3 Avocados a Day Keeps the Doctor... Where?

The rainy season is wrapping up here in Accra, and it's starting to get hot again. Another thing the dry season will bring is massive quantities of fresh vegetables with the harvest. That, I am certainly looking forward to. It's starting already: on the way back from Kumasi last week, a friend and I each bought 7 avocados and about 12,321 tomatoes (or 20, but it was still a lot!) for just $3.

Disposing of the vegetables proved somewhat more challenging than originally anticipated. For the tomatoes, I resorted to the old homage, "When life gives you tomatoes... make tomato sauce?" I now have enough frozen bolognaise sauce to feed every starving child in West Africa.

Despite eating avocado morning, noon, and night, I was left with two rapidly deteriorating specimens on Sunday. An avocado & tomato omelet for brunch was a no-brainer. Six down, one to go. For dinner, I made the mistake of going to the same friend's house where we had pizza with--you guessed it!--avocados and tomato sauce. Excellent pizza and even better company, but it used up precious avocado-eating capacity.

Returning home, a light bulb suddenly appeared above my head: Why not break out that blender gathering dust on the shelf and throw all my aging fruits and vegetables into a smoothie so I can drink, rather than eat, my last avocado? Thoroughly impressed by my own culinary brilliance, I chopped everything up, sliced open the avocado, threw it in the blender and.... nothing. Turns out, the blender doesn't work. D'oh.

(In hindsight, this was almost certainly a good thing -- an avocado-pineapple-paw paw smoothie doesn't sound very brilliant now that I’m over my fridge-full-of-over-ripe-fruit-and-vegetables delirium).

Salvaging what I could, I froze the fruit and made guacamole, bringing the total to three avocados eaten in one day. Never before has eating guacamole been such a struggle.

Tonight, I'm getting Chinese.