Masamba ndi Zipatso

There is a lot of locally available fresh food in Malawi. You can find tomatoes and onions year-round. I have also seen green peppers, small orange hot peppers, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, carrots, beans, peas, okra, cabbage and rape (Brassica napus) at the local village markets. As we are just going into the hot season, I expect to see even more as the year goes on. And those were just the vegetables! For fruits, there are oranges, apples (from South Africa), bananas, papayas, guavas and my favorite-- pineapples! Most of these are seasonal, but I should be able to get bananas year-round.

Check out the spoils of a recent shopping trip:

Oh yeah, and one more fruit-- mangos! Mango season starts around December. I have heard tales of the wondrous, large Malawian mangos, and I am very excited to try them.

There are small mangos here too. A teacher from my school brought me a few green mangos and suggested I try thinly slicing them and eating them with salt. I find the unripe mango to be pleasantly tangy, and I will definitely eat more of these. I did not care for it with the salt though.

(For the record, I did not use all that salt. It just poured out too fast from the giant bag.)

So while I am waiting for mango season, I can munch on a few of these mini-mangos, along with bananas and pineapples. Yum!

Chichewa Lesson

fruits - zipatso

banana - nthochi

pineapple - nanazi

mango - mango

apple - apozi

orange - lalanje

Vegetables - masamba

tomato - matimati

onion - anyezi

cabbage - kabichi

carrot - kaloti

okra - therere

peppers - tsabola

peas - nsawawa