Think Bovine...

More new-found Africa foods, continued...

Meet Bovril:  I had to steal this image from online because I couldn't bring myself to buy this food... Bovril is a salty, thick meat extract that tastes, well, how should I put it? ...Like gooey bullion in a salty syrup form.  Created in the 1870's, Bovril was first known as "Fluid Beef."  It can be made into a drink by adding hot water or milk.  It is also used for flavoring things like soups, and oatmeal.  Here in our country, though, it is most commonly spread on bread in a sandwich or on toast as a breakfast food.

As far as I can tell, Bovril is entirely of the English influence.  It is reminiscent of Vegemite in Australia and is well known for its bulbous-shaped jar.  I tasted Bovril on bread at a tea a few weeks ago, and got the after-taste out pretty much this morning.  Though I will admit it is much less jarring to this American than the medicinal taste of Vegemite, it was not eaten without a few goosebumps and a large glass of water.

Magical Mulberries

New-found foods in Africa, continued...  sorry- forgot to post this yesterday!

Though mulberries are anything but a new-found food to us, the abundance of mulberries throughout September inspired me to add them to our list.  Mulberries in Africa are enormous- a whole different beast than in the US.  And they are everywhere.  Most yards have at least one mulberry tree, and despite being everywhere, mulberries are hard to harvest and seldomly seen in a product on a shelf.  We took advantage of the school's giant mulberry tree near Kurt's classroom to make some delicious mulberry syrup- a real treat!

 

Amarula, Mi Amore

After going on a school trip with two older women over 60, Kurt is in love. 

But not with the women.  They bought him a bottle of South Africa's famous Amarula.

Though the drink is notorious for coming from the country of South Africa, today wild marula trees, bearing marula fruit, grow abundantly in five countries in Southern Africa.  For only a few weeks of the year the marula fruit is ripe for harvest. We look forward to trying the fruit itself, which is loved by humans and many many wild animals alike. (Hence the elephant picture.)

Amarula is a cream liquor second in popularity around the world only to Bailey's Irish Cream.  Its sweet flavor and 17 percent alcohol content make it a popular addition to coffee drinks and desserts, though it is most often simply consumed alone on ice.

I am not a huge alcohol person.  Usually I can't get over the potent flavor.  But trying this drink was nothing but nice.  We hear Amarula (marketed and popular in South America as well) is trying to break into American and European markets.  If ever you get the chance, we recommend a try- for medicinal purposes, of course...

Find out more at this website: www.amarula.com

Oh, the Passion!

New-found foods in Africa, continued...

Meet passion fruit:  Locals call it granadilla.  Though three different varieties of passion fruit exist in tropical places throughout the world, here purple passion fruit grows abundantly.  The fruit in the store often looks greener and smoother; as it ripens it becomes more wrinkly and turns to a darker purple.  Jonas' feet (below) will give you a terrible sense of scale, since this two year old is wearing shoes big enough for most five year olds. 

Passion fruit is the size of a petite lemon or lime.  Though also a citris fruit, it is less potent on the palate than grapefruit or lemon.  Its slight tartness makes it rarely eaten plain; it is either eaten with a sprinkle of sugar, or much more often, found in baked goods.  There are a number of other ways one can find passion fruit... jams, liquor, juice (the only way I've had it previously), and syrup are all attainable here.  

Here is the inside of the granadilla... pulp with crunchy seeds in the middle.

The seeds do not bake down, so they leave a crunchy reminder of the fruit in every baked good... kind of like poppy seeds, only much much larger!

Here I have pulled the pulp out to show the empty shell... The empty shells have the same texture and pliability as an avocado skin. 

Jonas and I made granadilla muffins (not as pretty as an actual food blog picture, but we have yet to receive our muffin tin here). They were a little tart and lumpy so we learned not to skimp on the sugar, but definitely to mash up the fruit before putting it in the batter.

Today Jonas and I made a staple, banana bread with our old black mushy bananas, but put in three granadillas for a new twist.  It was delicious!  If you are tired of the same old banana bread, we highly recommend you give it a try:  

• 3 ripe bananas, smashed
• 3 granadillas, smashed
• 1/3 cup melted butter
• 1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• Pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

METHOD

No need for a mixer for this recipe. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Pour mixture into a buttered 4x8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve.

You're A Gem!

New-found foods in Africa, continued...

Meet gem squash:  Though I have just learned that this squash can be found in southern parts of the US and Mexico, I have never encountered it.  But they are all the rage in the bottom half of Africa... At the size of a softball, these little squash are anything but soft.  Because they are harder than a baseball, they are put into a pot whole, stems and all, to boil for almost an hour.  They are done when they crack or pop.  Lesson learned: boil with a lid on!

Gem squash, next to a pair of scissors for scale

Below is our cooked squash being gutted.  The seeds are taken out, then the meat of the squash is scraped clean.  The empty shell of the squash holds its shape well, as it stays quite hard even after all of the cooking.  (You can see a deflated one in our pot- but that was a bad one that collapsed in on itself- not typical.)

Because the cooked shell keeps its shape so well, these cut little squash cups are often filled with other foods and then served as a pretty side dish.  After we gutted ours, we mixed it with salt, pepper and butter to get the true taste (very good).  But below is a fancier picture of one we were recently served in a restaurant.  It was filled with a creamy couscous and herbs- yum!

Meet Masau

For those of you receiving blogs via automatic email, sorry in advance for the number of posts this week... I have decided to do a food post each day, to introduce you to some of the new foods we have tried here in Africa.   And no.  For those of you wondering, the queen ant is sitting in formaldehyde in Kurt's classroom.   We haven't been quite that brave.

Meet Masau:  Whenever I think of this fruit, I now think of the Golden Girls. Above is a plate of the dried masau fruit we brought home from the market last weekend.  Jonas and I, having seen bags of the fruit for the past few weeks at local farm stands, finally asked an old woman we often buy tomatoes from about the fruit. She opened a bag and handed one to Jonas and I.  Terrible mother that I am, I didn't question its cleanliness, and Jonas and I each popped a dried fruit into our mouths.  A slightly tart, slightly sweet taste filled our mouths. A moment later I watched Jonas swallow as I realized a pit sat in the middle.  I spit my pit into the grass; Jonas' was found a day later.  Jonas approved, and since the woman had opened a bag for us (great marketing move: guilt by generosity) I bought the bag for 50 cents (then had to get an avocado, too, to make it add up to a dollar- darn you, lack of coin currency!), figuring it would be a nice snack for Jonas during our long hikes.  

We went home and placed the bag in our cupboard.  A few hours later I walked past and smelled... well, vomit.  I opened the cupboard and realized that masau is great in the open air.  Inside four walls?  Vomit. The pungency of masau is something Jonas has been unable to get over, and not another masau fruit has passed his lips despite my attempts. Never thought I'd make a Golden Girls reference on this blog, but apparently my obsession with the eighties sitcom is shameless... There is an episode in which Rose (Betty White) makes the most horrid, disgustingly smelling Scandanavian dessert ever, which she calls "Gerneten-fluken cake."  She somehow convinces the other ladies to try it, and when they do they are in love. "It tastes like strawberry cheesecake!" they all exclaim.  So they sit all day, snacking on their cake while pinching their noses.  (Ah, that Betty White.) They may as well have been eating masau. 

So what is masau? The masau fruit, also found in neighbouring Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia, is wine coloured with a sweet and slightly sour taste. The shape, size and texture are reminiscent of dried cherries. Masau are chewy, and you need to use your teeth to tear the flesh off the seed. (Because the seed is hard to extract, they are rarely used for baking... or feeding two-year-olds apparently.)  The fruit is supposed to be rich in vitamin C and beta carotene. Masau (pronounced mah-sow) are eaten fresh, dried, or boiled into jam. Local communities also use the fruit as a base for distilling an alcoholic beverage called "kachasu". In traditional medicine, masau is used to treat a variety of ailments including colds and flu, which makes sense if it is high in Vitamin C. Oh, and also because if you don't have a good cross-breeze, you'll need a stuffy nose to ingest it.

For more info on masau, click on this article.

Ants

A mound of dirt popped up in the middle of our yard overnight.  Ants. We were told if we fumigated them we would be able to see pillars of smoke rise out of the ground all over our 2 1/2 acre yard.  Our best course of action was to find the queen.  Daunting for us, but old hat for our gardener:

 

First a hole was dug down approx four feet deep and four six feet wide.

 

  Here Jonas helps pick through some of the hive.  The boy is all curiosity.

Once the queen was removed, the hive was moved to another part of the yard. Then hot ash was spread in the hole and new soil was put in to replace the old.

 

The white thing is the queen! Here she sits in a bucket with pieces of the hive around her. Sorry we don't have something better to provide scale next to it.  It was huge- as long as our fingers.  

The white part is the back end of the queen (who does not need to walk- she just needs to have food brought to her so she can breed) and you can see her head and arms in front.  So gross.  We promptly put her in a container, popped her in my purse, and carried her to school for Kurt's students to see. Jonas was tickled.

School Days

The school year here has just restarted, and all of this school talk with locals has inspired me to introduce you to ours (which has been holding classes for a month now!)...The school that my husband Kurt teaches at is one of my favorite places in the city.  Behind its walls is a progressive welcoming environment of brick buildings surrounded by manicured lawns and roaming peacocks.
Kurt’s school is an international school.  (Loosely, and international school promotes international education, in an international environment, either by adopting an international curriculum such as that of the Cambridge International Examinations or the International Baccalaureate, or by following a national curriculum different from that of the country the school is located in.)  Though 52 countries are served by this preK-12th grade school, the common thread is that all 500+ students learn in English.  Compared to the challenged NYC and CT schools of his past, Kurt has found the school to be a breath of fresh air to his teaching.  He has amazing class sizes- his smallest class has five and his largest has seventeen.  very responsible students in an expensive program make for few discipline problems and enthusiastic learners.

Teachers come from a variety of countries, most on two or three year contracts.  Teachers are always lucky to meet great people wherever they go, because there are so many amazing teachers in the world. Kurt has been blessed with great co-workers wherever he goes, and our time here is no different! Below is a little tour of the school: 

It looks tight and compact, but the school is a giant.  Gorgeous green space abounds with two sports fields, high school and front entrance on upper left, indoor gym in the large white rectangle, a top zigzag building: middle school with art, math, and language buildings on each end, a bottom zigzag building: elementary school with a playground to the left, then a large pre-school complex under the tree clump to the left of that. Down the middle of campus from left to right is the admin building, library, and theatre.  Tennis courts and some staff housing sit on the top right.

 The theater building, much to Jonas' constant amusement, has three turbines on top.  These spin with the wind.  Under the building are kept pools of rainwater.  When the turbines spin, they draw cool air up off of these pools and circulate it throughout the building. In front sit iron statues of the school's mascot: the warthog.

Outdoor art class area.  Above are classrooms for mathematics.

"The white building": a two story administration building that houses the cafeteria, nurse, admissions, teachers' lounge and administrative offices.

Standing under the overhang of the gym building, looking toward the high school where Kurt has his classroom.  Many classes take place outside, and these overhangs allow students to walk relatively dryly from building to building during the rainy season.

 

Jonas looks at a locust in a rain gutter.  These pathways for rain are used for a small amount of time during the year, but are very important we're told.  You can find these gullies in front of every gate throughout every neighborhood, as well. 

   

I love Kurt's classroom design!  The clerestory windows in the heightened ceiling are designed to vent hot air while shining light onto reflective boards that then filter it down below.  The room requires few lights for its large size, and it's great during power outages!

 

The school design is a wonderful mix of British colonial, modern, and African elements, surrounded by tropical flora. Here the thatched roof over the sandbox reminds you: this is Africa!

For more info about Kurt’s school, visit the website: http://www.his-zim.com/

Far and Wide

As a ten-year anniversary present to Cheri, I sent myself off for a five-day excursion into the wilds of the country, leaving Cheri and Jonas behind to fend with increasingly long power cuts, a faulty home security system, and a short supply of groceries, half a roll of toilet paper, and cash that had to last us three more weeks until payday.  (You’re welcome, Honey!)  But since you’re more likely to want to hear about my week out and about than Cheri and Jonas’ week in (although they did have plenty of fun, too), here’s a rundown of what I got to experience.

Five high school teachers and 40 tenth-grade students boarded up onto three tour buses Monday morning at 8:30.  We were told to expect a four hour trip to our destination, with a bathroom break halfway through.  Thinking that this short trip wouldn’t be too much trouble, and having my iTunes and headphones to drown out much of the noise, I unwisely chose to board the bus that had ten girls and no boys on board.  Seven hours later (including two drained laptop batteries, twelve Justin Bieber albums sung by my fellow bus-mates at the top of their lungs, two fights about which girl was being the most annoying by screaming too loudly, four police stops to verify the legality of our tour bus, and three very costly wrong turns on deserted logging roads), we finally got off the bus at our destination and I kissed the first adult I saw.  (His name is John, and this action is illegal in my host country.)  Our trip wasn’t so bad until the last few hours (three hours to travel the final 19 kilometers on dirt roads).  In fact, the first few hours were quite lovely.   Here are some pictures of the landscape, including some of the misnomered Halfway House where we stopped two hours into our journey.

 

one of the few stores we encountered outside of the cities

 what my now vast experience tells me is a typical family farm

 

some of the freely roaming cattle—these were nice and weren’t blocking the road

 technology!

 

 Halfway House—an old farmstead now turned into a quaint shopping center

  one of a number of antique tractors on display at Halfway House

Aside from overly excited, screaming teenage girls, the trip was quite lovely.  It was fascinating to see the countryside that lay beyond the city limits that had confined my experiences up until that point.  Take my word that these pictures do not do justice to the views.  You’ll have to come and visit to see for yourself!

Once we arrived to our destination—Far and Wide Adventures, the students were shown to their cabins, and the teachers were shown to ours.  While the students had to rough it in sleeping bags on bunks, the teachers split two chalets.  I shared with two other guys.  We had a two-story chalet with a kitchen, living space, two full bathrooms, a sauna, a fireplace, and a second-story balcony that overlooked the forested valley below.  We each had our own bed with plenty of comfy pillows and heavy down comforters, and the staff would clean up after us and light a fire each afternoon while we were away with the kids.  We didn’t want to leave our lodging, but when we did, we spent the hiking through the forest, camping overnight on a cliff’s edge (~760 meters fall down to the valley floor), and watching the kids negotiate a high ropes course (emphasis on “high”—some parts were over 50 meters high in the eucalyptus trees!).  On the last day, the three male teachers teamed up to compete against seven other teams of students in an orienteering competition.  Lionel (40) entered with a torn meniscus, John (36) was an overweight Scott, and I’m still carrying my sympathy weight from Cheri’s pregnancy three years ago.  We had originally convinced our two female teachers to join in, but the 14 kilometer course convinced them that the sauna sounded better.  (To their credit, we had just hiked 12 kilometers that morning to see the water falls, so the sauna did sound rather nice.)  We kept running into one student group that we thought we were in stiff competition with, and we more than once nearly killed ourselves running up a steep, rocky incline to stay ahead of them.  But when we finished the course and found out that we were first, we were surprised that our time of two hours and twenty minutes was the best.  We waited for other teams, but eventually gave up and showered.  We got out of the shower and went back to the finish line to see the second place team finish 40 minutes after we had.  Not bad for three badly out of shape men!

Here are some photos of our time and the landscape at Far and Wide:

 

main dining hall

looking from the dining hall onto the student cabins (left) and teacher cabins (right), with a fire lit in ours if you look carefully

 part of the high-ropes course

 the aforementioned 760 meter cliff face

 Mutarazi Falls—either the first or second tallest falls in Zimbabwe

 a monkey—I swear

getting ready to swim at the top of the falls