A New-found Love for Chapatti
Food, food, and more food. Here in Uganda the portion sizes are huge! I absolutely love food, especially new foods, so this was no challenge to me. Since being here, we have tried many local meals, which include various foods such as, rice, maize, beans, matooke or plantains, ground nut sauce, meat stew, potatoes, vegetables, and chapatti. I have really enjoyed all of the local meals I have eaten. Everything is cooked to be extremely flavorful and complementary to one another. As a lover of all carbs, it is no surprise that the chapatti, a cross between bread and tortilla, is my favorite local food!
We have maintained a very American meal structure, which is different than how the locals typically eat. Locals typically have a break tea around 10:00 am where they eat a moderate sized breakfast, a lunch around 12:00-1:00 pm where they eat their largest meal, evening tea around 3:00 pm for a snack and dinner later on in the evening. There are definitely some differences in meal etiquette. In the U.S. it is typically appropriate to wait until everyone is seated and served before starting to eat. I have noticed that here this etiquette is not observed; people simply eat whenever they are ready. Also, meal times are typically breaks for the entire staff, group, or family to sit together and eat. The cooks will make big pots of food for everyone to eat together. In the U.S. I often cook and eat a meal by myself or different people in my family will each eat something different. Lastly, locals do not typically have dessert sweets. We asked someone what they have for a sweet snack and they said fruit!
As a group we often eat breakfast at the hotel, lunch at our work place and dinner at a restaurant or canteen close by to the Guest House. The breakfast at the Guest House often consists of eggs, potatoes, a pasta dish, beans or sausage, cereal, fruit, juice, tea, and coffee. Everyone was very excited to eat pasta for breakfast! My favorite part about breakfast is the fresh fruit and juice. The pineapple and watermelon are very sweet and delicious. For lunch at our work locations, we eat local food made for us by the cooks at each place. Typically, it is rice, beans, vegetables, and matooke. For dinner we have tried a few different places, the Guest House dinner menu, the Guild Canteen on campus, Café Javas, and Hot Bites. The Guest House and Guild Canteen have local food, while Café Javas and Hot Bites serve American food like burgers and pizza. It is very nice to eat a mix of local food and American food. We were also very excited to discover that Hot Bites has very good ice cream and even makes milkshakes that taste like the ones back home!
