Ngizokubona kusasa I will see you tomorrow

Passport & Plate - Matapa

Mozambique | Monday, March 3, 2014 | 5 photos

Ingredients
1 bunch of young cassava leaves (I substituted with kale)
4 cloves of garlic
1/2 an onion
Two handfuls of peanuts
About 1 cup chicken broth
1/2 can of coconut milk

 

How to prepare this recipe
Start by grinding up the kale, garlic, and onion very fine (you can add more or less garlic and onions depending on your tastes). In Mozambique, it is traditional to use a mortar and pestle, but I found a magic bullet or food processor works just fine (not to mention less time consuming).

Then take your mixture and put it in a large pot with most of your chicken broth (save a tablespoon or so) and boil on medium heat for about 20-30 minutes until it looks paste-like.

While your kale mixture is cooking, grind your peanuts into a fine powder and add the rest of your chicken broth to make it into a paste as well.

Then add your peanut paste and coconut milk into your pot, cover, and simmer on low heat for about 2 hours.

Once it's done serve over rice and with meat if you wish. If you want to get the true Mozambican experience also serve with piri piri sauce on the side. I ate mine with prawns fried in olive oil with a bit of garlic and piri piri sauce. Fish or chicken taste wonderful with matapa too!

 

The story behind this recipe
While working in South Africa, I met my Mozambican boyfriend, Almeida. I've visited Mozambique with him a lot and matapa is very popular. You'd be hard pressed to find a restaurant without this dish on the menu. One visit, I finally learned how to prepare it. Almeida told me we were invited to his aunt's house for dinner one morning. I had never met his aunt before, but I knew it was important. His parents both died while he was still young and he has very little family, so his aunt raised him and is essentially his mom. He told me she wanted to make us their traditional coconut food that he ate almost every day as a boy. I wanted to impress Almeida and his family so I asked if I could help. My boyfriend's aunt speaks zero English and my Portuguese is less than stellar so she showed me step by step how to make the matapa. Using the mortar and pestle was tiring but she kept motioning for me to make the cassava leaves finer (making all the ingredients very fine is essential for the proper texture of matapa). When we had finally added all the ingredients (including extracting the coconut milk by squeezing fresh coconut in a fine cloth) to the pot she sat back and smiled. She told me all we had to do was wait a couple hours. The experience of cooking over a fire, grinding each ingredient by hand, and putting so much effort into a single meal made it the best meal I've ever had! In addition, it also gave me a true appreciation for the daily life in Mozambique. Westerners have come to associate Africa with hardship and poverty (and there's plenty); however, there is also a simplicity and vibrance to African life. I'd also like to think they were pretty impressed with how well a Canadian girl could make matapa on her first try. Now that I am back on Canadian soil for a while and my boyfriend is still in Mozambique, we spend A LOT of time on Skype. But when I really miss him, and Africa in general, I can always make matapa and it makes the distance seem a lot shorter.