Namibians have, because of their relative lack of vegetable farming, more meat (and no fish) in their diet – similar to Patagonia. Here are two dishes I especially liked:
Kalahari truffles
During rainy season – of which we surely got the brunt – Kalahari truffles pop up everywhere in the savannah. They are extremely tasty and sought after. But don’t think they will be showing easily: They make themselves noticeable by a tiny crack in the ground, and that crack is extremely hard to find, especially this year, with the very high grasses after the heavy rains.
Our friends live at the skirts of the Kalahari Desert but don’t find the truffles themselves. Ovambos collect the mushrooms that look more or less like sandy potato. The Ovambos are a loose connection of Bantu tribes, and make up the majority of people in Namibia; white people hover around six percent. So, politically, the political power is securely in Ovambo hands.
I’m not sure if the Ovambos follow their noses; the Kalahari truffle has that exquisite earthy aroma I know so well from European mushrooms, predominantly the so-called steinpilz (stone mushroom). One Ovambo woman seemed to be the expert; she offered several loads of truffles, all of which we gladly bought. She might have known the places where the truffles thrive - family secrets handed down in families from generation to generation.
We had a feast with Kalahari truffles, which need to be scrubbed extensively – but in truth, one never gets rids of the sand completely – and peeled. Inside they are light-colored, not black like French truffles. When cooked, they have firm flesh. We sautéed the mushrooms in olive oil with onions and ground oryx (antelope) meat. Side dishes: green beans and caramelized sweet potatoes. - Leftover mushroom are peeled, blanched and frozen, to be used later.
Oryx Goulash
Oryx are the most abundant meat deliverers in the area where I stayed with my friends. Without them, neither the white people nor the Ovambos could survive in Namibia. The goulash was made again with lots of onions and plenty of olive oil. Wild animals have no visible fat, so oryx dishes require much olive oil. My friends had harvested the oil themselves, under much hardship – hoeing the large olive grove by hand. The onions and the meat simmered for about two hours with pepper, salt and thyme until the goulash was just right – tomatoes might have made the goulash more Hungarian, I guess. We served the goulash with rice and two different kinds of coleslaw: one with carrots and yogurt, one with smoked pork belly and vinegar. Read More
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Beyond The Five Tibetans: Alexa’s Alternative
March 23, 2011
A while ago, I stopped doing the Five Tibetans. I really liked the short routine that got me fit. But it also got me lower back pain. I tried some adjustments, but the pain wouldn’t leave. So, I started a new routine.
My new routine doesn’t have a fancy name, nor can it serve you a wonderful story of its presumed discovery – old Tibetan wisdom unearthed by a stiff British officer desperate to regain his youth – but it works for me.
And it needs about ten minutes of your daily time; nobody can claim they don’t have those ten minutes! If the Five Tibetans work for you – by all means, stay with them! Because I believe in wisdom handed down by generations.
If the Five Tibetans don’t work for you, here is Alexa’s Alternative:
• Bending: This exercise works on your upper back and your posture without putting undue strain on your lower back. You roll your upper back backward over a big yoga ball twenty-one times, each time lifting your arms over your head, then lowering them. Lacking a yoga ball (which I don’t have here in my Namibia hotel room), you can do this exercise also by hanging backward over the edge of a bed. Make sure that your lower back stays securely on the bed, and that you don’t slip from the bed and hit your head.
• Grounding: These are really knee bends but I call this exercise grounding because it strengthens your legs, and really grounds you. Do twenty-one knee bends. If initially that seems too hard, do less. Try five. Or try one. If that is impossible, try a half one. Daily try will soon make you stronger, and able to do more.
• Hanging: Hanging your spine out, that is. This exercise can be done from a bar. Pull yourself up twenty-one times. I really can’t pull myself up, and I can only count to ten, but even this small effort lengthens my spine, re-aligns it and strengthen my arms. When I travel, I bend forward and touch a table with my hands, pulling slightly down and back (without bending my knees). You feel that this also lengthens your spine, taking the kinks out; unfortunately it doesn’t do much for your arms strength.
• Reaching: This is the exercise that I find most fun. Take a heavy ball (I use a six-pound ball at home, and a book or a filled water bottle on the road), and stem it up twenty-one times as high as you can reach . You’ll feel your whole side lengthening. This slims your waist, strengthens your arms and let the arm flab vanish. Then do the other arm twenty-one times. Don’t do this exercise with two balls, lifting them simultaneously – you wouldn’t get the effect on your sides (but would still exercise your arms). But stretching your sides gives the exhilarating effect.
• Swinging: Take the heavy ball and move it from one hand to the other in a smooth swing twenty-one times. Don’t twist sharply in your waist, machine-like – let it be a graceful dance.
You notice, I kept the number twenty-one from the Five Tibetans. Twenty-five repetitions seem to give enough of a workout without putting undue stress on the muscles and joints.
Don’t do more than twenty-one in a single session. You are allowed one repetition during the day, not more. You will see that even with one cycle per day your legs plant you stronger on this Earth, your back is straighter, your bingo wings melt away.
For better memorizing, I put the exercises alphabetically: bending, grounding, hanging, reaching, swinging. Read More
World Water Day 2011 – Seen From the Namib Desert
March 22, 2011
Every 22nd of April, World Water Day is celebrated. This year I observe it from an unlikely place: The Namib Desert.
The Namib is the oldest desert of the world. We know that some deserts have been man-made, by human deforestation and overgrazing of goats and sheep. This desert, luckily, is not man-made. When West Gondwana split from the original one-lump ur-continent Gondwana about 140 million years ago, conditions arose for the arid coastal strip that we call the Namib Desert. Then and now, warm moist winds from the north are cooled down by a cold ocean stream, the Benguela upwelling. The mixture results in cold air that can’t rise up high enough to make rain clouds, just fog. So it rarely if ever rains here, which creates this desert, many hundred of miles long, from Namibia to Angola. Those cool ocean fogs maintain the nearly invisible desert fauna and spare flora.
History aside, the most prominent feature of the Namib Desert are the wandering dunes, spectacular formations in constant movement, propelled by the winds. I marvel at the sharp edges, undulating forms, surprising patterns one finds and the colors of yellow and red sand, sometimes dusted with crimson or black – the beauty of this desert is indescribable. The desert reaches right to the edge of the ocean. One would think there should be a thin stripe of green between them, but there is only the stark contrast of endless yellow sand and endless turquoise ocean.
Plants and animals eke out a living in the Namib Desert. Welwitschia mirabilis is such a plant, ancient and immutable, nurtured by the ocean fogs that roll in most days. Hundreds of years old at times, perhaps even thousands, Welwitschia has two long leaves (usually ripped into several strands by the constant desert winds) and a middle trunk that grows incredibly slow. We saw a colony of plants of male and female plants spreading on the desert floor – it takes hundreds of years before you’d call the middle a real trunk that visibly reaches some height from the ground.
How can a country like Namibia exist? Due to a sweet water reservoir beneath this scorched coastal stripe. Namibians are very aware how fragile this ecosystem is, and fierce regulations who is allowed to drill a well and where are in place. Namibian agriculture consists mostly grazing cows and sheep. A famous meat product is a jerky made from springbok, a wild antelope. Due to lack of water, Namibia has nearly no plant agriculture – most fruit and vegetables are imported from South Africa by which Namibia was annexed until 1990, when it freed itself during a bloody rebellion. By chance, their Independence Day happened to be yesterday – March 21st.
And by another chance we arrived last week during some of the worst rains and thunderstorms the Namibian remember. We ended the first leg of our trip at a washed out bridge and had to make a huge detour. And for all that unusual rain, the Namib Desert, in places, showed us a fine, fuzzy green – a beautiful welcome. Read More