Most mornings for breakfast I have actually had toast,
although in Kigali last week I purchased some oats. I am not entirely sure what to do with these
– maybe mix up with water and honey (no milk as no fridge!) and add some
fruit. On days when we have not had
bread, I have had a banana for breakfast. Update: have managed to source UHT
milk, which I would not normally touch at home, but works well in my
porridge and tea here!
At lunchtime it is usually a case of a piece of bread either
with butter or chocolate spread, and hopefully an apple – if they had them on
our previous trip to the market. At
weekends, or on a day when we happen to be near the house, we have made more
interesting lunches – quite often this features guacamole to spread on bread or
crackers or toast. Last Saturday we had some
olives and cheese as I had been to Kigali. This was incredibly exciting and exotic!!
Dinner is the most exciting meal! So far we have made vegetable curry, pasta
sauce, soup, stew... and supplemented it with rice or pasta or mashed potato. One night I even made up some chapattis. Last night I amazed our guests by making a
sweet and sour sauce from scratch to go with our Chinese stir-fry. I did not think that I relied on my oven too
much at home, but now that I am without an oven or grill, I notice that I
really miss it – I can’t bake cakes, or make a lasagne, or shepherds pie or
cook a pizza – it makes ones diet seem quite limited. One project for last weekend was to attempt
to create a stove top oven using a charcoal stove. Unfortunately the rainy season is determined
for this not to happen and it has been bucketing down all day – I shall let you
know how this project goes if we ever manage to do it!
Meat is a thing of the past.
Unless we want to buy a live animal and butcher it, we cannot get meat
for home. This is OK, it just means we
save meat eating for times when we do eat out.
Although, this in itself is not ideal as food can take a couple of hours
to arrive in a Rwandan restaurant so you can end up extremely hungry and
fractious on such occasions.
My taste buds are already quite bored and want to try new
things, but we are also restricted by the fact that we do not have a fridge so
food does not keep and the market is only on twice a week. By the time I got to Kigali last week I was
quite desperate for meat so I had a burger and chips and it tasted so
good! I also managed to find a latte in
a coffee shop. And I returned from Kigali
with a bag of coffee, which we made up at breakfast at the weekend and it was good!
That aside, you can get hold of lots of stuff here – it’s
just being creative about cooking it.
You can even buy Dairy Milk in Kibungo and I have a huge addiction to
it, which I did not have in the UK. Beer
is also very nice, although I do not often have it (no point keeping it at home
as I have no fridge). People here tend
to have things like beer and fanta warm, so you have to specify that you would
like it cold when you order it. At home
we keep a bottle of Waraji (Ugandan gin) and mix it with passionfruit syrup and
water from the filter – no ice and tonic, although we did get two cold bottles
of tonic in the local store last week and were so excited to have cold tonic
and a slice of lime from the market that day in our drinks!
I hope I will be grateful for the exciting and varied diet
when I return home. I already really
miss milk – on cereal or just to drink – but it is interesting to see how most
people in the world live. Those of us in
developed countries in Europe are a minority and many people live in far more
difficult circumstances. I am enjoying the challenge to a certain extent and am trying to be
very creative.
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