Meanwhile...in the Kitchen

“Ah! I just really burnt my hand.  Lisa, it really hurts.” 

*Sammy curls up in the fetal position on the kitchen floor*

“OH.  Okay.  Um…here.”

*Lisa drags Sammy across the kitchen floor, sticks Sammy’s hand in the freezer and finishes cooking the egg Sammy started making*

Cooking has always been a bit of an adventure for me.  Cooking in Ghana is about ten times the adventure.  Cooking in Ghana with Samantha Myette is an indescribable experience.  We have no measuring cups, spatulas, can openers, or a microwave.  (Actually we have a microwave, but my host family didn’t know how to use it when they got it and it is therefore used as a cupboard.  You can find tins of milk, powder mixes, spaghetti noodles, and various photographs inside.)  The gas stove is a little scary (I burn my hand more often than not lighting it) and only the largest frying pan has a handle. 

Lessons learned from the kitchen:

1. Milo (a kind of chocolate drink powder) is a great mix-in for porridge.  I make excellent koko (porridge made from maize dough, water, and groundnut paste/peanut butter) and one morning I was really craving a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.  Since none were available, I decided to add Milo to my koko.  It was delicious.
2. Cocoa beans come from a fruit.  One day my host mom gave me a big yellow fruit about the size and shape of a football and tells me it’s cocoa.  Sammy and I were both dubious because it didn’t smell like chocolate at all, but we decided to give it a try anyway.  After hacking at it with a knife for a while (it was surprisingly difficult to open), we split it.  Inside there was white fruit surrounding a lot of seeds.  It turns out cocoa beans are not beans at all, but seeds from the cocoa fruit.  The fruit tastes nothing like chocolate, but is still quite good.  We laid the seeds out on the roof of the chicken coop to dry out and are planning to make our own cocoa powder. 
3. Fruit Slice Ninja is a lot harder to play in real life.  We cut up all the hard peels (banana, plantain, cocoa, cassava, etc.) into small pieces and feed them to the goats.  Sammy had this great idea to play Fruit Slice Ninja instead of just sitting around and cutting it up like usual.  Neither of us were very good at it.  It was probably because we were using kitchen knives instead of a specialized fruit slicing Japanese sword.
4. Indomie Noodles (the Ghanaian version of Top Ramen) fried in egg with onion and pepper is good.  One day Sammy turned to me and said, “I think we should fry this Indomie.”To which I replied, “Okay.  But let’s fry it in egg.  Because then it will be like eggy noodles.”She said, “Should we add onion and pepper too?  And have a side of fried plantain?”I agreed and I’m glad I did.
5. If you can’t cook the brownie batter your mom sent you in America because you don’t have an oven that works very well or baking pans, using the batter as bread dip is a good alternative.  I don’t think this needs any further explanation.

As you can see, we’re going to make a great team on the next season of Iron Chef when we return to the States.