Friday 16 November 2012

Culinary delights!

I know I go on about food a lot, but it is amazing how important it becomes when you undertake a 'change' in life such as I have.
Oh how true the saying is, ' pride comes before a fall.' Here am I congratulating myself on how well I have managed to adapt to the cuisine in Burundi (apart from tomatoes). When today I met my match. Today's lunch was by far my lowest edible point of my time here. Today we had a favourite dish of the Kenyan and Ugandan residents of the house. Oooops!
 It was maize ughali with sukuma wiki with very chewy beef in gravy. Sukuma wiki is extremely green and unlike linga linga, very flavoursome. Unfortunately the flavour is exactly what you would expect something so GREEN to taste of - greeeeeeeen! Nasty! Now linga linga is also green but relatively tasteless. So I have been coping with the odd helping of linga linga. But sukuma wiki is off the richter scale of nasty green tasting vegetable. I couldn't even finish it.
It was all a bit unfortunate, as the table was  radically split over opinions regarding the green stuff. Uganda & Kenya loved it, Britain and USA hated it.

Dark green stuff, sukuma wiki. Light green stuff avocado pear. Burundian avocado pears are really good. I had thought I didn't like them, until I ate them here. Maize ughali, is like the heaviest lump of Asda Smart Price powered mashed potato, but with all flavour extracted. It tastes like it looks.
Yes, the Africans do find find my mush-it-all-up philosophy of eating a little strange. It's often the only way I can cope with either the lack of flavour or the nastiness of the flavour.
Top of my Culinary Delights list, for my return to England for Christmas is......... A Fish Finger Sandwich! With white bread, butter and vinegar. Hmmmmm.
Just wondering if there are any parcels of drinking chocolate sachets on the way? I've been without hot chocolate for nearly 10 days now.

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