Meal Times

I am often asked what I eat when I am in Africa. The answer to that depends on where I am living and whether I am cooking for myself.

In most of the capital cities I have lived in there is sufficient variety in the shops that you can almost eat like you do at home, provided you are prepared to pay the sometimes exorbitant prices for some of the imported goods (and mostly I’m not!). There are always things you can’t get but with some adaptation you can eat pretty well.

When I am living in a situation where someone else prepares the meals then my diet is usually a lot more limited. I am is such a situation at the moment and what the food lacks in imagination it makes up for in quantity.

Breakfast is bread, which is freshly baked and served occasionally with eggs but mostly with jam. Flavours of jam on offer have included apricot, mango, strawberry and banana.

Lunch and the evening meal are always a variation on three main ingredients: 

• a carbohydrate of either rice, spaghetti or potatoes (usually boiled but occasionally there have been chips),
• meat, which is either beef, chicken, goat or fish and it is either boiled, stewed fried or minced, and
• a vegetable, which is either beans (think baked beans but without the tomato sauce) or an unidentifiable green vegetable (that was probably originally some sort of leaf), which has been boiled to a pulp but somehow still seems to have bits of grit in it…

Occasionally there is a banana for dessert but only when the person responsible remembers to go to the market.

Although it cannot be described as the most varied diet I have ever had it is generally quite tasty and I am grateful that someone else is doing all the hard work for me. The only place to buy anything in the surrounding area is in the village market and if I had to shop and cook for myself then I think I would be living on a diet of tomatoes, onions and bananas.