Market Day

Today I went with a couple teachers from my school to the msika (trading post) in a different village for Market Day. In the larger trading posts they have "market days" on certain days each week when there are a lot more vendors and you can get a greater diversity of items.

Besides the usual onions, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and greens that I typically see at my local market, they also had carrots, okra, eggplant, green peppers and green beans. Plus, they had fruit! I saw ripe mangos and two kinds of bananas. I've been pretty low on fruit the past two weeks so I jumped at these.

Guess what else I got-- macadamia nuts!  I think these come from the Thyolo area which isn't too far away. It would be fun to visit that area and see how they are grown.

When I got home the first thing I did was go for the mango. And... it was delicious! Very sweet, lots of flesh, and only a little bit stringy. I'm sporting a "mango mouth" right now where the fruit touched my skin while I was eating it. (Mangos, particularly the peel, contain a chemical that can be a skin irritant in some people). Totally worth it though.

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