Simple Vegan Lemon Vanilla Blackberry Cake

Emphasis on the word ‘simple’. This recipe was birthed from scarcity. No eggs or butter in the house, I turned to trusty old Pinterest to find a simple vegan cake recipe and was positively astounded at the difficulty of such a basic task. I didn’t need all the bells and whistles of processed vegan eggs…

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Actuellement: Renaissance in Rediscovering Culinary Joys

Life is beautiful. There’s simply no other way to put it: life is beautiful. I feel exuberant, unconquerable, blissful, at peace with myself in this world. Inhaling, I’m going to take a second to latch onto this feeling and wrap my arms tightly around it. Exhaling, I’m radiating this feeling out to you through your…

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Why is Leaving a Place I Hate so Hard?

I spent the first 19 years of my life in Harare and in the 5 years since I’ve lived in 5 different cities across 3 different continents. The constant change has repeatedly invoked the question of what it means to call a place home. How do I find comfort in places so far both geographically and culturally from where I grew up? What does hominess mean to me? This piece explores finding home away from home and finding comfort in places that you don’t even like.

Eggplant Bulgogi Pizza with Kimchi Hot Honey

#2 in the series of fusing Italian food with non-Western cuisine. I’ve been meaning to do a veggie pizza for a while and this idea has held me in a chokehold for the past few months. Initially, this was going to be an iteration of the Ultimate Skillet Margarita Pizza I posted 6 years ago,…

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Jollof Arancini

Disclaimer: This is NOT about which country has the best jollof rice. As a Zimbabwean, jollof rice was relatively unknown to me until my arrival at college in the United States. Feeling homesick, I joined and became an active participant in the Society for African Internationals at Penn (SAIP). SAIP provided a safe space for…

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Welcome to the Rest of Your Life: 3 Lessons from My First Year in the Real World

‘welcome to the rest of your life’, and what a welcome it was. losing my first job and an injury that left me unable to walk for 2 months were the overtones in the symphony of the debilitating global economic/political/climatic outlook.
I started writing this piece about life’s setbacks around the 1 year anniversary of my time in the real world (last August) but have invariably delayed because the setbacks did not stop coming. Keri Hilson said it first (and said it best),
#justgetbackupwhenitknocksyoudown, this post is a reminder (to myself more than anyone else) that transitions are tough, tough times never last and to remain confident in your ability to come out on top.

Warm Spiced Lamb Hash with Sweet Potatoes

Breakfast woes be gone. Breakfast is one of the meals I’ve been struggling with lately. A cup of coffee is just enough to turbocharge me to lunch without collapsing, but that charge has a very strict time limit. If I can’t get to lunch by 12:15pm, it’s the people around me that will suffer the…

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