Count Orsino

If food be the music of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Apparently some people solicitous for my welfare have been enquiring what I am eating – one of the expectations when I arrived here was that I would be bringing some “Irish potatoes” – I didn’t know this and on enquiring from Lyn the missionary I am relieving, she said Well she certainly wasn’t going to leave potatoes in the car for a month in the heat waiting for me to bring up! Potatoes do not feature in the diet here, Irish or any other kind.

That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour!

The staple is nsima (maize porridge) and rice – at the Health Centre opening I went to a few weeks ago, both were provided, and eaten together, but I am sticking to one or the other. Occasional pasta provides variety but I had to buy that in Lilongwe and it is certainly not available locally. The nsima (or rice) is supplemented by a meagre sauce, most commonly of a fish stew, using kapenta from the lake – this is a small fish 5cms long and 5mm wide which is dried whole. This can then be kept without refrigeration, and boiled up in water when required to use with the nsima. Penjani bought some today and I said I would like to try it so will give a report in due course. In practice however I have been sticking to more conventional stews – goat, horse or chicken (just kidding about the horse – it is those in England who have been eating that), with “greens” – a non-descript spinach like leaf which is apparently either soya or rape leaves. The other foodstuff readily available locally are groundnuts, and I have also been substituting this for the meat stew – I found this wonderful “food processor” (pictured) – remember these from the good old days – which enabled me to grind the groundnuts, mix with flour, egg and oil to make a “ground groundnut nut cutlet”. Apart from being easily burnt, it was a great success and make a very pleasant burger, a great deal more savoury than the horse meat burgers back home.

Enough; no more:
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Variety not being the spice of life here (that responsibility rests with Peri Peri sauce), I tend to make enough for 3 or 4 meals and plough my way steadily through it. The fruit available here (apart from bananas of course, the mango season being over) has so far been pomegranate (or passion fruit for the Poms) which is yellow rather than the usual purple variety, and tree tomatoes – both pictured alongside the pip of an avocado I was kindly given from someone’s garden – does anyone else remember as a child trying to persuade the avo pip to root and sprout by suspending above a jam jar of water with three cocktail stick arrayed around to keep it from drowning? The tree tomatoes do not taste like tomatoes at all, rather more like a pippy kiwi fruit. They do however bear an uncanny resemblance to tomatoes when cut.

O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,

Finally the water here arrives from the water source up the mountain, and when it has been raining, as it has recently – 70mm of rain in one night on Monday – it arrives a dark brown colour, so the water filter (pictured) is fairly desirable. I do not boil it however but have suffered no ill effects thus far.

Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

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