For most southern African children in the 1970s, the marula fruit gained legendary status after we watched how it intoxicated wild animals in Jamie Uys‘s film, Beautiful People.
Identifying trees with the venerable Meg Coates-Palgrave, the Zimbabwean dendrologist who has been studying and writing about them for 60 years, is not for those who are impulsive or prone to high emotion.
Rosella, or to some, Wild Hibiscus.
I could stare at a rosella plant in the same way our Jack Russell stares into the branches of a mukwa tree after spotting a squirrel. For hours and hours. It’s my kind of Bush TV, a descriptor mainly used when you are mesmerized by a campfire, which, funnily enough, a rosella calyx resembles.
Since I published my last blog post UNDER THE MONGONGO TREE – Bush Gourmet in the Zambezi Valley – A Prologue, many readers — particularly those with a slow internet connection — have written in to say they struggled to open the feature article in The Cook’s Cook magazine.
Shortly after new year, Denise Landis, the founding editor of The Cook’s Cook magazine in the United States — the same publication that commissioned me to write about Nasturtium Capers for its December issue — invited me to write another story, this time a feature article on a subject of my choice shaped by her “fascination in agriculture, food, and cooking in your p
If I’ve learned anything about living as we do — off the land, and overwritten by the principle of enoughness — it’s patience. For as long as I’ve been seduced by North African and Middle Eastern flavors I’ve wanted to make preserved lemons. That’s been for nearly a year now. This week I satisfied that longing and started the process.
