Easy 10-Ingredient Homemade Ramen Soup Recipe

There is nothing better then having a fresh broth to use as a flavour canvas for making  a delicious soup during a winter evening.  The recipe below can be modified to what you have in the fridge, so please use this as a guide to create some divine umami alchemy! We live close to clean…

How to make South African beer – uMqombhothi from Maize Meal

uMqombhoti is a beer recipe to inspire you to learn various food traditions from all over the world while bringing your own kitchen alchemy and culinary linguistics to the table.

How to Make Easy Feta Cheese Puffs Recipe with Greek Yoghurt

Tried & Tested Easy Recipe of Greek Yogurt Feta Cheese Bread Balls. A great party snack!

The history of your Favorite Foods: Pizza, Ice cream . . .

 So how do we track back in time to find the origins, the stories of how our favorite foods began?   Who put fortunes in cookies and tomato sauce on spaghetti?  Food pairings and cultural dishes have a long history.  From spice trades, to climate regions, culinary history continues to evolve.  Natural food traditions complement…

Film Food – Documentary Stories of Cocoa, Life in Chocolate.

First taste of chocolate.  Do you remember?  Remember the joy of opening a chocolate bar? A journalist recently visited Cocoa farmers to film their first taste of chocolate. Their reaction reminded me of the stories revealed by young child worker’s on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast in the Documentary: Semi-Sweet. Re-post of a film review…

How to Eat and Think about Bug Grub: A Taste of Entomophagy

Would you ever say, “I’m a Entomo-tarian and love crickets roasted and tossed in sea salt and cayenne pepper and covered in chocolate?” Considering bugs as grub gives way for the future of Pestaurants, cricket flour protein bars and stinkbug snacks being served in city centres across the globe. With two other curious minds, adventurous taste buds…

How to identify and pick wild edible mushrooms in Cape Town, South Africa

  “Is there rain and gale force winds on your side?” “No.” “Okay, then we’ll meet you at the forest gate at 7:15” In Cape Town, winter brings sloshy puddles and leaf layers on the forest floor.  Mushrooms, like stars fallen from the galaxy, pop out of the ground in diverse shapes, forms, colours and size.  This…

Educational Food Topics: Mind-Fuel Learning with young South African students

    Our future is bright!  When I got the opportunity to help design and facilitate environmental education lessons around various food topics with students around the Western Cape-I was amazed by what these fresh young minds are thinking.  Two different workshops hosted by the City of Cape Town’s Youth Environmental Programme YES and Leaders of the Future…

How to Harvest Seaweed: Superfood Nutrition from our Ocean

   Edible Sea Vegetable: SeaWeed I confess, my kitchen turns into edible science experiments almost every day. Seaweed is my new ingredient in the kitchen lab. Once you get to know the nutritional facts and the familiar taste of popcorn it has when nori (a type of seaweed) is roasted on the fire, then you’ll definitely give…

Inspiring Food Projects: Eco-Innovations

The more we think about innovative projects, the more we have to learn from nature.  These food projects use what our planet already has to offer and supports inspiring and positive thinking for world. Cardboard to Caviar Project (the ABLE project) Sahara Forest Project Veta La Palma Incredible Edible Todmorden Cardboard to Caviar After watching…

Baklava Recipe of Hellenic Cuisine Cook book – Detroit, MI

Follow my blog with Bloglovin It started with an urgent recipe book search, followed by a Whatsapp message to my mom, “Hey, I’m making baklava and was thinking about yiayia’s recipe book.  Did you give me a copy?” My Yiayia Christina was a legendary cook.  It’s a family fact that Yiayia and Thea Toula (her…

Easy Spicy Zesty Sweet Chickpea Salad Recipe

What happens when you juice pineapples, carrots and fresh green serrano chiles? A spunky zesty salad with sweet and spicy flavours can be created to fuel you through the day.   Last week, we bought lots of great farm produce from the City Bowl Market. Back at home, I put pineapple and carrots and threw…

Real Food Foraging in our Urban edible landscapes.

Real food foraging is taking Freetarian tactics to a whole other edible landscape.  It’s not about rummaging through the grocery store’s dump site or scrapping bubblegum off the concrete.  Real food foraging is a learned art: It bridges culinary knowledge, environmental awareness and plant/fungus identification to your own edible advantage.  Growing up with a Greek…

Recipe: How to Make Spring Roll-Nori Wraps

This Nori (seaweed) wrap recipe is an alternative to spring rolls.  It’s perfect for getting a balance of essential vitamins into your diet.  It’s also delicious and beautiful to share at picnics and parties.  It pleases: vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and my dad who likes to live on garlic and lamb chops will even chow these…

How to Cure your Own Olives in Brine: Greek Yiayia Style

Follow my blog with Bloglovin How to make your own olives edible. Mom would say, “Only eat 8 olives a day, honey.”  But it was too easy to devour the salty Grecian delights by the dozen. With crusty brown sourdough bread and green virgin olive oil on a flat side plate, nothing satisfied me more…

South Africa’s West Coast Pomegranate and Peppercorn Salad

Soul smiles and surf-sore shoulders leave me mindful and replete. A montage of new faces smiling in the heat. Moon memories and salted dreams sail me through the Monday office beat.  Yes, let’s strike out into the open, where wild places await. Let’s turn off the cell phones, leave our city behind. Let’s forget the…

Pickling Green Bean Recipe for St. Patrick’s Day

There’s not much that happens on St. Patricks day in Cape Town.  You could go down to The Dubliner Pub on Long Street or wonder if wearing your “Kiss Me I’m Irish Tshirt” from college could get you a smooch.  Growing up in Chicago, I remember the river turned green (or was it always? :0),…

Urban foraging and making Mulberry Tart

Growing up, we used to pick wild mulberries. The dark mulberries ripened to their juicy capacity and fell on the pavement, painting the sidewalks purple.  This was nature’s graffiti and we were young urban foragers. Just below Chicago’s purple EL line, we thought the forest preserve was our Jungle Book fantasy and we ate from…

Scream for Ice Cream at Breakfast: Banana. Strawberry & Pecan Recipe-Egg and Dairy-free

Who said you can’t eat ice cream for breakfast?  I don’t have a Vitamix. I don’t have an Oscar.  But I can still make easy raw food creations with what I have.  I’m using the trusty MegaMix Juicer.  During the days tofu was all the hype, Mom would add frozen bananas to our morning tofu…

Share. Cook. Love: The Cook Book

Our story began 2005, Feb 14th. Durban, South Africa.  A Surfer met a Gypsy at Capoeira class.  It was a Monday, after the first day of our third year at University. 7 years later, in the province where it all began, we told everyone we loved to join us for a festival of families, a…

Semi-Sweet Film Food Documentary: Life in Chocolate

It’s 37 degrees in Paris while Patrick Roger’s chocolatier workshop is busy transporting his sculpture of a Orangutan made of chocolate. Chocolate melts at 37 degrees, the same as our body’s temperature.  Roger explains: “Chocolate acts the way we do . . . It’s a love story.”  Roger’s story amongst others features in the food…

What to Eat when Visiting Greece’s villages: Nourishing Food Traditions

   Summertime and road tripping lead to some of my favorite food adventure memories.  In Greece, you can drive on national highways and come across Greek village tavernas that serve greek horiatiki salads under grapevines.  Roadside stalls are piled with local fresh, dried, and preserved food that have been made and celebrated for centuries.  Tradition, food…

A Durban Curry Bunny Chow Heat Feast in Cape Town

Climate change and Durban curry?  What do they have in common? It’s the only meal that will cool you down when a sub-tropical heatwave rolls through Cape Town.  A humid blanket covered the the whole city.  To survive the heat, we consumed the heat.  We invited our friends and a self-proclaimed Durban curry chef to…

Pink Pancake Recipe with Strawberry and Beetroot

Mickey Mouse pancakes were cool growing up.  I  got to eat dessert for breakfast; sugar-gooey syrupy pancakes with chocolate chip eyes, a cherry nose and whip cream smiles.  These days, I discovered eating pink pancakes are just as fun for breakfast and have a natural sweetness thanks to the sugarbeet and strawberries added in the…

Keep it Fresh with Juice and Beets

When my amiga, talented singer/songwriter, Ernestine Deane, was preparing to migrate to Germany, she generously gave her juicer a new home, which is now my new favourite kitchen instrument.  Up until Ernestine’s last week in Cape Town, the Le Dou MagiMix spun out delicious alchemy for her family, most importantly fresh orange juice to keep the…

It’s not Rabbit Food, It’s Rainbow Raw Salsa Salad.

Call it rabbit food, but it is damn delicious and surprisingly filling too.  Inspired by Raw-vember, I made a spicy salad that is bright and tangy in flavour and festive on the eye. This is a super quick, easy and yummy crunch salad that has major nutrients because it is a whole bunch of raw…

To Cook or Dehydrate: Raw Food Recipes and Creativity

I just learned how to harvest Aloe Ferox from the ‘cook’ book Rawlicious-Recipes for Radiant Health.  It’s a recipe book that encourages you to make colourful and vibrant food by encouraging you to put aloe in your smoothies, have sprouts as a kitchen staple,  and make edible flower salads that look like birthday confetti.  Who…

The Perfect Beach Snack: Nutella Loukoumades (Donuts) in Parga, Greece

 You can’t get more indulgent than pouring Nutella over fried dough.  Well I wouldn’t mind adding fresh strawberries or crushed almonds into the mix.  Regardless, everyone around the world loves fried dough.  North Americans call it doughnuts, South Africans call it vetkoek, Greeks call it loukoumades.  But not everyone pours Nutella over it.  My friend…

Greek Glory: The Kebab Pita at Thanasis

I had a layover in Athens back in 2008. The first stop I made when I got out the airport was at Thanasi’s Greek kefta kebab pita joint.  I sat in the middle of Monastiraki square and savoured each bite.  The pita kebab filled my tastebuds with the celebrated spices that have influenced Greek cuisine…

Spinach and Agushi: Ghanaian Flavour at the Portobello Market

As I’m writing this my mouth is watering again. We went to London to celebrate my Pop’s “Bones” 70th birthday year.  We travelled 9623 km from Cape Town and hopped around the 940 metres of Portobello Market in London.  There were hundreds of stalls to choose from for our varied market food palettes.  I came…