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Ugandan Flag
Fast Facts:
Land Area: 236,040km2
Population: ~35,873,253
Capital: Kampala GDP (PPP) per capita: $1,414 Official Language: English; Swahili Known For: Gorillas, Lake Victoria |
Within a few minutes of googling (there's a surprising number of resources out there) it was clear that whatever I made it was going to have to include cooked bananas (on their own forming the basis of a dish called Matoke), and I soon found a dish that looked like an interesting mix of flavours and an interesting challenge to cook: Luwombo.
Apparently a Ugandan 'Royal Christmas Dish' Luwombo combines panfried chicken with smoked fish, steaming it together with vegetables and peanut sauce in banana leaf-wrapped parcels. Sounded like fun!
The hardest part was finding banana leaves at short notice...in short I couldn't. Happily we have a couple of grapevines in the garden mature enough to be sporting some decent sized leaves and I found about three of these was enough to wrap one parcel sufficiently to stop the sauce oozing out of corners (dipping the leaves in hot water first makes them more supple and stops them tearing).
Steaming was a bit of a challenge as I didn't have a steamer big enough to steam three parcels and half a dozen plantains (I used the smallest green bananas I could find at the supermarket) all at once. I improvised, using a large, deep roasting dish half filled with water, a roasting rack (to hold the parcels and bananas out of the water, and a larger shallow tray weighed down as a lid. The fit wasn't perfect however so in our fan baked oven the bananas (which were skinless) dried out a little and went a bit leathery on the outside, but they still tasted surprisingly good! The parcels cooked to perfection and it was fun to dish them up and have to open them before eating--like little dinner presents! (I wonder if that is an intentional Christmas connotation??).
One interesting thing was that in making the sauce and in particular adding the smoked fish (which I've not hitherto been a fan of) the flavour pre-steaming was overwhelmingly salty...and I was a little worried I'd made something rather unpalatable! Happily once steamed for an hour with the chicken and mushrooms the flavours all infused together nicely. Both the peanut flavour and the saltiness diminished resulting in a nicely blended dish that miraculously turned out to be Mum and Dad' favourite thus far!
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| Luwombo parcels ready for steaming (left) and the finished dish ready to eat! (right) |
Rating (out of 5):
Luwombo 4.5/5 (even with smoked fish, though use a bit less if you're not a fan of this flavour)
Steamed bananas 2.5/5 (would rate higher if I'd steamed them properly and they stayed moist)
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