Growing Up in Uganda

People sometimes ask where my love of food really started. The honest answer is Uganda.

I grew up in Buziga — a wealthy neighbourhood in Kampala with green compound walls, bougainvillea spilling over gates, and the hum of generators on warm evenings when the power dipped. From the outside it looked like comfort. From the inside, it felt like a world that moved at its own pace: neighbours who knew each other's names, Sunday lunches that stretched into the late afternoon, and a kitchen that was always the centre of the house.

I have one younger sister, Salma. She and I could not have been more different.

I was the one hovering near the stove, asking questions, tasting too early, getting in the way because I couldn't stand not knowing what came next. Salma was the one who appeared when the good smells had already done their work — sliding into the kitchen just as something was ready, with that look that said I was busy, but I'm here now. We fought about everything. We shared everything too.

Our cook — and in a house like ours, there was always someone wonderful in the kitchen — had the patience of a saint. She'd shoo me away with one hand and pull me back with the other. "Come," she'd say, "tell me if this needs salt." Salma would wander in later, steal a piece of fruit from the counter, and sit on the stool watching us both like a tiny critic.

My favourite dishes from those years are still my favourites now. Matooke with groundnut sauce — soft, steamed green bananas with that rich, nutty peanut stew that fills the whole house with smell before it ever reaches the table. And roasted beef luwombo, wrapped and slow-cooked until the meat falls apart and every bite carries smoke and patience and time. I didn't know then that I was learning what good food meant. I just knew I wanted more.

Those meals weren't fancy in the way people sometimes imagine when they hear the word wealthy. They were abundant. Rice and stew on weekdays. Chapati torn straight from the pan before it had properly cooled. Platters at gatherings where everyone ate with their hands and no one apologised for taking seconds. The food was never just food. It was proof that the day had gone well, that someone had cared enough to feed you properly, that you belonged at the table.

But the table wasn't the only place where stories lived in our house.

My dad was an engineer by day and a storyteller by night. Every Friday — because there was no school over the weekend and the evening felt wide open — he'd gather us in the sitting room and tell folk tales, or stories from his own past, his voice dropping low for the scary parts and rising for the funny ones. Salma and I would sit cross-legged on the floor, fighting sleep, not wanting to miss the ending. Those nights taught me something cooking would later confirm: the best things in life take time, and the ones worth remembering are almost always shared.

I think about Uganda every time I cook now — not as a postcard, but as a feeling. The warmth of a kitchen. Salma laughing from the next room. My father's voice on a Friday evening. The steam rising off a bowl of matooke. The understanding that a good meal is never really about what's on the plate. It's about who you're feeding, and who feeds you back.

This blog is full of recipes I've learned since leaving home. But the foundation was laid long before that — in a house in Buziga, with my sister Salma, a father who could build bridges and tell stories, and more love than I knew what to do with.

Some stories you carry in your hands. Some you carry in your mouth. This one is both.