The World Around Us

It’s a whole new world: cornbread

Country: Mozambique by Lisette

21-10-2012

We invited Fadi and Lucia over for a goodbye dinner as they left today for Uruguay. Such is the volunteer life: transient. In the past couple of weeks, Fadi and Marlowe bonded over tech-talk and science and I bonded with Lucia over gluten-free food.

It’s not easy finding gluten-free ingredients in Maputo. And so I ate regular bread and used wheat flour for pancakes. Luckily, I had gluten-free pasta in my suitcase to keep me going for a little while. But lately, my body started screaming, “No, what are you doing to me again?”

In my quest to find gluten-free food, I have discovered a whole new part of the city. So now I have to dig up my recipes with quinoa. But first, I wanted to make a nice dinner with something new. Because as always, my guests are my guinea pigs! My nachos appetizer was easy to create and certainly made often. And since we arrived in Maputo I have made butternut squash soup a couple of times. What I decided to try out for this dinner was cornbread with broccoli and cheese.

I went to three supermarkets and two vegetable stands to get all ingredients. Satisfied I came home to start prepping dinner. In the last hour, when all the shops were already closed, I realized I had no measuring cups. Having never made any kind of bread before, the guessing made me a little nervous.

With US measurements that I then translated to European standards (I’m still not good in guessing ounces without a measuring cup) I feared for the worst. 250 grams of melted butter.. It just didn’t sound right to me. It was a big surprise when I opened the oven and it seemed to look okay. Still, I never trusted it until I took a bite. My cornbread was actually delicious!

And of course I forgot to take a picture of us all together! Typically me…