How to make a Ugandan "Traditional Dish"

I enjoy collecting recipes from other cultures. While we were in Potika we were exposed to a wide variety of unique and interesting dishes. One of them was the, "meat of a small animal who had no name in English." This meat smelled mostly like wet dog, and tasted slightly better. The Camp Commander captured a baby "small animal who has no name in English" and showed it to us and it looked A LOT like a cat, however, the adult probably reached a larger size than the common house cat in the US.

Another dish we were served was, "Green Vegetable and Fish." This is a fairly simple dish and I think that it would be quite easy to make back in the States. So here are the directions:

1) Buy okra leaves OR
Buy the stalks of spinach OR
Mow the lawn and save the grass clippings

2) Buy cans of sardines OR
Go to your local polluted, dirty and over-fished lake and catch some small fish

3) Lay out the sardines or the small fish from the dirty lake to dry in the sun. It is VERY important that they be placed on dirty surface and be easily accessible to flies. The more flies the better. Leave the fish out to dry for at least 3 days until they look like this:


This is a picture to assist in the making of the above listed recipe. (I tried to be very Betty Crockerish and give you a fully illustrated recipe, but unfortunately I don't have the picture of the final product. Hopefully, you can get there without all the pictures).

4) Use a dirty knife to chop the dried sardines or the small fish.

5) Boil water and add the okra/spinach leaves and/or the grass clippings.

6) Add the chopped sardines or fish

7) Cook for several hours, stirring occasionally.

8) Check to make sure the consistency is correct. It should be very slimy. If you use a spoon or a fork to lift some of the grass-mino creation out of the pot, there should be at least 5 inches of slim hanging off the bottom of the spoon. If there is not enough slim, hire a small child to spit saliva into the pot until the dish reaches the correct consistency.

9) Serve to your guests with a ball of posho (tasteless cooked corn flour). If you don't have any corn flour on hand, just make some Cream of Wheat and add to much powder to the water so that it gets really hard and dry.

10) Carefully watchyour guests eat, making sure that they finish their entire serving.

We were served this "Green Vegetable with Fish" while we were in Potika and unfortunately, I don't have a picture of it, because we were being watched by the cook and I didn't want to make her feel bad by taking a picture of the food-grossness.