Butternut Squash

One of my favorite things about this time of year is that it is mango and avacado season. If you don't have your own tree, you can usually steal bucketfuls from a neighbor without even going noticed. And if your neighbors happen to be stingy, there's always trees in the park, although they are usually picked over. It is very common to see people up in the top of these taaall mango trees with a broomstick, knocking dozens of mangoes down to their friends below who have backpacks ready to catch them. That's a scene that i hope to catch on film for you guys. And if all of those trees are picked over, you can buy mangos for as cheap as like 8 for a quarter, and several avacados for a dollar as well.

However, one of the little known facts about El Salvador is that it is also apparently butternut squash season. I know you are all soo jealous! I mean, butternut squash is typically a fall/winter thing, but I guess since we don't have cold weather here, someone arbitrarily decided that it should be butternut squash season. But hey, this is great for us because Marty introduced our tastebuds to an amazing butternut squash/curry/coconut milk soup last year, and now we can make our own for around 50 cents/pound. So, we've been making that soup, butternut squash muffins, and right now we have in the oven our first butternut/apple/cranberry casserole. Thanks to my excellent rationing skills, we still have Craisins from our Christmas stash. I've always been wary of "casseroles", but hey we're going on a limb, at the risk of sounding like something you would take to a Baptist covered dish luncheon on a Sunday afternoon.

So, since we've had so much butternut squash around, Elvis has gotten creative and started drawing faces on our hour-glass shaped friends. I find it harder to later decapitate our new friends, but it is quite entertaining. Check out his latest "rock star" character....

P.S. In the background you can see the beautiful shelves that Elvis designed and built for me for our anniversary this year =)

In other news, we went to a new cafe tonight, called Rock Cafe, started by some guys that have worked with Youth With A Mission. Apparently there's one in Kent, Ohio too. The cool thing is that everything is completely free!! I wonder how long that will last though, when people like our friend Pepon ate 3 cheesecakes in one sitting.... =) It was good to talk to the people that work there about their vision of how to reach out to people...it seems like we have a lot of the same ideas. So hopefully we can work together, maybe do concerts there or something of the sort.

In even more other news, today I got an hour long, full-body massage for $10. Sweet.