A culture of much and good food!

I've attached a lot of photos to this one!

I chose to call this blog Banana Republic Adventures. I mean, yes, that sounds like a funky name, but it’s also very appropriate considering the wealth in banana’s Uganda has to offer. Depending on who you ask, there are between 30 and 40 different types of bananas in Uganda, many many more than the single type you usually encounter in a European supermarket! Most popular here is the ‘savory’ banana, used for dishes as katogo and to make matoke, a sort of mashed potato like dish of (green) bananas. You’ll find gonja on the menu, which is a slightly sweet grilled banana, you can order banana on your pizza, get cute tiny little sweet bananas along the road, get the ‘common’ big sweet banana we are familiar with or a whole lot of other kinds I probably don’t even realize exist. Some bacteria/disease is now affecting banana trees (globally as well as here), hopefully the destruction of the country’s staple food can be halted!

Right: Rice, ground nut sauce, (somewhat hidden) matoke, sweet potato and avocado

“You can’t be (or get) tiny in Africa, we have plenty of food!”, someone in the office said last week. Poverty exists in the country and of course, that saddens people greatly, mainly because indeed, there is a lot of food. Let’s have a look on the menu maybe to see what people here generally/traditionally eat. The photo of the menu somewhere hopefully close to this text is the menu of our guesthouse (sorry not a great photo...). A lot on offer, although it depends very much on what they have how much is actually available, particularly of the non-traditional foods. Burgers and pizzas are global food, so we’ll skip all of those ‘western’ foods.

Lunch and dinner are the same kind of food. What you’ll find on the menu often is a list of options, e.g. ‘beans’, ‘chicken stew’, ‘luwombo of beef and G.nuts’ (G.nuts, ground nuts, are like our peanuts. G.nut sauce is a reddish sauce that resembles peanut sauce a little), ‘fresh boiled fish’ etc. These are then served with ‘foods’. Foods are not just any food, but the traditional dishes that form the basis of your meal, and to which you add your selected option. Foods include rice, matoke, posho (I think a mix of cassava flour and something else, often also called ugali), kalo (mix of millet and cassava flour), sweet potato, yams, Irish (it usually just says ‘Irish’, by which they mean ‘Irish potato, which is our normal potato, served boiled), sweet potato (often a yellow variant, tasting like a normal potato but then super sweet, not like the orange sweet potato we know), pumpkin, gonja, and some other options, depending on the place. It is common to pick any combination of three. That means you end up with a giant plate of food, which is usually too much (for us, not for Ugandans, most eat as if every meal is their last) to finish! I often opt for two only, rice and something else. Because we have matoke every day in the office, I tend to pick something else during dinner. Most often Anna and I will eat rice (plus another ‘food’) and peas or rice and beans for dinner. Dinner in the guesthouse (happens most often) takes a long time to get ready. The kitchen is small and they don’t prepare food before the evening, so when we order it they’ll make it fresh, with a resulting waiting time of 45 to 90 minutes! At least by the time it arrives we’re properly hungry…

Ugandan snack food: chips masala and the ugandan version of kebab

So far we’re both dealing with the food quite well. Anna felt a little ill for a day, but that’s all. As someone told me, it seems my stomach is an African stomach! Good to know by the way, when Anna was ill the whole staff was ready to help and stood standby. “We don’t want visitors to have problems and we are not aware, if she is not feeling well we could go to the hospital. Ah! Not that she lies in her bed and dies!”. They overreacted a little bit maybe (blame it on the mother instinct!) but it’s very reassuring to know that the staff cares about our wellbeing and health and is ready to help when needed!!

Below: Kalo with katogo and peas

Right: Posho with chapati and beans (or peas...)

There’s two snacks worth mentioning, mainly because we’ve had them and they’re very tasty. The first is samosa, a sort of triangle shaped dough envelope filled with either a beef or vegetarian filling, and then deep fried. We don’t have them very often (mainly because the guesthouse doesn’t make them super well), but they’re good! The other one, unfortunately maybe, we do have more often: chapati. Essentially (we think) a deep fried flatbread. As far as we understand you make the dough, fill a frying pan with oil and once it’s hot you fry the dough in the oil, with an unhealthy but delicious bread as result. We try limit our consumption of chapati to a few times a week, haha!

Let’s see, what else might be interesting about food… oh yes, the fruit! Living at the equator where it’s always warm and there’s enough rain and sun means the fruits are tropical and thus delicious! As I said, we always get some fresh fruit for breakfast, a nice start of the day! The pineapples are amazing, there’s different types of mango, there’s papaya, lots of water melon, giant and wonderful avocados (you get them with dinner) and passion fruit. The passion fruit is mainly used to make fresh juices of, which you can get in most places. The heaps of fruit on offer at markets are enough to lure you and more than once I’ve been tempted to buy some, but without a kitchen there’s not all too much I would do with the fruit I’m afraid.

Just as in Korea I do sometimes long for some ‘normal’ food, although I try to eat as much local food as possible because I feel that makes the experience all the more real and interesting. We tend to have non-Ugandan food on either Saturday or Sunday (or both), because we go out sightseeing on those days and are more likely to be in places where they actually sell ‘western’ food. In the area where we are there’s barely any places that sell food that’s not Ugandan, and if it’s on the menu they might not have it (like our guesthouse) or it’s disproportionately expensive.

Katogo (which I think is the name for the green bananas when they are prepared in their banana shape) with goat stew and some boiled green leaf veggies)

One last short note: about the price of food. As you can see on the menu, most Ugandan foods are between 6.000 and 10.000 Ugandan shillings. Our place has pretty average prices, you can find places that are cheaper and places that are more expensive. Although 1 euro is about 3.300 shillings we just divide all prices by 3000 to convert to euro. In other words, food is not too expensive! The more you’ll move to the city center where the big hotels are, the higher the rates will be. A meal in a fancier or 'western' place will averagely cost 30.000 or (much) more! Of course, the risk of thinking everything is cheap and ending up spending way too much at the end of the trip is present as well...