In Ugandan culture, it is customary to invite guests to your house for extremely large and delicious meals. Everyone here feeds us so well and you eat until you feel like you are going to explode at most meals. Even at restaurants food is cheap and comes in huge portions. A full plate of rice with meat and steaming sauce usually costs about 7,000 Ugandan shillings, which is equal to about 2 US dollars. Typical meals consist of a base like rice, cassava, Irish potatoes, matoke, or posho, and then a meat like chicken, beef, or goat, and a sauce that is either meat or ground nut based. Whatever combination of these dishes you get, your meal is bound to be delicious.
One of the most common base dish is matoke, which is my personal favorite. Matoke is essentially large, unsweet, green bananas, similar to plantains, that are cooked and mashed. While doing a rural homestay in Eastern Uganda, I got the chance to learn how to make this tasty traditional dish. First you must remove the thick peel with a knife and wash the sticky matoke. Once they’re clean you line an aluminum bowl with the lush green banana leaves and fill them with the matoke.
Next you make sure that they are wrapped tightly in the leaves and place the bowl and place it on a traditional mud oven. You know it’s ready when you begin to see steam and the leaves just barely turn black. Let it cool until you can touch it, then you can knead the leaves to mash and mix the matoke. At the end, you are left with a hearty meal base that is about the consistency of mashed potatoes.
While matoke is my favorite food here, it is the sauces that really make it. My favorite type of sauce to go with my matoke is ground nut sauce. Groundnuts are essentially small peanuts, and are a common and satisfying snack here. They are commonly called g-nuts and can also be made into a delicious brown sauce. They make it by crushing the g-nuts and mixing it with water, onion, and an assortment of spices and cooking it over the fire. The sauce tastes a bit like a flavorful peanut butter and is the perfect complement to go with your matoke.
Meat is the last thing you need to complete your typical Ugandan meal. Beef or goat are the cheapest and most common, and chicken is often considered a delicacy here. All meat is not served by itself, but more like a soup in a broth with onions, spices, and other vegetables. Adding this broth to your base meal makes it all the better. My favorite of these is the goat, which has the most flavor and comes either in the soup style or on a sort of BBQ skewer.
Almost every meal I have eaten in Uganda has been incredible. I am glad I still get to enjoy all the local food for six more weeks. I don’t know what I’ll do without fresh matoke once I’m back in the states, but I am looking forward to a real cheeseburger.