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…
Category: Fresh and Easy Recipes
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!
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…
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…
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…
Eating Kale:Yuppie-Guilt or Social Tool for change?
I recently came across a blog post that said “20-things-everyone-thinks-about-the-food-world-but-nobody-will-say.” If you’re a kale-loving, politically correct “foodie” interested in CSAs, molecular gastronomy, and not getting your bubble burst, run away now—shit’s about to get real. It went on to say some pretty funny, real and ridiculous shit and brought up statements like: Locavorism has become the…
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…
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…
Step by Step-Easy Dolmades Recipe (just like your Yiayia’s)
In less than a month, I’ll be back in Greece buying white peaches from my Yiayia’s (grandmother) neighbourhood laiki (produce market) and learning how to make feta cheese from the thea’s (Aunties) in the horio (village). But lately I’ve been channeling my ancestors by consuming far too many olives and craving those cultural food comforts…
Pomegranates for Breakfast
If theres one thing I like about winter its the fact that pomegranates are readily available to my tastebud’s needs. If I had to make up a fast or some sort of ‘cleanse detox’ sort of regime it would be to eat pomegranates for breakfast lunch and dinner and in this ‘detox,’ we would have…
Oat Milk Pancakes with Peach and Pear Syrup
This isn’t a vegan recipe but it can be. It’s an alternative pancake recipe when you look into your fridge and realize the milk is all gone. You’re still in your pajamas, too hungry to wait in a check-out line at the grocery store, so your creativity kicks in and you make a plan. How…
Prickly Cactus Pear Smoothie
The best thing about when friends house sit is the magic of new groceries that end up in your kitchen. One Sunday afternoon, I discovered prickly pear syrup (turksvy stroop) in my fridge and it sat there, waiting for me to make crepes or pour it on yoghurt. Instead, it ended up in my fruit…
The secret to making Oscar-winning Popcorn
The Academy Awards came and went but yet the popcorn-maker is still at work-satisfying each movie-goers mesmerizing experience in the world of cinema stories. You pay more for a Cherry Coke and Jumbo sized popcorn than a sit-down dinner at the show, and somehow a movie screening isn’t the same without this cinema snack. My…
Fool-proof Crepes
For my birthday this year, my ‘sweet as sugarcane’ man made us a crepe breakfast. His speciality in the kitchen ranges from delicious pasta dishes, creative braai ‘BBQ’ fish marinades, and his exceptional skill to flipping crepes with ‘kitchen ninja zen’ style. There is no need for a spatula when he is around so I…
Guacamole on Toast
Fresh vital goodness on toast, for breakfast, for a snack, appetizer, or just because it’s avocado season-Guacamole toast has been born. Or is it the lazy way of getting all the pungent delicious flavours into one bite without cleaning a food processor or pestle and mortar? Well if you have a cutting board and a…
Rooibos Rice with Smoked Paprika Mussels (Quick Paella-wanna-be)
I thought to myself, ‘How can I make a rice dish a little more interesting?’ So I started with the idea of color and decided to use all ‘red’ coloured ingredients in my kitchen. So first off, I made rooibos (redbush) tea-flavoured water to steam my brown rice. I also took flavours commonly found in…
How to Make a Fresh Fruit Smoothie (Batida)
An apple a day plus some other amazing ingredients will definitely keep el doctor away. I am self-medicating with an abundance of fruits in season. In my own kitchen I took the fruits in season in South Africa with some inspiration from the beloved country, Brazil, and I blended the fruit together to make…
Bread with Gluten-free Flours
I love bread and anything to do with starch-carbs. This recipe doesn’t exclude Celiac-disease tummies out there because there is still hope if you can get your hands on stone-ground wheat flour and mix bread recipes with other gluten-free grains. I’v experimented with gluten-free grains for awhile but, for me, nothing compares to…
Coconut Milk Borscht with Drunken Rice Noodles
Quite possibly the most delicious comfort soup on the planet. If soup is as old as the history of cooking, then this one surely makes history. Why? Cause we’re marrying Thai and Eastern European flavors into one incredibly colorful noodle dish, this ain’t your everyday ramen, folks. Rice noodles and beets get dunked and drunk…
The Culinary Linguist 