Zimbabwe, here at last

Hello,

Zimbabwe, the final country in my challenge and while this is a very average dish to finish with it is seasoned with the taste of success at having completed my challenge within the time frame I had set. 197 countries later with a wide variety of foods tried in 18 months. I was well and truly satisfied when I went to the supermarket recently, there was no spice on the rack that I hadn’t cooked with except for the pre-blended spices i.e. chicken seasoning. In the 18 months I had tried beef, fish, pork, chicken, veal, venison, rabbit, crab, mussels, clams, prawn and even frog and snails overseas. The number of different vegetables and fruits I have tried are also far reaching from apples to zucchini, although there are still a lot in between I haven’t yet tried.

Anyway, Zimbabwe’s national dish is sadza and I decided to cook this with vegetable chili with peanut butter cabbage. A vegetarian meal which doesn’t sound the least bit appealing but here goes. People haven often said “Why eat it if you don’t like it?” and while there has been meals that I would have preferred not to have put my taste buds and stomach through the ordeal, it is all about the experience. It is highly likely I will never visit every country in the world but I now can say my stomach has (albeit my version of that country).

The chili contained chili (of course), tomato, carrot, onion and capsicums. In addition I cooked the peanut butter cabbage which contained peanut butter, cabbage, tomato and onion. Finally, I made the sadza which is essentially corn meal and water. The meal was very bland and certainly not a good one to end this journey on but it would have been edible if I was hungry.

So there, it is finally done after 18 months, five days before my ultimate deadline. You may notice (not that anyone reads this blog) that there are still white patches on the map (those places I haven’t cooked), these places are still “provinces” of the likes of France, England, Denmark and the like. I coloured in Greenland (a province of Denmark) a long time back which would be another “white” spot.

A special thanks to my housemates for assisting me with sourcing ingredients, cooking and putting up with some weird and different dishes from time to time.

Now what? I have learnt a lot more about cooking and hopefully I can cook a little better drawing on a number of cultures the world over. Despite everything, no matter where you are food is food and life sustaining.

Goodbye

Sam’s rating: 5/10