Not so traditional, but still kind of traditional.
If you know me, you know that I love food and love to eat. The fact that this post is obnoxiously long and is split into multiple posts should not surprise you.
Breakfast.
After the first week of 3 prepared meals a day for us, buy our fabulous cooks Winnie and Irene, we decided that we could cook our own breakfasts. This also would allow us to eat things that we’re more accustomed to. Our kitchen is equipped with a microwave and stove.. however only one burner (the electric one, 3 others are gas.. we’re trying to get a small tank of gas) stopped working after a few days. Luckily the oven works though! This provided a challenge for making ourselves breakfast. After a few egg explosions, we have mastered scrambled eggs in the microwave. Our breakfasts consist of fresh toasted bread (made by Robin, see below) with avocado, scrambled eggs with peppers/onions/tomatoes and misc. fruit. It is our most colorful meal of the day. 🙂
Lunch.
Lunch consists mainly of a lentil, rice, potato, pumpkin, sometimes a type of scrambled egg, fruit and avocado. We also have chapati often. Chapati is probably my favorite carb of Uganda. It is a fresh, fried flat bread similar to a tortilla/naan.
Dinner.
Dinner is pretty similar to lunch, with a few modifications; rice, potato, veggies (sauteed or pseudo salad), chicken or beef or type of egg, fruit and avocado. Winnie also makes for us fried bananas for dessert. They naturally have a slight purple color to them. I love them. They aren’t too sweet but very tasty. They have several different types of bananas in Uganda; sweet and savory types.
Bread.
Robin enjoys baking bread. He started baking bread a few months ago when he was visiting his girlfriend in Zambia. They don’t have access to anything like bread there so they decided it would be a fun project to try. He’s been perfecting it since we’ve arrived. I do not mind being the taste tester and guinea pig. He’s been making a loaf about every other day, depending on how quickly we eat it.
Avocado & Mango.
We have been eating hundreds of avocados and mango.. I do not mind one bit! The avocados are huge, delicious and very cheap. I think we bought 3 large ones for less than $1.
Jackfruit!
Jackfruit is one of the largest and different looking fruit that I have ever seen. *The jackfruit tree is well-suited to tropical lowlands, and its fruit is the largest tree-borne fruit, reaching as much as 55 kg (120 lb) in weight, 90 cm (35 in) in length, and 50 cm (20 in) in diameter. A mature jackfruit tree can produce about 100 to 200 fruits in a year.* (taken right from the Google machine)
We had it served with dinner one night and I loved it! I told the GC that I really liked it and he had one cut off the tree and gave it to me J Therefore, I was tasked with cutting it and preparing it. The jackfruit has a very sticky sap that gets on everything. I wore some medical gloves, there happened to be a box in the guesthouse, and a ton of coconut oil on the knife and my hands. Overall it was successful in terms of not sticking to everything. The entire process took me an hour and I didn’t even clean it as thoroughly as I could have!
I only kept the meat of the fruit but threw away the seeds. The seeds however can be cooked in multiple different ways.
Stay tuned for part 2!
Red Rover 