Ghanaian Lasagna - Just for Fun

One day I decided to make an pseudo-American dish for the family. Let's face it, what's really American besides apple pie and... apple pie? I thought lasagna would do well.

My host mother, Lydia, had gone out to the market to get the ingredients the day before. Unfortunately, the cottage cheese resembled American cottage cheese about as much as a baboon resembles a crocodile.

The oven was in Celsius, while the directions were in Fahrenheit. I wasn’t sure of the conversion except that 5/9 or 9/5 was somehow involved. The oven handle was also broken, so I had to stick a knife into a small metal rod and turn it, and I’m never sure which part of the rod is supposed to be pointing at the correct temperature.

Plus, the noodles were from Italy and I had to try to translate the directions into English. Because I never took more than Italian 101, I wasn’t sure if it said, “without pre-cooking” or “required pre-cooking.” I finally determined it was without pre-cooking. So I didn’t cook the noodles before putting them in the oven. JJ woke up from his nap and came in, and being a Spanish speaker, was able to translate a little more of the Italian and he told me, “I think it says here that in order to cook the noodles, the sauce should be molto liquid.” He didn’t know what ‘molto’ meant but fortunately I did from my Italian class in 2001. Unfortunately, the lasagna had been in the oven for about 20 minutes by this point and was definitely not molto liquidy. It was pretty solid meat.

The noodles were not cooking very well, so I took the whole pan out, poured some bottled water over it and put it back in. It ended up cooking about half an hour longer than it was supposed to, but it miraculously turned out all right, albeit a bit dry.

As in, crunchy. With some random water hanging out at the bottom of the pan.

Kweku was the only one in the family who had ever tasted lasagna before and vouched it was authentic, so the rest were none the wiser. I think the next day was the only day I was able to take leftovers to work.