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…
Tag: vegetarian
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…
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),…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Homemade Chocolate in a Jar
Breakfast on Valentine’s day involved me, a spoon and my Love Source jar. This chocolate is goddessa concoction of coconut oil, cacao, agave syrup and vanilla pod with niblets of an orange essence. It’s from the ladies of I Heart Life Outside The Box where poetry and chocolate unite just in time for Valentine’s…
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…
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…
Vegetarian Bobotie
This layered oven-baked dish is a reflection of the histories, cultures, and cuisines that flavour the peninsula of Cape Town. The roots of the spices used in traditional recipes come from Cape Malay cuisine but is easy to make your own Bobotie-inspired dish with the flavours and ingredients in your own kitchen, celebrating…
Amatungulu Num Num Jam (Carissa-Natal Plum)
Carissa, also known as the Natal Plum, Num Num, Noem-Noem, or Amatungulu in our household was found growing just steps outside our house in Muizenberg, Cape Town, South Africa. My boyfriend Chris grew up with his grandfather making this jam out of the Carissa fruit that grows in Durban, Kwa-Zulu Natal. So when we saw…
Simple Carrot Soup
Underneath the soil lays an abundance of root vegetables that make delicious vegetable stock for spring and autumn dinners. This soup can be made in twenty minutes, fresh, from peeling to simmer to blend and in a bowl with a hearty piece of bread. Ingredients: 5 medium-sized carrots 1 Chinese white radish (resembles…
The Culinary Linguist 