Food, Glorious Food!

So what have we been eating this past month?  Breakfasts are a pretty normal and are usually some combination of eggs (which have orange yolks!), cereal (I got one healthy and one chocolaty kid's kind), and the occasional green apple.  Bacon here is less fatty and cooks better in the oven since it doesn’t have the same grease to cook on the stove top.  There is milk and it comes in two types, either as the long lasting, doesn’t need to be refrigerated initially carton kind, and the lasts only about four days 1-liter bag type.  The bag type tastes way better than the carton, but it doesn’t last long (both expiration and quantity) so we have to buy it frequently.  There are a lot of different types of juices with combinations that I’ve never seen like cranberries and kiwi, a pineapple-mango-banana-guava-passion fruit called Tropical Mix, and a passion fruit-orange-peach-mango-apple-pear called Whispers of Summer.

Some boxed milk, spices, cookies, juice, and a soda that I swear tastes like grape Dr. Pepper.

Lunch if I bring it from home is nothing too special, chicken, rice, tuna fish sandwich, etc.  Basically your normal boring lunch.  If I don’t bring lunch, the Embassy has a cafeteria with all of the American staples, and it is actually really good.  There is a ton to choose from like burgers, pizza, breakfast foods, Mexican food (Mexican-American?), fish tacos, smoothies, and of course desserts.  Prices are expensive by Ugandan standards, but I think normal for the average lunchroom back home.  A cheeseburger (even the juicy lucy cheese on the inside style) is 22,000 Ugandan Shillings, which is about $8.  There is also a local option that gets you a typical Ugandan lunch for 6,000 UGX (about $2.50).  I finally pried myself away from the comfort of a cheeseburger lunch and tried the Ugandan option.

Local Ugandan lunch.

The meal had a lot to it, but in reality is pretty simple and hits a lot of the usual Ugandan foods.  It is made up of:

• Rice with veggies and broth poured over it.
• Beans.
• Diced up cabbage.
• Two types of potatoes (pretty sure at least) – One I think is a sweet potato and the other is some kind of African potato.  It doesn’t taste like a potato back home and is a bit harder.  The potatoes that we are used to are called Irish potatoes and I’ve only seen the smaller kinds.
• Beef from a beef stew.
• The purple stuff?  It is a groundnut sauce.  Actually tastes like peanuts for the most part.
• Ugali (under the peanut sauce) – Cornmeal cooked with water to make a white ball of doughy starch.
• Matooke (under the peanut sauce) – A type of banana that is mashed up, steamed, and ends up looking like yellow mashed potatoes.  I was told that it doesn’t actually taste like bananas, but yep it does.  Probably the most typical Ugandan food, basically what rice is to Japan.  One Ugandan at the Embassy told me that if he didn’t have matooke with a meal, it’s like he didn’t have a meal at all.  The bananas are seriously everywhere at the markets.

All in all, the dish was just alright.  You really can’t beat the price, but it’s really heavy in starch and I, unfortunately, am just too picky of an eater at times to enjoy all of it.  Though the good news is that I was told, by a Ugandan, that the Ugandan meal at the Embassy isn’t cooked as well as one I could get at a restaurant or local house.  So I will have to venture out and give this type of meal another shot one day.

Finally on to dinner and everything else.  Dinners cooked by Katie and I are nothing too unusual yet.  We’ve ventured out a bit on our cooking, making up some dishes with goat and minced lamb, but we haven’t tried to make anything too crazy yet.  That time will be coming soon though!  For eating out, there is surprisingly a huge selection of different ethnic foods and they are pretty tasty.  We have had Mexican, Greek, Italian, and Ethiopian to name a few.  There is even a site\app called HelloFood (which is like Grubhub), that you can order from, and a boda-boda driver will deliver the food to you.  Oddly enough we haven’t tried a Ugandan restaurant yet, but it’s probably because we are still stuck to sticking to things that we know and crave.  Speaking of craving, I went a bit overboard this week on buying baked goods from the market that comes to the Embassy every Friday.  I ended up buying 5 chocolate filled croissants, 3 chicken meat pies, 2 cheese sticks, 1 pizza guy, and 1 beef samosa.  My excuse is that they are all really tasty, and I maybe shouldn’t shop when I am hungry.

Ethiopian meal complete with Tusker Malt Lager.

I’ve been wanting to do more street food, but we have to be a bit careful with what we eat, due to having weaker stomachs than the locals.  We did though get to try a street food called rolex.  It was a mix of eggs, cabbage, tomatoes, shallots, and spices put onto a hot plate, stirred around, and then when it’s just about cooked, a flattened chapati is placed on top and cooked onto it.  This is all then rolled up and looks a bit like a crepe.  How did it get the name rolex?  Say rolled eggs fast and pretend English isn’t your first language, that’s how it was named.  There are also a ton of people selling fresh fruit on the side of the street.  Katie is loving the ability to buy pineapples and sweet melons (a smaller watermelon) for $1 apiece.  The people also have a variety of other fruits for sale like mangoes, avocados, papayas, bananas, passion fruit, and jackfruit.  Jackfruits are large, and prickly, with a rubbery fruit inside.  We can’t really place the taste, but it is described as a mix of apple, pineapple, mango, and banana.  More than one Ugandan has been surprised that we had never heard of jackfruit and that we don’t have them in the U.S.A.

Rolex making.

A Jackfruit, they grow quite large.

There is still a ton more that we have to try and eat, and luckily I have a huge appetite and not enough sense to think about what I am putting in my mouth!