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if you know me, you know i’m not much of a cook and i’m super happy i married a guy who is. i made chili for dinner last night, though, and it was good. i was proud.

i searched allrecipes.com for a chili recipe forgetting that there are whole cooking contests dedicated to chili, so i was somewhat overwhelmed with my options. i settled on “minnesota golf course chili.” first for its nostalgic quotient; second for its simplistic ingredient list. i admit i was intimidated by the pages-long ingredients of some recipes, but more importantly when selecting recipes to cook in uganda you have to choose based on likelihood of ingredient availability and how willing you are to drive all over town in search of those ingredients. for example, i’m probably not going to find rice vinegar regardless of how many stores i check. so, for success in cooking in uganda, the first step is to start with manageable ingredients.

there are several local markets in kampala. the biggest – nakasero – is in the center of town, but there are also very good markets at bugolobi and nakawa, both very close to us in mbuya. but for ease of one-stop shopping and no price-haggling, we frequent the actual grocery stores. there’re three major ones: uchumi, payless, shoprite. i think uchumi is south african, i know that shoprite is, and i don’t know where payless comes from (just that it’s run by indians). after you spend some time in kampala, you figure out which one has what. uchumi has the best fresh produce; payless has a wide variety of ethnic foods (thai, indian); shoprite has empty shelves and long lines. i only go to shoprite if i have to, and usually leave annoyed. we split our shopping between payless (conveniently located in bugolobi, or the new one in bukoto which has meat/cheese from quality cuts, the best butcher in town) and uchumi. uchumi has a leg up for mass shopping because we can get most everything at once, it’s at garden city so good parking, and it’s near new york kitchen which makes fresh bagels.

our grocery stores are comparable to u.s. grocery stores in the variety, but not in the quantity of that variety. for example, we can buy cornflakes, special k, or coco puffs. but we cannot choose among the generic vs brand-name, low-sodium, organic, low sugar, environmentally-packaged options. we get just one option of each: cornflakes, special k, or coco puffs. oh, and we don’t really buy cereal because the milk here is definitely not kemps; uganda milk isn’t drinking milk. we do buy granola, though, because jesa (local brand) yogurt is super good.

you’d guess that grocery prices are cheaper since we’re in africa. unfortunately, the prices of ugandan groceries match those in america because most everything is imported. uganda doesn’t manufacture much of anything – we focus on raw products: fruits, vegetables, flowers – so anything produced or manufactured gets imported. importation increases the price, and the unreliability of supply. grocers here haven’t really caught on to the concept of supply management; they’ll stock the shelves with something and when that something sells out, they won’t restock because they haven’t ordered anymore supply. there’ll be popcorn for a while, then suddenly no more. who knows when it’ll return? same thing with ceres fruit juice (super yummy 100% juice from south africa), sweetened condensed milk, vanilla extract, paone pasta (great pasta direct from italy). usually, whatever’s missing shows up again, but not always. i saw ocean spray cranberry juice for the first time yesterday – crazy expensive ($5 for a liter) – and probably won’t ever again. and, we’ve never found corn tortilla chips anywhere.

so, we can pretty much find just about anything we need most of the time. but, rarely all in one place. last night shopping for chili ingredients was nearly a coup. we got everything at payless bukoto…except sugar and kidney beans – those were at uchumi. also, no chili powder anywhere – i didn’t honestly expect there to be – but i found an easy substitute recipe online that i could recreate with basic spices.

if you’re interested, here’s the recipe for mn golf course chili. i doubled the chili powder and added red pepper flakes to up the spiciness. and, here’s the recipe i used for the chili powder substitute. we don’t have paprika or cayenne pepper, so i used 2 tsp of chilies powder instead. the chili was super tasty. it made us sweat, so i’m sure it’d be good for those of you suffering in the mn cold these days…