International Cuisine Day

Polytechnic of Namibia – Cultural Festival 2006
International Cuisine Day

Oshivambo

Nama – Donkey meat bbq!

Director of Computer Services: Laurent Evrard, with the French offering.

Romeo teaches me how to eat mopane worms

Yummy…..

My reaction.

Some background on mopane worms and traditional usage:

The mopane worm as food
Mopane worms are hand-picked in the wild, often by women and children. In the bush, the caterpillars are not considered to belong to the landowner (if any), but around a house permission should be sought from the resident. Chavanduka describes women in Zimbabwe tying a piece of bark to particular trees to establish ownership, or moving the young caterpillars to trees nearer home. When the caterpillar has been picked, it is pinched at the tail end to rupture the innards. The picker then squeezes it like a tube of toothpaste or lengthwise like a concertina, and whips it to expel the slimy, green contents of the gut.

Preserving
The traditional method of preserving mopane worms is to dry them in the sun or smoke them, giving additional flavour. The industrial method is to can the caterpillars (usually in brine), and tins of mopane worms can be found in rural supermarkets and markets around southern Africa.

Eating
Dried mopane worms can be eaten raw as a crisp snack, although in Botswana people tend not to eat the head. Alternatively, mopane worms can be soaked to rehydrate, before frying till crunchy or cooking with onion, tomatoes and spices and serving with sadza. The flesh is yellow, and the gut may still contain fragments of dried leaf, which is not harmful to humans. The taste is somewhat reminiscent of tea leaves. Source

Malaysia represents…

Kavango girl