I love Puff Puff and trying out new versions is what I love to do – not to say how easy it is to actually do. Some ways Make a new base for the batter So instead of making your puff puff batter solely out of flour, you can add fruit or vegetable purees, like […]
Travel & Exploration
A Short History of Acarajé & Baianas, The Women Who Make Them
Because food is more than eating, and that which begins in pain can be transformed. Ever since I heard about Acarajé in 2009, I haven’t been the same. In ‘Women, Food and God‘, author Geneen Roth says that everything about life is on the plate. And it is true – joy, sorrow, remembrance, hope, worship, fellowship, pain, anger, […]
On Independence: Freedom & Cultural Exchange
October 1st is in a few days – I have a plan 🙂 – to share musings and recipes and what Freedom means to me. Independence makes me think of Freedom..and food and Acaraje – the Nigerian export to Brazil via slave trade. Freedom is Cultural Exchange…in which some changes become celebrations of shared history. Cultures […]
Tanzanian Street Food, a la Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam
Street food is a window into the soul of any nation’s cuisine. What foods are battered, sold wrapped in paper and bags are often the bedrock upon which a great proportion of the population eat and feast. I find it one way to discover a city, to embrace it, to discover all the ways in […]
On Oluhun: Learning & Discovery
The rains are here – heavy with juice and thick with grey, thundery clouds. It seems like it rains every day. Green tea with orange has been my remedy for the running nose and itchy eyes the rains bring me – allergies of some sort. But that’s alright. This is life. For the last few weeks, […]
Nigerian Food in Literature: The New Yam Festival in ‘Things Fall Apart’
There are one hundred mentions of Yam – one hundred. 100. C (Roman Numerals) in Things Fall Apart (1958) – the most widely read book in modern African literature. Written by renowned writer, the late Chinua Achebe, the novel is set in late 19th century Nigeria, pre colonisation. It follows the life of Okonkwo, a wrestling champion on a journey that […]
Happy St Patrick’s Day
Cook up a range of treats, from a Guinness caramel to some ‘green sauce’. And hope you find the 4-leaf clover 🙂 Recipes Guinness Caramel Sauce Guinness Clover Rolls Chocolate Guinness Cake Fish & Scent leaf blinis Green chili bagels Palm wine with Guinness Arancini What are you doing today?
Around The World In Peculiar Star Apple Names…
..Or how the star apple and it’s monikers got their names, from star apple to milky breasts to ‘vagina’ fruit … Star Apple For the pattern you see when you cut a cross section through the fruit, due to the arrangement of the seeds which cluster into a five point star. One of the most […]
Around The World in 12 Star Apples: From Agbalumo to Cainito, Lagos to Jamaica
The idea that we are as much the same as we are different is what slays me about food, what binds my heart to the cause of eating, feasting, of discovery. That though we are set apart by seas and oceans, by mountains and plains, valleys, plateaus, essentially we are the same – we eat the same […]