Some snacks

The food of Mozambique is one of its highlights for me.
If you consider that Mozambique was, several years ago, the poorest country in the world, this means a lot more. In any small town, you can generally find a decent range of ingredients, almost all produced within the borders of the country. Cashew nuts, fresh seafood, lettuce, vegetables, fruit, all normally fresh and tasty. Despite the intense poverty of the region, the people eat fairly well. Because the climate supports a pretty healthy spectrum of fruits and vegetables, it is a pretty straightforward step to make a delicious meal, cheaply. Food is something clearly valued in the minds of the locals. Any bus journey is frequently punctuated by stops in small towns, where children and women mob the vehicle, selling bunches of sweetly perfumed, slightly green bananas, sugar cane (in the north), fresh, small baguette-like, crusty rolls called pao, boiled eggs, questionably fresh fried local chicken, small fried fish, cashew nuts, biscuits, beer and cold drinks. Its impossible to go hungry here, although I did several times for no good reason other than fear of the less than frequent toilet stops.

In any restaurant you go to, peri peri will be available. Rather than rely on bottled, premanufactured sauce like Tabasco, or worse, Bushman's or Nali, Mozambicans makes it themselves. Sometimes it'll be the kind I love;chunky, oily, spicy and lemony, and sometimes it'll be thin, cheap vinegary and fruity red stuff. Sometimes, like at Black & White, it'll be so hot you can scarcely look at it without your arsehole tingling. The fact that peri-peri is so commonplace is testimony to the skill of the average Mozambican cook, and the thought that goes into the food. Or perhaps its indicative of their adaptation to living with almost no money, where its cheaper to cook what you can grow than buy what you could make better.

Another interesting point is that the only food that is deep fried is chips, which are normally fairly rubbish anyway. Because almost all cooking is done on coal burning fires, deep frying is a tricky process, and that much oil is expensive. But, so far it seems that Africans are totally unaware of the versatility of the potato. Chips is it, it seems, round these parts.

Bread, another thing I feel pretty strongly about, is brilliant here, for the most part. The pao is almost always fresh in any busy area, and dirt cheap. Starting from 2 mt and going up to about 5 mts, its crusty, chewy and tasty, made from all the normal bread ingredients. It doesnt seem to be full of preservatives and shortening and shit, just the old flour, water, salt and yeast sort of things. Delicious!