Welcome to the Africa Cookbook! Our goal is to help you make and celebrate traditional African cuisine from anywhere in the world, whether it’s helping you decide what to eat when you travel to Africa or what to make at home to experience African cuisine from your own kitchen!
What is The Africa Cookbook?
We know that African food isn’t available worldwide the way some of us wish it was. Whether as Africans living abroad, African descendants wanting to stay connected with our roots, or as extended families wanting to celebrate all parts of our family’s culture, so many people around the world want to be able to prepare African dishes.
The problem? We can’t always find the ingredients we need, getting things shipped from Africa or from larger global cities can be expensive, and we have to get creative with substitutions. All of this can make cooking the food we love more difficult than it needs to be.
Our goal is to make recipes available that showcase both how things are made in African countries, but also how these recipes can be adapted for the realities of living away from Africa. We will show what substitutions we use and pass on tips. If we can make African food in Eastern Europe, it can be made anywhere!
Who Are We?
Let us introduce ourselves!
We are a Zimbabwean and an American couple who have been living together in Eastern Europe for the past three years. As we start our family, we want to make sure we pass on Zimbabwean cuisine to our children, as well as explore more of the food across the continent.
We’ve had some insane adventures in Bulgaria, from visiting local festivals to experiencing the beauty of the Black Sea coast. But it’s hard to be away from home!
Chef Valentine Moyo
Chef Valentine is a Zimbabwean cook. While in his day job he specializes in everything from Japanese to Italian cuisine (with a LOT of Balkan recipes mixed in for good measure), his true passion is African food.
His favorites are the cuisines from Zimbabwe and South Africa, but he also loves Nigerian and Ethiopian food. He’s at his happiest chowing down on amacimbi (mopane worms), a Zimbabwean delicacy, and he starts to get really grumpy if he hasn’t had any pap (maize) recently.
Because of his Nigerian extended family, he’s also started exploring Nigerian food, and he keeps his kitchen stocked with the best spices from Lagos.
He will handle all of the cooking and recipe creation for the site.
Stephanie Craig
An American travel writer, Stephanie has traveled to five continents and over sixty countries. She runs the travel websites Sofia Adventures and History Fangirl, as well as the podcast Rick Steves Over Brunch. She has appeared in National Geographic Online, the New York Times, and CNN Arabic.
Though not a talented cook, she loves when Valentine teaches her new recipes (although she doesn’t love it when he wants her to then make them). Nevertheless, she can still make a mean chakalaka.
She loves north African cuisine and has been inspired by her travels in Tunisia to appreciate the delicious foods of Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, and Morocco.
She will stay far away from the recipe development side and instead, serve as the website editor and tech guru.