Breakfast Foods of Zanzibar

(this entry dictated by Calvin)  We never eat cereal here because it’s really expensive (like one box is $8).  But there’s a lot of other foods we like for breakfast, such as

• Mandazi—fried bread half-circles that taste sort of like donuts, and me and Oscar like with cinnamon sugar or nutmeg or dipped in chai (very, very common)

• Mfuta—a big circle about the size of a plate, made from coconut milk and with sesame seeds on top—Mom and Dad like it with chutney on it, but I like it plain (kind of rare and only available after 8 AM so not possible to get on school mornings)

• Chilla—a fermented coconut milk and rice flour circle about the size of a dessert plate that has a lot of holes in it from the fermentation (pretty common)

• Mkati wa kumamina—is called cake but is not really cake and is more like very thick chilla, about 4 inches tall (very rare and kind of expensive, like around $2)

• Vitambua—sort of like chilla and cake, but made from unfermented coconut milk and rice flour and shaped into little balls about the size of a kid’s fist—Dad says the shape is kind of like Indian dosas or Scandinavian abelskivers (really rare during the power outage because you need a blender to make them).

• Boflo—little tea-party-sized loaves of bread that we eat with peanut butter or Nutella—they sometimes have bugs in them or charcoal or hair on them, so I don’t like to eat them (very common and pretty much the only kind of baked bread available in Zanzibar)