Last night it rained. The morning is cloudy and damp. More rain is expected. It could reach 60˚. Today’s low will be in the 40’s, the high temperature of not so long ago. Maybe spring is making its mark, defining the weather and pushing through the dampness, the browns and the grey. I do see more flowers every morning. It was two hyacinths today, both of them a deep rose. The mornings are noisy now, filled with the songs of birds. When I got the paper, I saw a cardinal couple probably looking for the perfect tree. The red was bright against the wild rose bush just beginning to get buds. There is just something so wonderful about the spring.

Yesterday I got bought a pineapple. It is still a bit unripe. When I was a kid, I never saw a pineapple outside of a can where it came in slices with a sugary syrup. In Ghana, a bowl of cut fruit was my lunch every day. I ate bananas, oranges, mangos, pineapples and pawpaw (papaya here) when it was in season. On the road, I often bought oranges. The aunties selling the fruit always cut off the top of the peel with a razor blade. I’d suck out all the juices then turn the orange inside out to eat the pulp. I remember those oranges were the sweetest I’d ever tasted. They were green. I often wondered why they were still called oranges.

The first time I saw a Guinea fowl I didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t quite sure if it was beautiful or ugly. They have small heads and big bodies. Their feathers are spotted. My first thought was Guinea fowl are off-beat relatives of a chicken. I was wrong. They are singular birds, and they can really fly. They wandered all around the school compound eating bugs. They have a funny run and are quick, hard to catch. I never saw a baby Guinea fowl. Sometimes I bought Guinea eggs. They were hard to break.

Okra and garden eggs were two vegetables I hadn’t ever seen. I liked okra except it was slimy. I only had it in stews. Since then, I’ve found out to de-slime. Cooking them with tomatoes is an easy way. Garden eggs, nyadua in Twi, were white though some had green stripes. They were baby eggplants. I also ate them in stews. One of my friends grows them in her garden.

If I cooked a Ghanaian meal here, it would have kelewele, jollof rice, chicken, a light soup and a green sauce I never learned how to make. I’d eat dinner with my right hand, the Ghanaian way.

Explore posts in the same categories: Musings

This entry was posted on April 12, 2022 at 11:33 am and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.