“On a personal note” “I hate pumpkin!

“I hate pumpkin! I tried it once and I did not like it! I am never going to eat it because I don’t like how it looks! Those were some of the words out of my children’s mouths. I did not say a thing, but I smiled.

One day in October, I got a very nice piece of pumpkin, peeled and cut it up in small pieces, put 8 cloves of garlic in a pot with a little oil, cooked the garlic until golden brown, added the pumpkin, two teaspoon of brown sugar, stir, put the cover on the pot then low down the fire leaving it to steam. Half an hour later the pumpkin sprang lots of water so I crush it up, mixed then I turned up the fire allowing the water to dry out. We ate it with Sada Roti, but my children ate Sada Roti with cheese, saying how much they hated pumpkin. The next day I decided to make soup. I filled a pot with water, put one cup of yellow split peas, one large onion, one tablespoon of salt and two dashes of black pepper. I let it boiled for an hour then I added small pieces of seasoned chicken, diced carrots and more water. Boil for 20 minutes, put in potato, dumplings and the rest of the pumpkin from the night before, which was about 2 cups. Cook until the potato was soft turned off the stove. The soup was a nice rice orangey color. We sat at the dining table and my children were saying that the soup tasted real good. They even took seconds. I wanted to say I am glad you all like my pumpkin soup, but I said, “Yeah, it tastes nice, real nice.”