SAFARA

Safara, the arabic word for journey or travel. That is the name of my new magazine website which is dedicated to African food and travel. I am an African and I serve people African food for a living. My catering company Simply African has been providing catering services to mostly business clients for nearly a year now. The business is doing well, not as well as I had hoped for. But part of the reason is that I have been unable to employ a chef who understands African food (and I do mean food from the whole continent) and who would like to help me take the business to new heights. The other reason is that people have not been exposed to African food. This is about to change. Safara Magazine is born and is there to help everyone prepare African food in their own home. It will show you how to prepare the African cocktails, tell you about the best African wines (not just the South African wines); you will get information about the different places where this great food comes from and hopefully, it will help you see Africa in a better light.
Why not decide that tomorrow night is Africa night and try and prepare African food and also get some wines. You know, the more you buy African produce and products, the less poverty you will see on the continent. Buying African provides jobs and then you will be able to stop senidng aid to the continent. We need trade not aid.

Hmmm! Occo

Are there any awards for the laziest blogger in blogosphere? If so, I may be in contention. I don't know why I seem to abandon the prospect of writing with no one to criticize me or my writing especially not Mrs. Campbell, my thoroughly disliked Form 2 (Year 8) English teacher. You would think that I would be jumping at every opportunity I get to write but I don't. Having said that, I do have a valid excuse as to why I am not blogging as much as I should. I have a job which is more like 6 jobs i.e. I run my own company. It involves catering, not the easiest thing to be doing and I also am now putting together an online African food and travel magazine. Oh yes! Africa will soon have its portal on the web where you can find all the information you need to impress those around you. You will be able to find working recipes of everything from Jollof Rice, one of West Africa's favourite to Moroccan Tajines, to Bobotie and Injera. And the site will look good too!!! This for me is a truly exciting time but it is also a really busy time. Putting SAFARA Magazine together (for that is its name) has not been easy because I discovered two things in my search for authentic African recipes and ingredients. One is that with the exception of the maybe the Egyptians, Africans have never written down recipes until quite recently and two, the recipe for a particular dish is usually based on what is available in the cook's home at the time or perhaps region. It is very difficult to say conclusively this is how you make Jollof Rice or whatever the dish is. It is made even more difficult because I don't want to change the recipes because then they won't be authentic. I have decided that what will happen is that we will include as many recipes as we get for a particular dish and we will leave it to the reader to decide. We could also put authenticity badges or ease of finding named ingredients or something else that would let the reader decide whether they want to go ahead with that recipe or dish.
It isn't all bad this online magazine thing. I have had the priviledge to interview a few people, Africans and otherwise and also to visit a few restaurants (the few African restaurants that exist in the UK). That leads me to another gripe. Why are there so few African restaurants in London? And those that exist, why are so many of them so bad? I see very few non-Africans in a majority of these places. Now you might get upset with me. But if you run a restaurant and you don't think it is a problem that the majority of non-Africans do not and will not eat at your restaurant, then I feel sorry for you. C'mon guys! Let's put some excellence into what we do! Infact, if you don't include the Moroccan restaurants you will be hard pressed to find any good African restaurants. So a warning to all you restaurateurs out there who own African eateries, we at SAFARA will be out and about and we WILL write about you.
Anyway, I am off to interview the chef at Occo, one of those fantabulous Moroccan places that we can talk about. And yes, Morocco IS Africa.
Ciao

African Food

I am back to my normal ranting ways. sad isn't it. I must be an angry person under this lovely exterior. Anyway I have good reason to rant. I have started a new journey which is the online magazine, Safara Magazine. It is a world's first I believe. It is the world's first publication, online or otherwise, which is totally dedicated to African food, drink and travel. Infact, African food does not usually get a look in in other magazines or websites. There is the small matter of Moroccan food which has started to get noticed. You can now see a number of different Moroccan dishes on supermarket shelves. But still I wait for the really good African restaurants. Don't get me wrong there are a number of African restaurants but I am still wondering why we don't see any African restaurants in the top rated restaurants? I am quite annoyed that in all the time I have been reading the Caterer magazine I have never seen an African restaurant or caterer featured in the magazine. I have even decided not to renew my subscription because I don't feel that ethnic food is even being considered by the magazine's editor and writers. We need to do something about it. Get African restaurants up to scratch and get African food out there. People need to find out about African culture through its wonderful food.

Not Just Indian!

So I am talking to a guy about ethnic food and about my new blog and he happily tells me that curry is one of his favourite foods. “Have you eaten any African food?” I ask him. With a sheepish grin, he replies faintly, “No.”

Why is it that when you talk about ethnic food, the foremost dish in most people’s minds is curry? Why is it that most of the people I talk to about ethnic eating only think of Indian, Chinese or Thai? Why haven’t many people living in London ever sampled African food or been to one of the many different South American restaurants springing up all over London?

I am quite surprised that the majority of people living in Europe’s most cosmopolitan city where you can hear people speak upwards of 300 different languages would not take the opportunity to experience the different cultures and food available. And this is not only aimed at the white population but also the majority of immigrants who also tend to stick to the food of their fathers.

It is a little bit like the Brits who go to Spain only to have fish and chips from a chip shop run by a British expatriate. I have to admit that when I lived in Sweden I took my own tea bags as I could not buy strong enough tea. I also bought clotted cream from the English shop in Stockholm. Shame on me! I made up by making sure I tried lots of different Swedish food and learnt to prepare them also. My favourite still is Jansson’s frestelse (Jansson’s temptation) made with potatoes and anchovies.

Now is a good time for us to embrace each other, learn about other foods, try to prepare things we’ve never had. You could even prepare your ‘exotic’ dinners to coincide with festivals or important dates in that culture. The modern British cuisine is changing and the taste for exotic and spicy foods continues.