A home cooked meal

A fun mental game that I like to play here is imagining the vast number of tools and technology required to cook food: raw ingredients, refrigeration, running water, seasoning, ovens, stoves, utensils, pots, pans, bowls, peelers, whisks, spatulas, etc. It's easier to reflect on such things when you noticeably don't have any of them, especially if you're as much of a foodie as I am. The "kitchen" in Legon Hall is pretty funny looking- dust covers every surface an inch deep and there are a number of broken electrical outlets and sinks that aren't even connected to water pipes. Volta Hall, where the girls live, is a little more set up for cooking, with a refrigerator and working outlets and occasionally running water. The girls have done a fantastic job amassing some basic tools also, like pots, pans, forks, bowls, knives, and you can get some basic ingredients if you know where to look. In honor of Mama Mia, we decided to give it our best shot and make a meal from scratch...



We settled on the obvious: pasta, sauce (really tomato paste with basil, oregano and cayenne that some of us had brought along), green beans (I still don't believe that we got those! Vegetables are impossible to find here, except maybe cabbage), bread with margarine, and to keep it at the college levels, glasses of fairly cheap but actually pretty good red wine.

It takes a lot to get all of this together. The kids at the International Students Hostel seem to enjoy cooking a little bit more (they have slightly better facilities but nothing like the industrial size kitchen I'm used to). It was fun though, and we ate it out on the steps before watching a couple of Simpsons episodes that I'd brought along on somebody's computer. All in all, a very good night.