A whiff on our early morning drive to the mountains one weekend, reminded us of our childhood days, when we spent our holiday with Auntie Rose.

The morning aroma of breakfast being cooked on a coal pot, the smell of the charred wood mixed with the caramelized smell of our local rice porridge, wafted through the air.

As soon as I mentioned the aroma, R (my sister) turned towards me and replied,

“This smell is just like when we were at Auntie Rose’s house in Kumasi.”

I nodded and smiled as that was exactly what the whiff reminded me of.

We were very young when we spent part of our long vacation with her, but that sweet aroma stayed with us.

Auntie Rose lived in a large storey building. It was a communal house where the young ladies would cook a large pot of ‘rice water’ as we called it.

We would line up with their bowls and be spooned thick blobs of the porridge. In those days, we did not think about using sugar sparingly. We would douse the porridge with creamy, canned, concentrated milk adding many cubes of sugar.

It was delicious, very much like a rice pudding and we would eat it with buttery rolls of freshly baked buns. Breakfast was a meal we looked forward to.