Shoutout to Mom!

What’s new? Kris starts school tomorrow or Tuesday, I hope he finds out which soon, so he’s making some last minute adjustments to the garden, i.e. adding more sweet corn and making the hills hillier. I just got off the phone with my parents, seems as though everything back home is going well. It’s nice to find out what your missing out on back home, but also bittersweet. I didn’t share with my mom my almost meltdown the other day while trying baking here for the first time. We found a pretty good toaster oven for a decent price in Ho Hoe on our last trip so we brought it home with us. I was going to make M&M cookies while Kris biked into Kpasa to get some things at the market. I decided since the oven was so small and I didn’t have a proper baking sheet that I instead would make M&M cookie bars. I had most of the ingredients, M&Ms sent by mom (thanks!) except for vanilla. Not to worry, Ill figure that out later, so I set out mixing the cookie ingredients. Then I remembered that there’s probably some sort of temperature and length of cooking conversion I should be doing since I was making bars and not cookies. Never fear I thought, I can just call Mom and ask what a good substitute for vanilla is and what changes I should make to my temperature and cooking time to make them turn out perfect. Then it hit me, I’m in Ghana, not nearly in the same time zone or a nice and easy free call away from my cooking/baking consult of choice. I was pretty sad about it, luckily Kris was still getting his bike ready and his shoulder was readily available to shed a few homesick tears on. Then I consulted the Internet; turns out that really strong black tea can make an okay substitute (though some snob on the website commented that there really isn’t a substitute for real vanilla, thanks) and I still managed to burn the outsides of the bars while having a very doughy center. Best cookies in Ghana yet… well, besides the ones our moms have mailed us. Anyone who tells you they don’t miss home, or wake up from a dream thinking they’re at their home in their bed (one that’s actually comfortable), is lying. Sorry to all of you empathetic Moms reading this, and especially sorry Mom for probably making you cry and miss me all the more. We miss home and some days are better than others, but we’re also really enjoying this experience and opportunity to share some knowledge and skills with the people of Ghana.