Ugali @ 36,000 Feet Above Sea Level

The last thing I would expect to eat in an US airline is definitely ugali. Oh well, add githeri to that list. So you can imagine my surprise when I tasted some ugali-like flavour in the barbecue chicken entree that I had chosen to eat for dinner during an international flight. On the Business class menu it read 'Chicken flavoured by a barbecue marinade and whipped potatoes with chives and creamed corn'.

When you are paying close to $5,000 for a plane ticket you expect the food to be top notch and as such I didn't put much thought to my order. When I read creamed corn on the menu, I thought it would be sweet corn rather than milled corn flour. A quick check in Wikipedia reveals that it is actually a Midwestern cuisine. In it, sugar and starch may be added and in homemade version some variety of the milk, perhaps even cream. To the rural Midwesterners it is creamed corn, but to me this is basically ugali.

That said, I think Kenya Airways could get away with serving their Premier class passengers with ugali. I can't remember where I sampled it, but they could chop up the ugali into cubes and glaze them with melted butter. Thinking of it, we did this with left over ugali when I was young. We'd eat the cold ugali with afternoon tea when we got back from school.