When there's no electricity...

When Michelle was here for 10 days, we had a crazy week of power outages. Normally, we have the electricity pretty good here in Mzuzu. One of the head guys for the power company lives here, so we actually have more consistent power than the rest of the country.

However, the week she was here was very different.

On Friday, the power went out at 10am. Normally, it will come back on after a couple of hours, but it never did.  We went out to eat at a hotel up the street that cooks food on a Braii (BBQ), hoping that we would have power to cook our dinner....

So, at 5:15, just as we were about to leave for the hotel to charge our computers so we could watch movies that night, the power came back on! For literally 5 minutes...talk about dissapointment!

By 5:45, the sun has gone down, and dark is upon us. We lit candles and started a fire, and I began to rack my brain for things we could cook for dinner.

I wrapped our tortillas and leftover taco meat for the previous dinner in some tin foil and put it near the fire to heat up...but we needed something more...

So, I put my thinking cap on, as my 3rd grade teacher called it. I went out to my storage shed and found some metal contraption to put over the burning logs in my fireplace. Then, I pulled out one of my oven racks and laid it on top of the metal. I pulled some hamburger meat out of the freezer, and luckily, I had enough hot water in my tank to fill a bowl. I defrosted the meat in the water.  (yes..this part was kinda gross...squeezing water out of meat...yuck.)

Then, I made patties, seasoned them, and threw those puppies on the oven rack! I chopped up some carrots, sprinkled them with brown sugar and butter, wrapped them in tin foil, and threw that over the fire as well.

Talk about good dinner!! It was probably one of the best ones we had! And all of it was prepared by candlelight and a headlamp! :)

Quote of the night... Michelle: "This is why you live in Africa and not me. I would have just eaten a piece of bread for my dinner."

Ahhh....living in Africa. I love it!