My last few years in the United States, especially after the seismic financial downturn in 2008, were fraught with survival anxiety. In my search for a way to continue paying my bills in an economy where even my bank went under, a different kind of creativity emerged from within, that, over time, led me to a fundamental shift in my core beliefs.
There is an Arabic proverb that says, “If you play the flute in Zanzibar all Africa dances …” Its derivation hails from a period when, nearly 200 years ago, the islands were colonized by an Omani sultan after he moved his capital from Muscat and transformed them into a prosperous kingdom.
If applying the traditional definition of the noun ‘heirloom’: “a valuable object that has belonged to a family for several generations” to fruits and vegetables, the emphasis, I feel, should be placed on the word “valuable.
The day a 14-foot python, out hunting for food, strangled our Staffordshire bull terrier to death in front of my mother and me during an evening walk on the farm in Zimbabwe, was the day my scales tipped from wary ambivalence to fear and loathing of snakes.
It was my mother who first made me aware of dulce de leche. As young children growing up in Buenos Aires in Argentina, she and her siblings, Edward and Jane, would slather it on bread in the way children today slather on Nutella.
The seed for this recipe was sown by Chris after he asked me when I was going to make ravioli using Mongongo nuts. Once again we’re laden with pounds and pounds of nuts, harvested from our house tree in June, shelled by Ruth Mongongo in her village on the Zambezi River, and safely stored away in our big freezer.
