Food, glorious food

Having just finished the best meal we've had yet in Kagando, I figured it was about time I wrote about our food here. We had the option of eating in the guesthouse or having a cook but we decided not to, not least because the 2 main vegetarian meals they cook are beans and rice (and Emma hates beans) and omelette (and I hate omelette!). Most of our shopping is done in the local village which is about a 5 minute walk away. In the village there are loads of stalls, almost all selling the same things. We still have no idea how it works when 10 people in a row are all selling tomatoes but they seem happy enough and they man each others stalls when needed and give each other change. The main vegetables are tomatoes, avocadoes, aubergines and potatoes and often green peppers and cabbages. One day there were carrots which was very exciting but they haven't reappeared! At first, the only fruit available were pineapples, passionfruit, lemons and bananas of varying sizes but since we've been here the mango season has started to our great delight (although the first ones were tiny and were almost all stone!). Oh and watermelons are appearing too. The food is very cheap- about 5p for an avacado twice the size of one at home. I think the people in the village know us now but they still seem to find us hilarious! There's also an `African and English supermarket' or as we call in the `muzungo shop' as we are the only people who seems to use it! It's much more expensive and sells store cupboard ingredients like tomato puree, jam, pasta, rice and milk, juice and eggs. They used to have porridge oats (all out of date) but we bought them all and I don't think things get replaced very often...

We have now been to Kasese, the big town 45 minutes away, 3 times to do a big shop in the supermarket there (actually the size of a corner-shop). They sell the most exciting thing of all- cheese! It's a big round gouda cheese that costs about 6 pounds and would taste pretty bland in the UK but here is's made so much difference to our meals! They also have heinz ketchup and kidney beans, low-fat milk and other delights.

For breakfast we either have toast or porridge, depending on when we wake up and whether we can find oats. The bread here is white and very sweet. It's really not very nice! They produce lots of honey here so that's easy to get and we've found jam and peanut butter. Toast has got much better though since my lovely Mum sent us a parcel containing mini, hotel style, sachets of marmite, nutella, jam and honey. Equally excitingly, we also managed to buy some 'salty' (i.e. normal, not sweet) brown bread on the way home from Rwanda. We're having to ration our second loaf though! At weekends when we're here we sometimes cook pancakes. Lunch is usually bread-related and has got much better since we bought cheese. Our ktichen is amazingly well-equipped and even has a toastie-maker!

We're quite proud of our reportoire of evening meals using the basic ingredients. We started with pasta with tomato and aubergine sauce. Everything takes a long time to prepare as we peel all the vegetables, including the tomatoes before we cook. It is fun thought to know that every meal is made from scratch and the ingredients are definitely local and in season! Once we found curry powder we started making the same sauce but with rice and calling it curry. The cabbage inspired bubble and squeak which we usualy have with guacamole and fried eggs. We've also mastered chips and have eggs, chips and guacamole or, most excitingly of all, bean burgers and chips. We cook on 2 gas hobs. They are adjustable but only really from hot to very hot so when we cook rice we have to keep turning the gas on and off to keep it at a simmer! Just before we went away for a week our gas ran out. Luckily we'd just finished cooking but we had to wait a couple of days until someone was going to Kasese and was able to take our gas canister and fill it up at the petrol station. We managed to cook pasta salad by soaking the pasta in boiled water for a while and then adding cold vegetables, but we left it rather too long so it was a bit of a soppy mess, not our best meal!

About halfway through our time here we found an oven which is basically a small glass bowel with a lid that has a fan in it, so it becomes a fan oven. We've now made 3 cakes, pizzas, oven-chips and today we made bread rolls. We started making the dough using some brown bread flour but I realised that the wholegrain seeds I'd seen were moving and were actually weevils! So we tried again using normal white flour and they worked perfectly. We've just eaten an amazing meal of kidney bean burgers in rolls, oven-cooked chips, guacamole and left-over curry as a relish. Only the tomato ketchup wasn't homemade.

We're feeling pretty spoilt now thanks to the parcels from mum as we have a house full of real English chocolate, tea-bags, sweet, cereal bars etc. African chocolate is made to not melt in the hot weather, but it therefore doesn't melt in your mouth either!

For drinking we mostly boil water and then filter it through my scarf! We sometimes have passionfruit squash and for a treat we buy sodas from the hospital squash. They have coke, fanta, bitter lemon or stoneys (ginger beer). They come in glass bottles and you are exepcted to take the bottles back as the shops have to give them back or they get fined. They are the re-used which seems like a much more sensible idea that recycling the glass. Alcohol is banned at the compound, but we really haven't missed it and it makes being away more of a treat if we can have a cocktail or glass of wine. Another one of our luxury buys (at about 3 pounds for a big jar) is Cadbury's hot chocolate powder, simple pleasures!

I think our time here has made us both better cooks and it's been fun but I think we are both still dreaming of supermarkets full or every food you can imagine, and bakeries full of salty bread!