Ages ago, I used to make handmade paper. In my mum’s blender in our backyard in Warri. The same blender that pureed our tomatoes and onions for stew. The very same one. When my children were old enough to learn about recycling, we made screens for scooping and drying our sheets of pink and lilac...
Kitchen Alert – Puff-Puff on the brain. Current obsessions. Testing the bounds of Fried Dough. Like we’ve done for Agbalumo and Meyer lemons, Mangoes and more. But I was thinking about language and Puff-Puff and it occurred to me that I haven’t ever heard someone ask ‘Can I have a puff-puff?’ Sounds wrong. To my...
I didn’t realise I had a ‘collection’ till I brought back four bottles of vinegar from Dubai in January – Cane, Palm, Mango and Lime. It was the Mango that captivated me on the aisle at Carrefour. Set amongst the woody sheen of balsamic, the red and golden of wine vinegars and the milky white...
And not made by me, but by the capable staff at Rosa Mexicano at the Lincoln Centre in New York. Two years ago, I was wowwed by how beautifully composed the avocado was – prepared as you sat and watched and then had it, served with two types of salsa – a dried red chilli one...
Or how to macerate fruit. What is Maceration? Maceration. Not to be confused with Marinating though similar. Maceration is the ‘art’ (barely) of softening fruit – fresh or dried, in liquids or sugar. Similar to marinating but subject here is fruit not meat or vegetables. Why Macerate? To soften the fruit, amplify flavours and prepare them...
I go through phases where I ponder the meaning of life. What and why we’re here. If human beings are really human. Just how much meanness there is and the like. Then I walk in the door of the Philly Homebrew Outlet on 1447 N American Street, right on the corner with a United States...
…because we have more than Chapman, awesome as it is. We have Zobo, and Tsamiya, Kunnu and more. Isn’t it interesting that most of the drinks I’ve discovered are from the north of Nigeria. That kind of thrills me – most of them are recent discoveries and I’m now thinking of all sorts of combinations. Anyhoo,...
It wasn’t till I was an adult that I realised we didn’t have a class of ‘Nigerian desserts’. Growing up, desserts in their elaborate western form weren’t our thing. We kept it simple and fresh. Mostly. We had fresh fruit salads and cakes, Ice cream and jelly and that was mostly it. It was enough...
Making toppings for desserts like brittles and pralines are relatively easy. They involve nuts and caramel. But easy doesn’t mean you should hurry through the process which might lead to ‘caring less’, it means a few steps with utmost care to accomplish great results. Brittle is a type of confection consisting of flat broken pieces...