A Bit More of the Mundane – Food Preparation

This part of living in Africa has probably been the most challenging. Before moving to Africa I’d been pretty good about making pretty much everything from scratch. We didn’t buy a lot of mixes. I even made our butter and yogurt from scratch in the states. But I took for granted the readiness of other parts of food prep or the availability of certain foods.

So, upon arriving I had to learn what was available, how much it cost and if that was a good price or not. Our helper, Osbert, has been a huge help with this! I’d take a trip to the central market a couple times a week for our produce. Think of all the open air markets you’ve ever seen in the movies or pictures of 3rd world countries and it looks a lot like that. Each little “eduka” (shop) has a variety of things to sell – pineapples, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, green peppers, carrots, peas, and we’ve even been able to find green beans! After buying what we needed, I’d bring it home and clean it – soak it in clean (filtered) water with some cleanser in it to kill parasites or other bacteria that our bodies aren’t used to. We buy eggs by the tray – 30 eggs per tray. Every Saturday, a man comes by with lettuces, spinach, and sometimes hot peppers and broccoli. We also have two avocado trees in our yard so for about 3-4 months out of the year we have all the avocados we can possibly eat and enough to give away. That’s a LOT of guacamole.

As you can see, produce is readily available. So we eat a lot of fresh fruits and veggies every day. Other things are more difficult to find. For instance, our family really enjoys cheese. When we first arrived, you could have any cheese you wanted as long as it was gouda. 😀 Not long after we got here, the man that sells us the gouda also began making mozzarella. So now we can have “real pizza cheese” on our pizza. 😉

Meat is another thing that isn’t as readily available. Here in Mbarara we can normally get minced beef (ground beef) and pork sausages – sort of a cross between a hot dog and a sausage link. But that is all. We could get chicken but we’d have to buy a whole chicken and have it butchered here at our house and then cook it. They are also quite tough so I learned to use the pressure cooker to help with that! Being Americans, we’re used to planning our meals around the meat. So it was quite the change to plan the meal and then add what meat we had later. After we’d been here about three months, we butchered a cow in our garage. It was quite interesting! Not exactly something you’d do in America. 😀 But it was so nice to have meat more often! Also, we could have different parts of meat – like a roast or steaks and stuff like that.

It’s been fun to start to find things. For instance, last fall we learned of a place in the capital that would deliver meat down to us in Mbarara, just for the cost of the transport on a bus! Through this company we can get chicken pieces – like legs and thighs, lunch meat, and stew beef. The cost is also far less than we pay in the stores in Kampala for these same things. Its been a blessing to have access to this!

Another thing that we recently found was a local dairy that delivers cheese all the way to Kampala. We noticed their label on some of the cheese that we bought in Kampala and decided to check into it. Thankfully, the dairy isn’t far from where we live and we can buy all the same cheese here for less – a wholesale price, vs. retail. For the first few months, if we wanted sour cream or cream cheese I had to make it. But we can get those things from the dairy and it saves me time!

Late last fall, Osbert showed us this HUGE market outside of town called Western Market. We’ve started going there for our produce once a week rather than making two or three other trips to Central Market in town. The produce is a LOT cheaper for us. You have to buy a much larger quantity but it is generally worth it. Also, we’ll get entire stalks of bananas for what it cost us at the central market for a bunch of bananas. It should come as no surprise that we can go through a whole stalk of bananas in a week as a family. 😀

We were able to find our African version of Sam’s Club – called Vickies, after the Indian gentleman that owns it. We can buy bulk items from him for less than what we can get them in the grocery stores. He sells canned goods, juice, bails of flour, pasta, other baking good in bulk (like sugar, salt, baking powder, etc.) and many other things, including non-food items like toothpaste and diapers. We go there about once a month or so, maybe even less but when we go we stock up.

For everything else, we go to a local grocery called Pearl. We can get a lot of the other things we need from them and often, if there is something we’d like to get all we have to do is ask the man who owns Pearl and he’ll order it for us.

So, as you can see, we’re adapting. It takes some planning ahead but I’ve learned how to make the things that my family enjoys and a whole lot more. We eat a lot of beans and I’ve learned to make some pretty good refried beans from scratch. 😉 When I got married a good friend gave me a recipe for spaghetti sauce and I make that several times a month. It makes excellent pizza sauce, too. I’ve also learned to make LOTS and then freeze some of it to make it easier next time. It’s been fun to learn how to speed the food preparation process. No grated cheese here! So my cheese grater is my dear husband. 🙂 Most of the time he is more than happy to help me with that part since it makes it take me less time to get the food ready.

Another blessing has been the seasonings that people have sent us ever since we mentioned the need in November! It’s been wonderful! We can’t even get many of the spices needed to make those particular mixes – I’ve checked! So THANK YOU to all who have sent them! We’re enjoying them tremendously!

I could go on longer but this is long enough. I hope it gives you a little picture into our daily life! We really do enjoy the African food that they have here but there isn’t a lot of variety in it. We eat it a couple times a week normally. But it is nice to have food that tastes like “home” and it has been a journey to get to the place where it really does taste like home.