Catering

The Challenge: Create Christmas season food for a group of visiting Canadians and a few other expats who would be missing familiar traditions in a place where only basic ingredients are available.

The Response: Is no problem! All we have to do is:

1. Find a turkey. Ugandans don’t eat turkey, and you can pay over $100 for a turkey from stores in Kampala, so this is was not easy. However we managed to work it out. We contacted the Farm Manager at Kibaale Community Centre (a former student of mine when I taught here in 1996.) He found us one, and almost as importantly, he arranged to have it slaughtered, cleaned and plucked for us, so we didn’t have to deal with all that. It was very small and quite tough, so we supplemented it with a roasted chicken as well to make sure there was enough to go around.

2. Gather special treats. Over several trips to Kampala over the last few weeks we stockpiled items that are unavailable in Masaka to ensure that we had sprinkles for the cookies, cheese for the cheese platter on Christmas Eve and bacon for Christmas morning brunch. On my recent trip to South Africa, I also picked up some exotic African appetizers to share on Christmas Eve—roasted macadamia and cashew nuts and cans of zebra and wildebeest pate.

3. Bake up a storm. Megan has been VERY busy over the last little while making gingerbread men, molasses cookies, chocolate mocha pretzels and many other delicious baked goodies. I contributed a tray of Nanaimo bars and some butter tarts.(Interestingly, I learned through my internet recipe search that both of these are uniquely Canadian treats...who knew?)

4. Adapt where necessary. Since we are in the tropics we were able to add a few things to our menu that we wouldn’t be able to enjoy at home. We served freshly squeezed passion fruit juice for Christmas dinner, barbecued burgers on Christmas Eve and had fruit salad that featured mangoes from the trees on our property.

5. Be willing to spend lots of time in the kitchen. Prepared food doesn’t exist to any great degree here, so we had to make most things from scratch and without the benefit of food processors. We chopped all the ingredients for fresh salsa and guacamole and had to form the hamburger buns and patties by hand. Lots of cutting, slicing, kneading, carving and stirring, let me tell you!

Yes, it’s been a lot of work, but it has been fun to put it all together. It was a delicious feast and it felt almost like home on this first Christmas I’ve spent away. I’ve got good friends here and it was great to have visitors to help us celebrate. Good thing we’re heading on a safari next week...we can let others do the cooking for a few days! Phew!