Wednesday 3 May 2017

Making Matapa with the locals..

Yesterday I had the privilege of being invited to visit a nearby village to spend a day with the locals. I was introduced to the 7 wives/ladies from each of the 7 families who lived there (and all of their children/grandchildren).

We then helped them make Matapa, a traditional Mozambique dish, from scratch. Starting with the cassava plant we washed all the leaves and threw them in a giant pestle and mortar with some garlic and took it in turns smashing it together, (was a good job there was a lot of us, it's hard work).

Next we had to scrape out a bunch of coconuts, one of the women was in charge of the machete and she was just tapping these coconuts in half; I lost my finger making a salad, I'd be sure to lose a hand attempting this. We shared the coconut milk amongst us then sat on these handy stools with a little scraping attachments on them. It makes easy work of scraping all the coconut out of its shell.

(They keep the shells to use later, they work like charcoal and can be put into irons to generate heat)

We chopped and replanted the shoots from the plants, and peeled and grated the roots.

The ladies then went into the cooking hut to start cooking the stuff whilst we played with the kids in the sand. I showed the group of kids my phone and they were loving their own reflection. We emptied one of the houses and laid down some mats, washed our hands then all sat in a big circle with all the food and drinks in the center, we said grace then passed the food around and got stuck in.

I'd never eaten Matapa before let alone helped make it with some locals. It wasn't half bad, topped with smashed nuts. Lovely.

It was a really nice day out. When it was time to say Tchau the little girl broke down in hysterics, bless her. Made my heart melt.

If you're ever travelling anywhere around the globe be sure to take up any opportunities to get involved in the local culture and learn yourself a thing or two.

Here's a few pics/clips from my day: