Mint and cucumber is a combination that, I recently found out, is as effective in the spa as it is in the kitchen. If you’re wanting a flat tummy or to detox, a face mask or to cure acne, it is to mint and cucumber that you apparently turn. I’ve never tried it as a beauty treatment, but I have used it to great effect in the kitchen.
The Cook’s Cook, a magazine for cooks, food writers and recipe testers, published bimonthly in the United States, included me in its “Best (Advice) from the Best (Food Writers)” feature, which was published in early February. I was invited to share my “experience, wisdom, and/or advice on the subject of food writing in 75 words or less.
Three years ago today, I flew out of a desert — Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Salt Pans that reflected so well my own emptiness — and landed on a piece of Africa tucked into the edge of the Zambezi Valley. The rains had arrived, and it was a piece of Africa full of seeds bursting with the promise of new beginnings. Of connection. Of learning.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a [lima bean] by any other name would [taste] as sweet.” Apologies to Shakespeare, but there appears to be much confusion when it comes to the name of these large, kidney-shaped beans. Aren’t they Madagascar beans, I’m asked? Christmas lima beans? Butter beans? Yes, yes, and yes. They are all these names, and more.
How do you explain companion planting to a visiting geologist, in other words, “a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth, as well as the processes and history that have shaped it?” I could have fetched my smart phone and read out its definition: “Companion planting (noun) – the close planting of different plants that enhance each other’s
Karen Blixen wrote in her classic memoir, Out of Africa, “There is a particular happiness in giving a man whom you like very much good food that you have cooked yourself.”
It was around this premise that I planned a party for Chris’s 60th birthday in early January. The party was my gift to him.
