Food in Meheba

I’m excited about our many culinary experiments lately. Make no mistake, food in Meheba is basic. The four readily available food items here are rice, beans, cabbage, and nshima, which is a boiled maize product that is a Zambian staple that I almost never eat. I’ve heard it said that on the totem pole of corn based foods, its pretty much bottom of the pile. People here love it, but I haven’t quite gotten there yet.

It is also usually possible to find sweet potatoes, tomatoes, rolls and eggs with a bit of searching. Onions can usually be found and if you’re lucky there might be garlic. If you are REALLY lucky and happen to be in the right season, you can find avocados. Mango season is still a few months away, but I’m going to be the happiest person alive.

Thanks to the spices my parents so generously brought with them we’ve been enjoying chili and tacos and other Texas treasures. We don’t have refrigeration, so cheese is out and much to Jeremy’s chagrin so is meat (though I’m loving the ease of being a vegetarian here!). We have little pieces of soya that parade as chicken and make a good substitute in chicken tacos.

Lately we have been experimenting with baking. Baking with coals and no oven is tricky to say the least, but we’ve developed a pretty good method. We have two pots that are the same size, so we generally light coals under one of them, put the lid on and place whatever we are baking on top of the lid. Then, we turn the other pot upside down on top of that and put coals on top of it. It makes a pretty good little oven and generally avoids burning the bottom of whatever we are making.

And oh the treats that we have been making!! I’m learning a lot about the wonders of flour. In Texas, “from scratch” usually meant that I bought the box of cookie mix instead of buying the already made frozen dough. Here, I am learning the wonders of bread making without a bread-maker, what really goes into biscuits and pancakes (not just a box of mix!), how to make brownies and cookies from scratch-scratch, and I even whipped up my own pie crust and oatmeal crumble for a genuine apple pie!! We’ve made samosas (again with the hand made dough) and chipati and even tortillas (great with soya tacos)!

Let’s just say I’m going to be the girl you want to take camping when I get back. Cooking over coals is a learning process, but so far I’m very pleased with our experiments. With the recent opening of Shoprite in Solwezi (a large American style grocery store) I can see our culinary expeditions climbing to new heights.