Food 2

In my first month or so, I posted about food here in Uganda. At the time I was living in Kampala, the capital city, and I realized that since my time in the rural areas, it could use a revision.

            All right, so this is my meal everyday

            Breakfast: Well technically I skip it as the breakfast, but at around 10:30ish, is tea. There we drink tea (shocking I know) and roasted g-nuts – i.e. peanuts. I usually eat a lot of g-nuts because they taste amazing, and this functions as our breakfast. Every once in a while we’ll also have escort – bread or some sort of bakery item that’s called escort because it’s supposed to help the tea down our throats. Although tea is not breakfast, this informally serves as my breakfast.

            Lunch: The lunch break starts at around 1:15. We eat posho, rice, and a bean sauce. Sometimes there are eggplants in the bean sauce. I explained what posho is in my last food blog, but here’s a quick summary. To make posho, you mix corn-flour mixed with water over a fire until it forms a solid mixture. It is white and largely flavorless, usually eaten with a sauce. It is extremely hardy. I mean this literally: a little bit of posho lands in your stomach like a rock. I’m saying this as someone who is almost never full, but it can fill you in a matter of seconds. When there are guests visiting the school, they’ll often cook chips (chopped up potatoes, not exactly in the shape of fries, less long and skinny more short and clumpy) and a beef sauce. This is partially to give the guests a treat, and I think also is a good way to increase the quantity of food: without adding the rice, posho, and bean sauce is not enough for both the teachers and the guests.

            Dinner: I eat dinner at home with my home-stay. We usually start around 9ish. I say this pretty loosely though: dinner’s often eaten anywhere from 8 to 10. Yes, Ugandans eat dinner later than most Americans and usually go straight to bed afterwards. There isn’t a strong emphasis on eating together. More or less, the food is left on the counter with a lid over it to keep it warm, and you come get some whenever you want. You also eat in the sitting room, just sitting on a couch or any other seat (living room) not at a table. Anyways, what we normally have is sweet potatoes (not the same as the sweet potatoes in the U.S., whiter and a different shape) and a sauce. The sauce is either a bean sauce – gotten from the school and the same as that in lunch – a g-nut sauce, or a beef sauce. The last two are my favorite, and we have them with decent frequency. Now I said above sweet potatoes with sauce, which is to some extent wrong. It’ll be more accurate to say some starch is served on which you put one of the sauces. Sweet potatoes are the most common, although there are other options: rice, Irish (i.e. regular) potatoes, cassava (a starch kind of like potatoes), etc. At the school, they always eat rice and beans for dinner.

            Then there are also pineapples. Compared to the ones here, the pineapples in the U.S. are not even worthy of the name. They’re imported from a far, and in order to make them last, they’re plucked before ripe and frozen. Here the pineapples are GOOD. They grow them here. Imagine so much juice that they explode as you bite them (not joking), and more flavor than like 3 pineapples combined in the U.S.  Also they’re dirt cheap. One can buy a pineapple that is twice as big as on the ones in the U.S., say from the hand to the elbow in length, for about 60 cents. And these are the expensive ones! Normal sized ones sell for 40 and 20 if you buy them directly from the farmers. I used to think of a pineapple as a treat to be eaten maybe once a twice a year because of their price in the U.S.

            All right so that summarizes the foods for now. The focus was on everyday food. Here the food we eat is pretty routine, eating the same basic foods every day. I also added that bit on pineapples, because the pineapples are awesome here.  I’ve been told by some “experts” that Ugandan pineapples – really central Ugandan as this is where they are grown the most – have been considered the best in the world, although I have no way to check this and am told this by clearly biased Ugandans. I have reason to doubt it though.