Luwombo!
We didn't do have much going on this weekend so we decided to try our hand at making my favorite traditional Ugandan dish: Luwombo.
Luwombo is basically stew that is steamed in banana leaves for a few hours. There are many varieties but the most common is chicken and beef with peanut sauce.
For the chicken, you place some chicken and a whole bunch of veggies in the banana leaf (and usually some beef stock granules, in uganda you would use mchuzi).
For the beef and peanut luwombo, you grind the peanuts and add a little water to make a paste then steam it along with the beef. In Uganda this would go over a charcoal stove so you get a good smoky flavor but our apartment complex does not allow charcoal grills so I smoked the meat for an hour over very low temperature to get at least some flavor.
We were happy with the results but found that we didn't grind the peanuts fine enough.
We needed some good starchy sides so we also steamed Cassava (also called yucca root here). These came out perfectly and are basically like a dry potato.
We can't get the right plantains here for matoke (and believe me, we have tried every variety of plantains we could find). So instead we found some nice ripe ones at the new Mexican supermarket that just opened. They came out nice and sweet and a were good complement to all the other food.
And we can't have a feast with out chapati! What is called chapati in uganda is really paratha which is very flaky (almost like a flat croissant). Our favorite Indian market stopped carrying the brand we like but luckily I stumbled upon some at the local Chinese market when I went to buy banana leaves.
All in all we were quite proud of ourselves (and quite full when were were done)
