I’ve loved the band, Queen, for as long as I can remember. I’ve listened to their music from the days when I was an audience of one, watching my pubescent elder brothers and their mates belt out “WE WILL ROCK YOU!” while strumming the strings of wooden tennis rackets, smoking stolen cigarettes and sipping on stolen beers, right through to now.
It’s been nearly a year since eighteen small Zambians carried their brightly-colored plastic chairs into a makeshift, mud-walled room to start their education at our farm’s new preschool and day care center. Such a lot has happened since writing my first school post back in March.
I was commissioned by the American magazine, The Cook’s Cook, to contribute again, this time to their travel issue, which was published on December 1, 2015. In it I wrote about Island Dining Above Victoria Falls. You can read the original magazine piece by clicking here. For those with slow internet connections, I have reproduced the story below.
“As soon as you start the process of drying Nsumo fruit,” Adelina Banda tells me on our drive back from Dambwa market in Livingstone on Wednesday, “it rains.”
“What? No way!”
“It’s true! Mrs. Dennis on the farm, who is a Tokaleya, told me the other day.
Ever since I started serving homemade ciabatta bread to my Livingstone friends, they have urged me to teach them how to make it. Later, as I’ve posted more and more recipes on my blog, there’s also been a growing interest in the food I’m developing here on the farm, using fresh garden-to-table ingredients with wild edibles added, as and when they come into season.
One of my little brother’s favorite childhood books was Richard Scarry’s The Adventures of Lowly Worm, a book about an optimistic, one-footed, underpant (not pants)-wearing worm in a Tyrolean hat. My assumption back then was that all worms were lowly; that the only real use for them was to hook a sizable fish.
