A halloween recipe

When I was growing up, my family often ate dinner in a pumpkin at or around halloween. It is one of my favorite foods, and dinner in a pumpkin is now our family halloween tradition. I'm posting the recipe in case you want to try it too! If you want to cook it in the microwave (which is much, much, faster) make sure your pumpkin is small-ish so it will fit. Last week I baked it in the oven, and it took 2 hours and the pumpkin still wasn't all the way cooked. But it still tasted good.

Dinner in a Pumpkin

1 pumpkin, seeded
1/2 lb ground beef
1/4 c celery
2 T chopped onion
1 c cooked rice
1/2 c ketchup
1 T worcestershire sauce
1 t sugar
1/2 t basil
garlic
1 egg
8 oz tomato sauce

Brown ground beef, celery, and onion. Mix with everything else and put inside a pumpkin and microwave for about 20 minutes or bake in the oven for an hour-ish.

When you scoop out the stew, make sure to scrape a little pumpkin "meat" off the wall of the pumpkin; it's delicious!

spontaneity

Tonight, I decided to come home early instead of waiting for Peter on campus so I could get some housework done. I also made dinner, which we usually don't start thinking about until 7:30. I was really excited to have a good dinner planned and ready right when we walked in the door. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. Dinner still wasn't ready until 8:00, and I didn't make enough. As soon as we finished all of the food, our conversation went something like this:

me-"Peter, are you still hungry? I'm still hungry."
Peter- "yeah."
me- "what else should we eat?"
Peter- "let's go get tacos."
me-"okay."

30 seconds later, we were out the door and on our way to purchase some tacos to finish off our dinner of curried chicken and rice... Peter also decided that after getting our tacos we should drive around and figure out where the spotlight we'd been seeing every night was coming from.

It was really fun. :-) I love when we do random fun things like this when we really don't have time, but we make time anyways.

Vote YES on Prop 8

A friend of mine posted this on his blog about Prop 8 and gay marriage, and I thought it was really interesting. If I had commented on it, which I didn't, I think I would have just said "amen." Check it out.

A different city

So it turns out we're going to Tamale, not Kumasi. Whoops. If you are looking at our map, it's sort of in the northeast part. Tamale has a population of 350,000. Apparently lots of the people there are Muslim. I do think it's funny to be going to a city with a name that is a food in English (not Spanish, the Spanish name for the food is tamal). I don't imagine that we will be eating very many (any) tamales in Ghana, unfortunately. Unless I make them.

Tamale apparently has really cold mornings and really hot afternoons, because it's close-ish to the Sahara. I'm not too worried about this, because "really cold" apparently means 59 degrees fahrenheit. Coming from Provo in February, it'll feel just fine.

A little more information

We are going to Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana. It's the red city that's in the middle of the south, in case you're having trouble finding it on the lovely map. The average temperature ranges from 75-85 degrees during the months that we'll be there. It is the capital city of the Ashanti people, and their king lives there although he doesn't have power within the Ghanaian government. It's also a good place to get kente and adinkra cloth, so I read.

My boss suggested to me that I should apply for an ORCA (undergraduate research) grant and study Ghanaian museums while I'm there. It so happens that there are several museums in Kumasi, so I actually could do that if I want to. I just have to decide what exactly I would study, and write a grant proposal in the next couple of weeks. Even if I decide not to write the grant proposal, I'll definitely be visiting those museums.

I'm a lot more excited now that I know where we're going, so I can learn all about it.

Going to Ghana

We are going to Ghana! On Monday we found out that Peter got an internship in Ghana for this coming January-April. He has been doing a lot of research on microfranchises, which are small businesses to help people in 3rd world countries get out of poverty, and the internship is to help set up and manage a new set of microfranchises. (This is the watered-down version for non-business people like me. If you want more details, ask Peter.)

I am really excited and a little nervous, of course. I think it will be an amazing work experience for Peter and an amazing experience in general for us both. I don't even know what city we're going to, or if we have to get crazy shots, or anything. But it's going to be an adventure.