MacDoads and other Malawian eats

While staying in Lilongwe, breakfast consisted of eggs, French fries, a sausage and 6 pieces of toast...way too much for a stomach still in a different time zone. At the guest house we made poutine to give them a taste of food from home. Cheese, though, is painfully expensive (I bought feta as a treat at my place).  Dinners were consistently chicken and rice. Now that I am out of the city, meals are a little different.

When eating with others, its nsima and miscellaneous greens, like boiled sweet potato leaves. Nsima is a staple in many African countries, though it would be known by a different name. It is boiled corn meal flour that you eat with your hands. They are pretty particular about the process of eating nsima and it is a food you are expected to play with. As long as it is with something, it’s pretty good, and definitely filling. The difficulty is in the nutrition, the lack of protein especially. You can buy fish at the end of the lane, but there is not a lake anywhere near here. Furthermore, in a few months the flour will be hard to find as the season changes.

Fruits and vegetables are dirt cheap and widely available. I will hereby reclaim my health... by default. A pound of strawberries costs just over a dollar, and mango season is starting soon. A pound of potatoes is less than 20 cents.

So far the meals I have been making myself include rice and tomato soup, fried sweet potatoes, pasta, peanut and preserve sandwiches, garlic bread, and real oatmeal...trip food anyone? Meat and eggs, for now, have to be consumed in town as I can’t transport them in a timely manner. I envision eggs on the back of a bike taxi not ending well. Everything has to be boiled or fried.

My tap water runs red and after boiling it is pretty hard to get all the sediment out, and I should have brought a ceramic pump but I can manage. I have had to bring in water, juice, and as a treat, a bottle of coke. There is no Dr. Pepper here. No matter how you carry a sealed 5 litre bottle of water on a bicycle taxi, it will leak.

There is a food oddity I will avoid. The small cousin of the cow, as Rex from WUSC described it, is a delicacy. This ‘cousin’ when in a home, is a rat, and I have one of those, but when the rat leaves the house and crosses the street it is a mouse. These garden mice are fried on the side of the road and served on a stick.  To eat a mouse you are expected to start at the tail and eat up, bones and all. I’m not needing protein that badly yet.

Now MacDoads...it is exactly what you think, but red arches on a gold background with “your lovin’ it” written underneath.