Happiness is a bowl of monggo

By Marifi Jara

QUELIMANE, Mozambique–I woke up at the start of the week thinking I need a breather from political news, the Maguindanao massacre, other crimes here and there, and climate change. We’re welcoming December, after all, my favorite month! Coming from a tropical country where we don’t have any real changing seasons, spring cleaning is an alien concept to me. I see December as the time of the year when it’s good to clean up rubbish, both physical and emotional, from our system and then start gathering up hope for the coming new year.

As I sat down to breakfast thinking about my tidying strategy (do the cupboards first or the computer files?), our housekeeper Lina comes around with what I would like to consider as my first Christmas gift for the year: half a kilo of monggo beans, freshly picked from her mother’s machamba (small farm) near the Zalala beach, about 30 kilometers away from here. Receiving a gift from someone in a country at the bottom 10 list of the United Nations index for human development, where monggo (called ferjao sorroco here) is quite a pricey good (unlike in the Philippines where it is somehow considered a poor man’s food), is truly heartwarming.

And so the next day (I had to first soak the beans overnight), the first day of December, I showed Lina how to make the popular ginisang monggo Filipino dish. I gave her some from the big pot to bring home for her family to taste. The next day she tells me it was hit! Whether that was true or a white lie, it still made me feel happy. And I was already feeling lighthearted nonetheless having enjoyed my bowl of monggo beans.

Making a cultural payment forward, here’s a recipe for mukapata, a Mozambican dish — considered as a feast fare and not a daily staple — using ingredients common to Filipino cooking: rice, monggo beans, and coconut milk.

Ingredients: 1 cup of rice, 1 cup monggo beans (yellow variety works better for this dish), 400-gram can of coconut milk (I cheat here because I find it too tedious getting it fresh, but of course freshly-squeezed coconut milk is much, much tastier), 4-5 cups of water, salt to taste

How-to:

Boil the monggo beans in about 2 cups of water until tender, bordering on mushy.

Add 2 more cups of water and the rice. Boil and let simmer until rice is almost cooked. Stir every so often. Make sure not to let it go too dry. Add water if necessary.

Pour in the coconut milk and sprinkle with salt depending on your taste (about a teaspoon should be enough). Continuously stir while cooking for another 5 minutes. The dish should come out a nice mashed mixture.

Mukapata is a tasty and very filling dish, easy to make, and goes well with a bit of grilled meat, fish or chicken is recommended. It could prove to be a nice and inexpensive surprise on the Christmas or New Year table.

Now, back to the cleaning job. And I do think I’m ready to look at the news again.

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