I don’t have a knife but I have two spoons…

So what am I eating?  I’m trying to self-cater at least a little bit, but this gets old fast when you move every few days and carry all your food along with you.

Luckily for me, everywhere in Africa the following seem to be readily available; bananas, peanuts and bread in some form.

In East Africa fruits are abundant – mangoes, oranges, papaya, watermelon, and my favorite, pineapple.  Having a pineapple just seems to make everything better.  We’ve also encountered a fair amount of cassava and plantains, which take May back to her days growing up in the Dominican Republic.  It’s easy to find fried cassava and plantain chips for sale at local groceries – both of which are delicious.

Most days I buy a real meal for dinner, either when we go out as a group or at whichever place we happen to be staying.  In Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar and Nairobi we went out to eat a few times, sampling Swahili, Indian and Chinese at reasonably priced restauarants.  The Indian food has been especially good especially in Dar, and at the home of our friend Krupa’s parents in Nairobi, where we were invited one day for lunch.

If I had to choose one food item that seems to dominate our lives it would have to be the cashew nut.  Or cashew nuts, to be precise, as you never eat just one!  After discovering that we could buy a 1 kg bag for less than $5 at the market in Dar, they quickly became an integral part of our diet.  We’ve each eaten at least 1-2 kgs of cashews since we arrived in Dar the first time and we’re still eating them.  It’s gotten so bad we all joke about how many cashews we eat and how we can never eat them again (after we finish our current supplies of course), yet we still do, everyday.