Like I said before I love food from home, add to it the fact that I can”t get any of it here makes it even more difficult for me.I especially love the fruit there is nothing else like the wild fruit, what more it grows naturally just the way God intended. I can not wait to go home to eat mazhanje(Wild Loquat), masawu (Ziziphus mauritiana), magaka(Cucumis africanus), nhengeni, mapfura, hacha, hute, tsubvu and matamba. ( I do not know the English names for these fruits, if you know please share.)
The reason for my post is I got some matohwe from back home, in addition to other food from back home, it took a long time for them to get to me. My aunt, whom we call Vako, one of the most gracious people I have ever met, preserves fruit in a lot of ways, some she dries and some she makes into jam. Thinking of it, she is the one who taught my mother how to make marmalade (lemon and orange) who then taught me. She is a very talented woman. I wanted to post her picture here but someone stole it from me, hmmm!! Sorry I digress but I know she is the one who preserved the matohwe and gave my mother who gave it to a friend, who gave it to me and finally by the time I got it it was just a quarter of what Vako packed for me. All the same I am happy I got them, thanks Vako!!!. So this is the condition I got them in:
This fruit is most likely a year or more old from the time it was picked. To preserve it you take any amount of the fruit and boil it in salted water. and then put them out in the sun to drip off excess water. As you can tell from the above picture they are kind of dry, so I boiled them in unsalted water just to soften them.
Here is the final result before they vanish:
Let me know if you know how to preserve the other wild fruits.