Munyemba(Cowpea Leaves) recipe

Growing up I could not understand why my grandparents ate the food they ate, I associated most of their food with being tasteless and bitter. Well to be fair, Sadza is tasteless to most people because its just water and maize-meal, you have to have an acquired taste for it. If you follow my blog you may know that in Zimbabwe we eat an assortment of green vegetables, from the obvious ones, unusual and wild. My mother does not care if you do not like what she cooks, if she cooks it you eat it. I can tell you a number of times I wanted to cry during lunch or supper. One of the vegetables that made me want to cry was munyemba or cow-pea leaves, I only started appreciating it when I moved to Bermuda. I miss Zimbabwe that much! My father will not eat munyemba even though he can eat munyevhe three times a day everyday and I honestly think munyemba has a tamer taste compared to munyevhe. To each their own I guess.

When I last went home I came back with cow peas and when I wanted to cook them some of them had started going bad, so I threw them in my “garden” and they germinated. It was not a lot but got a few cow-peas. So this year I planted the same seeds and I have a much better crop than I did last year, something has been biting into the leaves but it generally looks ok, I am not too worried.

I plucked a couple of leaves and washed them

Remove the stalk from the leaves and throw it away

Cut the leaves into ribbons, both my grandmothers do not even bother with a knife

Add to boiling salted water and simmer for 5 minutes and drain

Fry 1 small tomato and 1 onion in a tsp of oil until you have a sauce

Add back munyemba to the sauce and simmer for two minutes. Serve with sadza, rice or potatoes.

This vegetable has its own unique taste and has a crunchy feeling to it