Collage Montage

I happen to have several intagram photo collages that seem to encapsulate the last week or so fairly well. Which means this entry will be mostly pictures. But that's what everyone wants to see anyway, right? Who reads these days?

Wednesday was the 51st anniversary of Ugandan independence! On Sunday I went to the Independence Day city festival with Becky and Patcee. We watched a parade, ate some street food, and of course got our faces painted. Since all the cool kids were doing it. All the cool kids that were under ten years old anyway. Once we had our faces painted we had so many pictures taken of us (by complete stangers) I felt like I was part of the parade.

Also, no intagram would be complete without food pictures, right? Here, starting with the top left and going clockwise, we have: 

• A fabulous fresh pineapple that made for a fantastic Friday night dinner last week 
• Cookies I made. Yup, those are cookies 
• Tiny bananas! So delicious! And, also, I was really proud of the fact that I managed to walk down the market, buy everything I wanted (including the baby bananas), and walk all the way back up the hill to the house in under 20 minutes. Like a boss. 
• Pot-stickers. And since I'm in Uganda, potsticker - Costco frozen food department = made from scratch. More about why I did that in the next entry.

And last, and probably least, is another food collage depicting my attempt at baking pumpkin-y things. Unfortunately things got less and less photogenic the further I got in the process. Sorry about the ugly mess that is the final product. I'm not a very inspirational foodstagrammer.

We start off here with a beautiful whole pumpkin. No can in sight here, folks. This is the real deal. Then, after scraping out the yucky guts (Becky did the bigger half. Thanks!) the pumpkin is baked in the oven for 30 to however-many-it-takes-for-me-to-remember-it's-in-there minutes. I scraped it out of the shell and pulverized it into submission, until it looked like that colorful baby food in the top right photo. So now, after hours and significant muscle exertion, I'm on the same step I would have been with a couple seconds and a can-opener at home. But it was an experience. Next I mix up the batter, which takes the pretty orange pumpkin and turns it into a concoction that looks like...well, you can see it. Finally it goes into the pan, with the streusel topping I had grand hopes for that actually ended up melting and looking like a burned mess. Overall, a significant decrease in the attractiveness of the photos. BUT, the house smelled magnificent and the pumpkin bread didn't taste half bad.

And that brings us to the end of the photo-collage-montage. Hope you enjoyed it!