to the boil and simmer onion and tomato for a few minutes. Pour some liquid from the pot into the bowl of peanut flour and stir to make a thick paste- then add the taste to the pot while stirring. Add several teaspoons of salt. Simmer for 20 min- taste and add salt as required. Simmer down/or add water to form a thick soup consistency. Pour over hot rice and enjoy.

Another slightly odd, but really tasty recipe I've picked up here is banana tomato curry.

Banana Tomato Curry

A few bananas
a few tomatoes
1 tspn curry powder

Method
Slice 2-3 bananas into rings and caramelise (low heat) in a lightly oiled frypan.
Add 1 tsp of curry powder (we use hot Madrasa- hold your breath!) add diced tomato (5?) and simmer gently with minimal stirring until cooked. Add salt to taste - but personally i dint think it needs it. Serve with rice or ugali or whatever takes your fancy.

What I love about the cooking in this part of the world is that the recipes are uncluttered. They are simple, incredibly delicious and feel so..wholesome to eat. Even if you're not up to the peanut wonder- give the greens or the banana curry a go this week and enjoy the flavour of each individual ingredient.

A Foreigners guide to Malawian Cooking

We had a short 'formal' language lesson today and hit the markets to give me a chance to show off my newly aquired language skills. ahem ...panic! With the visual cue of a language helper at my side, people were coming ot of the wood work (ok- market alleyways) to greet me...unfortunately not all in Chiyawo- there was Chichewa and who knows what else thrown in the mix- but the experience got me off my 'Im doing great' high-horse and reminded me that I need to actually speak this language with comprehension one day...and that will require more than the 2-3 hrs a day I've been putting in this week. Time to ramp it up.

Anyways, we came home and cooked up a feast to provide maximum opportunities for Mama Swabila to state the obvious in chiyawo for my benefit ( I am chopping the tomatoes, you are washing the pot, we are cooking...) I am amazed at her patience.

I am also amazed at the Malawian womens ability to make delicious meals from simple ingredients. If you had asked me a month ago to make a 3 dish meal using only milly meal, oil, salt, tomatoes, onion, green and eggs- I probably would have cooked you 3 omelet’s. You may not be interested in cooking- but just in case you are, I have put ‘recipes’ (I use the word very loosely) below.

‘Greens’
Finely slice required quantity of green leafy vegetable (keeping in mind it will shrink lots). The locals love the bitterness of the dark green outside leaves of Chinese cabbage as well as pumpkin leaves (de-strung) so don’t be scared to branch out. Steam in a pot with a little water and salt. Finely dice 1 large tomato and place on top of steaming greens. When the tomato looks really soft, stir through the greens and serve hot with Ugali.

‘Eggs’
Hard boil enough eggs for 1 or 2 per person. Shell.
Heat about ½ cup oil in a pot and add finely diced onion (they use small, purple salad onions) and a finely diced tomato or 2. Stir well until the mixture resembles tomato soup. Add salt to taste.
Place whole boiled eggs in ‘soup’ to heat through before serving.
I know there is gobs of oil in this- but it tastes so good its actually my favourite ‘relish’ so far.

‘Ugali’
Ok- this is a hard one to describe, so if this ends up being incomprehensible- google it. Works for everything else!
Buy yourself some maize or white- millet meal (in Perth you can get it at Kailis Brothers in Northbridge or Kailis Sisters in Freo).
Half fill a medium-large sized pot with COLD water. As it heats, stir in 2-3 handfuls of the flour with a strong wooden spoon. It should be like thick soup. Let it boil and glop for about 10 min or until it starts kinda sticking to the bottom. Put on an apron, put up a ‘do not disturb’ sign and stir firmly with one hand while adding more flour with the other hand. This should take the mixture to quite stiff and separating from the sides of the pot - but still moist with no lumps. The stirring method is systematic, repetitive and built into the genome of every Malawian woman. Its easy and obvious- just like carrying water on your head- but for the rest of us, I’ll try and describe cos it is the difference between ‘good ugali’ and ‘inedible’.
Stir from 12 o clock clockwise to 6 o clock (simultaneously moving the porridge off the sides and the bottom of the pot) , then back through the middle to 12 o clock, then anti clockwise back to 6 o clock. At this point, you repeatedly smush the porridge with the spoon against the front of the pot- then resume the stir sequence… for 5 - 10 min until the porridge holds its own shape and is thick enough to scoop into large almond-shaped serves (use a big serving spoon).

Eating
The trick to eating is to leave your hands wet after washing - before the meal so the ugali doesn’t stick to your fingers- thereby minising burnage. Place a serving or 2 of ugali on your plate, along with some of the relishes outlined above. Break off pieces of ugali with your RIGHT hand, dip into the relish and enjoy a simple, delicious and filling meal.

Food glorious Food

I gotta say- we really do live in a 'convenience, fast food' world in the west. nothing brings that home better than leaving that world and going back to doing it all by hand. I really enjoy it though. Before I left Oz I was making an effort to buy local, buy in season...buy responsibly. I had been reading the Mennonite 'More-with-Less' cookbook and their goal/philosophy of
'looking for ways to live more simply and joyfully...that take their shape from living faith and the demands of our hungry world' really sat well with me. They take it beyond mere purchasing preferences, however, and challenge our consumption. While a huge proportion of the worlds population is undernourished ( see http://www.fao.org/es/ess/faostat/foodsecurity/FSMap/flash_map.htm for a really interesting time series map), we over spend and over eat. We over eat calories, protein, sugar and processed foods - to the detriment of our health and our planet. Culturally, most of our protein comes from eggs, milk and meat- the most input intensive form- rather than grains and legumes. The cook book really challenged the way I thought about food.
Anyways... out here buying local and in season is the only option- and there's no fast-food (except for the chargrilled maize cobs sold by the side of the road) or supermarkets (in our sense of the word), so I've been having a crash course in DIY food.

Storing in-season veggies for out-of-season
I have learnt that if I see anything in the markets that I like, and haven't seen sold before (ie carrots and beans) buy in bulk, because it could be months before you see it again. One day I came home with 3kgs of green runner beans ($1.50!). After the excitement of finding a green vegetable other than cabbage, okra or rape wore off, I decided to prepare my own frozen veggie packs. I washed, strung and chopped them all up (took ages but was quite thereputic) then googled how to blanche veggies. I discovered that you bring a big pot of water to the boil, dump in the veggies for 1 minute, then scoop them into ice water, drain and freeze. It was so exciting I did it with carrots a week later and I was proudly able to contribute beans and carrots (among other things :) to our christmas lunch.

Meat
The 3 chickens we ordered for Christmas arrived last night. Better late than never. I was excited- so my housemate left me to it. Then I understood why. I gave them a good rinse, finished plucking them, stuck 1 in the freezer whole for a roast, then looked at the other 2, willing them to turn into drumsticks and breast fillets all by themselves... alas, alack! it didn't happen, but google came to the rescue and I found a website with step by step instructions for chopping up chicken...and the best thing is we can turn the carcasses into chicken broth and not waste anything! Buying whole chooks is the cheapest way to get chicken with the least waste and the most scope for DIY pride :)

see: www.gourmetsleuth.com/cutupchicken.htm

Bread
I've always liked cooking bread, and here I've had plenty of opportunities. It takes a bit of time, but its really not that difficult, and, if Perth is still having a heat-wave, you'll have no problems getting it to rise. The recipe I use goes like this:
Ingredients:
1.25 cups warm water
1 package yeast (~tbspn)
1 cup milk (soy milk in my case)
2 tbspn melted butter/marg/oil
2 tspn salt
2 Tbspn sugar
6-6.5 cups regular flour.
Method:
Stir yeast into warm water and stand for a few minutes (while you find the other ingredients)
Stir in the rest with about 5 cups of the flour. By this stage it'll be getting too thick to stir, so wash your hands, roll up your sleeves and get your hands in there, adding enough flour to form a ball of dough- not too sticky, not too dry. Tip it out on a lightly floured bench top and knead it for a while. If you don't know how to knead bread- google it :) Once its all nicely kneaded, put the dough back in the bowl, cover it with a teatowel, put it in a warm place (I have the privilidge of being able to just leave it on the bench :) and when its doubled in size, set your oven to 180 deg, punch the dough down, knead it a little bit, then drop it into a large greased bread tin, or 2 small bread tins. If you don't have a bread tin- dont panic- grease any oven tray you've got, mould the dough it into an oval loaf shape and stick it in the oven for about 45 min. When its cooked it should sound hollow when you tap it on the bottom- but that can be a bit hard when its in a bread tin, so if its not burning, leave it in the full time to be safe.