Breakfast: My host family always prepares breakfast for me, and it usually consists of eggs scrambled with tomatoes and onions, some bread product, and juice. The bread product is usually what I would typically think of as a dinner roll, and sometimes it is chapati, the thick greasy flour tortilla I described in the “Mabira Forest and Kampala” posting. The juice is usually fresh squeezed lemon or orange juice made from the fruits picked right off the trees in my backyard. I almost never have much of an appetite in the morning (even at home), so I usually eat the eggs and then take the breadstuffs with me to eat at around 10:00 or 11:00, which is when I get an appetite and like to have a little second breakfast.
Lunch: In the recent weeks, I’ve been eating lunch at local restaurants near the office in which I work. One of my preferred places is called Nile Foods. You can get a very filling meal and a drink for less than 2,500 Uganda Shillings (Ush.), which is equivalent to approximately $1.60 USD. A sort of standard meal here consists of “food” and “sauce”. Foods are the starchy staples such as matooke (steamed and mashed plantains), rice, posho (a cornmeal and water mixture with a doughy consistency), and potatoes. Sauces usually cover the protein need and typically consist of either beans, cowpeas, or a chicken, beef, or fish stew. There’s also a peanut sauce which is common and quite tasty. It sometimes comes with smoked fish, which isn’t quite so tasty. I like to have beans or peas with rice and matooke or posho.
Aside from the local foods described above there are a few restaurants which serve more western foods such as burgers, pizzas, sandwiches, etc. Personally, I prefer eating the local foods to eating the western foods here. The food which the locals are more familiar with preparing simply tastes better to me than the western foods which they don’t know how to cook as well. There is also very good Indian food available.
Dinner: The same that I wrote about lunch can be said about my dinners here, except that I usually eat dinner at my host home rather than out. At home we have matooke almost every night, and the best sauce they make to go with it is fresh fish. The fish is usually Tilapia or Nile Perch, and both are delicious. I just have to be careful about the bones. Smoked fish: not so good, fresh fish: excellent.
Snacks: There’s a variety of snacks available either on the streets or in supermarkets. I’ve been supplementing my diet lately with crackers and peanut butter purchased from one of the local supermarkets. The street foods which I’ve sampled thus far are the chapatis, and a snack they call a rolex. The rolex is a chapati with a cabbage, carrot, onion, tomato, and green pepper omelet rolled up inside. Rolexes are delicious, very greasy, and filling. They usually cost around 800 Ush. (~$0.50) Other street snacks include various meat skewers, and roasted corn on the cob, which is called maize (pronounced like maze) by the locals.
Aside from the food describe above, there are three items I’ve encountered so far which I’ve never experienced anyone eating back in America. These three are ants, grasshoppers, and most recently, cow intestines. I had the chance to eat a big handful of fried ants during my first week here. I believe they have more of an acquired taste. The grasshoppers are supposed to be in season come November, so I haven’t been able to try them yet. My host brother, Dennis, promised we’d go out grasshopper hunting and eat so many of them. I’m pretty excited for this great grasshopper hunt. The cow intestines I ate with dinner the other night. I came outside to where the sauce was being prepared, and saw a pot boiling with what looked like noodles in it. After asking what it was, I was given the local name, which I now forget, and was told it is intestines. My next question was from which animal did the intestines come? Cow, and there is probably some liver and kidney in there as well, was the response. I was told the intestines are a great treat, and that they are very nutritious. I didn’t like them too much, unfortunately. My host brother was very happy, however, when I passed my bowl of intestines on to him.
The bowl on the lower left contains the cow intestines
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