A Taste of Uganda

Here is a little taste (pun fully intended) of what I have been eating for the last few months. Of course, coming to Africa and only eating at Noah’s Ark is like coming to America and only eating at camp, but I have also had chances to eat some very traditional Ugandan foods from time to time and there are some things I am certainly going to miss.

Chapattis are one of my top three favorite Ugandan foods. A chapatti is like a thick, greasy tortilla. (Sounds delicious, right?) Okay, I may be biased because tortillas are one of my favorite foods back home, but chapattis are so popular here they must be loved by nearly everyone. They are made from dough and then fried in oil on a small cooking stove while someone continually pushes out the edges to make sure it doesn’t get too thick.

One of the great things about chapattis is the sheer versatility of this food group. You can eat them with beans. You can eat them with soup. You can eat them with boiled cabbage. You can eat them plain. You can eat them rolled up with an egg. You can eat them with guacamole. I’m starting to sound like Dr. Seuss… can you imagine if he wrote a book about chapattis?!

Our Sunday lunch is an egg sandwich. The cooks fry a bazillion eggs with shredded vegetables in them—most commonly tomatoes, carrots, and onions I think. It is one of two meals a week in which we get bread, so I am a fan.

Sunday supper is the most popular meal of the week: chips and sausage! It only took two weeks for me to come to terms with the fact that French fries can be a meal all on their own.  They are served with “salad,” which is basically coleslaw and quite tasty. The only problem is you have to eat the salad very quickly before it can get all the chips soggy.

On weekdays, the lunch served is posho and beans. Posho is made from some type of grain mixed with water and cooked in a pot. It is like a very dry tofu. It is made from a grain that is ground up and mixed with water, then cooked until it makes a solid-ish mass that can be broken apart into pieces, kind of like really thick and dry powdered mashed potatoes. It barely absorbs the flavor of whatever you eat with it. This is the most common meal in all of Uganda—many families and schools eat this for every meal everyday. I ate it everyday for the first half of my time here, but now I buy more of my own food and usually stick to some combination of bread and fruit for lunch.

Here is one meal I have learned to like: matoke. It is made from cooked green bananas. Apparently you can’t make it with ripe, yellow bananas or it doesn’t work. I have been corrected when I asked someone if we were eating banana: “No, these are green bananas.” Apparently they’re not even in the same category.

Traditionally, when matoke is prepared it is wrapped in banana fibers and cooked in a pot. Here at Noah’s Ark, my guess is they don’t go to such lengths since they have to feed about 200 people, but I will admit I have never watched them make this green banana concoction. They serve it with some sort of sauce that usually includes meat and vegetables. As long as the ratio of sauce to matoke is heavier on the sauce side, a bowlful of this tastes fairly decent.

Guess what everyone—I eat bananas now! I don’t exactly enjoy them, but they are a) easy to come by, unlike apples or grapes, b) easy to prepare, unlike a mango, and c) I can eat a whole one or more by myself, unlike a pineapple or watermelon. It usually takes me about a week to get through a bunch of small bananas like this. But please, don’t automatically assume I will continue this habit when I get home. I won’t mind if there are no bananas of any size or color waiting for me.

Saturday lunch: my favorite lunch of the week! This is a bowl of cassava and beans. When I asked a worker here what cassava was made out of, he gave me a long questioning look and I thought maybe I had said the name wrong and he didn’t understand me. Then understanding dawned on his face and he patiently explained to me that cassava is a plant, so it’s made up of… you know, plant things. Apparently not many Ugandans like this meal because it is an odd combination or the cassava is cooked weirdly or something, but I look forward to it every week. When it’s all cooked together, the chunks of cassava are surrounded by a sort of sticky bean mush, which sounds disgusting but tastes wonderful.

Here is a poor picture of something called rolex. The name came from the words “roll eggs” because it is simply a friend egg with shredded vegetables rolled up in a chapatti. We don’t have the capacity to serve them at Noah’s Ark, but just up the road is the Rolex Man, who makes these in a tiny wooden hut and sells them for the equivalent of about 60 cents apiece. If I am ever not in the mood for whatever the kitchen is serving, it is only a ten-minute walk to our beloved Rolex Man.

Our Saturday suppers are regularly soup and bread. Sometimes the soup has meat and sometimes it has rice, but it always has vegetables.

Another regular supper here is rice and sauce. The sauce is different every time, but often looks similar to what we put on spaghetti when we have that, with vegetables and scrambled egg.

You have to admit, the dollar meal in Uganda trumps the dollar meal from McDonalds. There is a small restaurant in Mukono where I can get four meat samosas and a chapatti for the equivalent of one US dollar. I treat myself to this once a week when I go into town to go to the supermarket. Samosas can be either vegetarian or filled with meat, and both are tasty. I can buy them at Noah’s Ark as well, but sometimes they run out before eleven in the morning if students are quick to the kitchen during break. The ones here are filled with potato and vegetables and the ones I get at the restaurant are filled with ground hamburger, which here is called mincemeat. They are also one of my three favorite Ugandan foods.

Have I mentioned how much I love the avocados here? Look at the size of this one! There is a very kind woman who sells fruit outside the supermarket and picks me the best avocado every week when I go… and she knows how to pick a good avocado! This is the third of my favorite three Ugandan foods.