Have Food Will Travel

“Etta, I can’t sleep.” My nickname exhales in a soft, scared whisper from his lips. “Me neither.” I feel grateful that he’s standing next to the bed as I’m tired of lying there, listening to the wind howl like a freight train around the corners of the building. I get up to take him to the living room and open the drapes. Mistake. The sight is scary. We’re living on the second floor of a resort complex on the island of Mauritius. The windows bulge inwards and rattle. Tin roofs are flying around at eye level. Power lines are lying in the road and the once pristine swimming pool is full of debris. Cyclone Dina had just hit the island. It is sweltering. The power is out and we have nowhere to go, so we close the drapes, put on some music to drown out the scary sounds, and to distract the child from fear, we draw smiley faces on balloons for the rest of the night.

Mauritius is a place of beautiful beaches, clear ocean, good diving, amazing people and incredible food. We were blessed to live there for two years and experience this beauty first hand. Our friendships were deep and I could possibly write a book on our Mauritian experiences alone, but the focus is food and people.

We were having dinner one night in our dining room when there was a knock at the door. A sweaty, out of breath young man was standing in the doorway with a bag of sweets in his hands. It was the Indian Festival of Light (Divali) and the tradition was for all the people to come out in front of their houses and cook deep fried sweet treats, bag it and go around to all the other houses and exchange sweets. Kevin had been running for miles, exchanging sweets. The island is poor, yet there is no crime and it is the most peaceful and giving people I have ever come across. We had nothing to exchange with him. “No problem Miss. Come with me.” He dragged us out of our condo and onto the busy streets of the village. Everyone was outside cooking sweets. We took the little bag he gave us and went from family to family, barely able to understand the French Creole and making it work with my broken French and improvised sign language. We socialize and meet new people until the early hours of the morning.

Mauritius is my island in the sun. I miss it and its people and it gives me great pleasure to travel back there through its food. The food of Mauritius is a blend of French, Chinese, Indian and Creole flavors. This combination causes it to be extremely flavorful. There are a lot of tourist resorts on the island and fine dining is in abundance. Our favorites used to be La Domaine Pain in the center of the island. It was an Indian restaurant with utterly incredible cuisine. For pizza, we’d head to the harbor in the catpital of Port Louis at Don Camillo restaurant in the marina. For Chinese, we’d walk to our beach in Flic en Flac to Oceans restaurant. For traditional Mauritian flair, there was the restaurant of Papayo, just around the corner from where we lived. No matter where you ate, there was never salt and pepper on the tables. It was always three little bowls: one with freshly minced garlic in oil, one with fiery minced chili in oil and one with shredded, unsweetened coconut. By the time we left, we got a shock when we got back to regular western civilization and realised how salty the western foods are.

Right in front of our complex used to be a vendor with his own little table with fresh fruit and vegetables. We called him the veggie man. He quickly learned what my favorites were and used to bag them for me and hide it away until I came to get it from him in the afternoons. He also taught me all the French and Creole names for all the fruits and vegetables. Then of course there is the local beer called Phoenix with the slogan: “So Delicious, So Mauritius,” and how very true that used to be. Goodwill rum came in first at a whopping 90% proof and were consumed for free when you bought a boat trip to coconut island, a beautiful uninhabited island great for snorkeling and just lazing about on the gorgeous white sand beaches.

For more on Mauritian culture, go to the foreign lands section of this blog. Recipe will follow later this week.

About a lot of the photos in this blog: They are grainy as they are scanned copies of paper originals. We didn’t have digital in those days!

I’m sitting in a large pool of blood. The 20 foot swells break in waves over the deck and washes the red into pink and gone, but the red just keeps on returning. We’re on our second sailing course in Durban, South Africa just before moving to Mauritius. It is at the onset of working on bringing our Caribbean Dream to fruition. I’m the only woman amongst 5 men on the course. The instructor is a chauvinist and picks on me relentlessly from the moment we set foot on board. We’re not supposed to be out to sea in this storm and we’re doing man overboard drills in the confined safety of the harbor. Everyone gets a turn to practice here, but when it comes to my turn (the last one), the instructor sees it fit to take us out into the raging monster that used to be the ocean. Stan is standing on the foredeck, ready to pick up the danbuoy, a buoy used to simulate the man overboard. I’m at the helm, sailing up and down, shouting instructions into the howling wind at my crew as to what to do with the sails, where to go, etc. It is chaos and there is no way I’m going to get Stan in the right position to pick up that buoy. The instructor takes over the helm. He has no success in getting Stan in the right position to pick up the buoy either. Then the instructor decides it’s time to go back to the harbor and cut our losses. He jibes the boat without calling the jibe. A jibe turns the boat in a different direction and can be an extremely dangerous maneouver if the person at the helm doesn’t call it. When a boat jibes, the boom comes swinging and it takes a series of crew members to duck, move positions, pull on ropes and turning winches to stabilize the boom and get the main sail into the right position safely. While we were out in this stormy mess, the rope that moves the boom/main sail had twisted dangerously and a student was standing up, trying to untwist it. It was then that the instructor jibed the boat. Since he didn’t call it, nobody expected it and wasn’t ready for it. The boom came swinging and hit the standing student in the head. He bounced off a sharp piece of equipment straight into my lap. He was a big man and I was pinned under his weight. When I looked down at him, he had turned white as a sheet, he gurgled and his lips turned blue. I talked to him and received no reaction. He wasn’t breathing. He had received a headwound that exposed things that made me want to faint, but there was no time for that now. When I looked up, the three men sitting in front of me was frozen in shock, staring at me with eyes like saucers and mouthes agape. “WAKE UP!!”, I screamed. “GO GET ME THE FIRST AID KIT DOWN BELOW!!” One guy managed to get me what I asked. I squeezed the injured person’s hand. He didn’t squeeze back. I couldn’t reach his mouth to do mouth to mouth, so gave him a hard squeeze on the side of his shoulders, pushing his shoulder blades toward each other. I have no idea why this worked. Perhaps a mere miracle, but his eyes flew open and he stared at me. He took a large gulp of air. The color returned to his face and the color of his lips returned to normal. He immediately closed his eyes again, but he was breathing! I bandaged up his head tightly and it stopped the bleeding. I couldn’t look anymore and just held his hand while whispering to him that everything was going to be ok. The instructor finally got us back to the harbor where the paramedics were waiting for us. After we moved to Mauritius, the man who brought me the first aid kit delivered a yacht in Mauritius. He came to see us and told us the injured man was in a coma for six weeks. When he woke up, he couldn’t remember anything of the incident or even doing the sailing course. This incident killed my sailing dream and I have no fondness left for it, nor the inclination to ever take it up again. It also altered the path of my journey. I was afraid to tell the story at first, but it is an integral part of me and how I remember leaving South Africa. I cannot think of this part of our lives, without remembering the Blue Zoo. It was a restaurant we used to love, not too far from the sailing school. This restaurant made the best lobster bisque and I share the recipe with you in the Recipes section of this blog.

I apologize to all sailors for butchering the terminologies and procedures, but it was done for the sake of easier reading

Photo by me

Dish in photo re-invented and cooked by Stan for Valentine’s Day. He garnished with a beetroot heart that touched my heart.

(Remember to look for the omelette photo recipes this week Monday thru Friday)

A massive shadow falls over us where we’re kneeling on the sandy ocean bottom. The creatures above us come out of nowhere. Their size and numbers overhead blank out the sun. It is the most intense ocean experience I’ve ever encountered. Their grace, beauty, size and utter silence take my breath away. I see something in their large saucer shaped eyes equivalent to kindness. Something opens up inside of me and reaches toward the ocean. The mantas were everywhere. After 90 minutes a diver ran low on air. It was time to go. The minute he lifted off the sand, the mantas were gone. Like ghosts they arrived out of nowhere and like ghosts, they disappeared into nowhere.

These islands are slowly busy sinking into the ocean and is one of those spectacular places that no words can do justice. I feel blessed to say I have seen its beauty before its demise. It was 1998 and the first time I ever flew across an ocean. In this case, the Indian Ocean. I was clueless about everything, including culture. The Maldives is a Muslim society that requires women to cover their shoulders. Blissfully ignorant, I arrived in the Maldives in a strappy sundress. I was on my way to the beach, right? Wrong. Throughout our trip I was constantly in trouble for not covering my shoulders in the appropriate public places. Here I learned the value of respect for other cultures for the first time. When we reached the island of Meeru, something struck me as odd. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then suddenly it struck me. No movement and a silence so strong it was loud. There was absolutely no wind. The ocean remained still. Not a ripple. Not a leaf in the palm trees moved, not a person on the beach. It was too hot to be outside and the only place to be was in the water.

In the days to come, we settled into an easy routine. Get up early. Get onto a boat to go do two dives. Get back to the open air restaurant on the beach for lunch and go and do the third dive for the day. Get back at sunset. Bang heads over cocktails. Eat dinner. Go sleep & start the next day the same way.

Traveling to this beautiful place also introduced us to different flavors of food and for more about Maldivian food take a look in the Recipes and in the Foreign Lands section of the Home Page. Breakfasts at the resort were westernized and mostly consisted of a continental pastry buffet. It was this buffet that nearly got my husband into some serious trouble.

One morning we were sitting at the breakfast table, staring at the beautiful ocean. As usual, I was away in my own little dream world. The majority of the tourists that were there at the time were Danish and some long legged blond beauties strolled past us. Right as these beauties are strolling past, my husband decides to say something along the lines of: “I’m going to go get myself a Danish tart,” and he leaps up. I threw my napkin at him, yelling: “How do you know they’re Danish!!!” Turns out he was talking about the pastry, not the beauties!

It was on these islands that a dream was born and my life’s journey changed direction. I tasted foreign travel, my wanderlust was fueled, I wanted to leave Africa, become a beach bum and own a sail/scuba business in the Bahamas. Little did I know this journey will change direction many, many more times.

Photos by me

Suzie’s Home Made Ice Cream with Tropical Fruit

Piri-Piri Chicken Bites

We’re packed to the hilt with divers and gear. Suddenly husband yells: “Hold on!”. The car hurtles down the first dune and the engine screams in protest at an ungodly pace up the next. Bums lift of seats, heads connect with roof, gear flies everywhere and everyone groans. After hours of this we reach our destination with bums numb and heads bumpy. It was worth it. Tonight we’ll eat Suzie’s grilled barracuda and home made ice cream. Tomorrow we’ll dive with large pelagic fish on reefs of great and unspoiled beauty.

The abrupt end of the road at the border between South Africa and Mozambique comes as a surprise. There is 10 km of sand dunes left to our campsite in Punta D’Oro, Mozambique. It takes us hours to cover the distance. We’re in the ugliest car on the planet. Our mini van, the Toyota Venture, is boxed shaped with pink and purple stripes and curtains in front of the windows. The “road” requires a four wheel drive. Mine is in the shop with a seized engine, so husband’s adventure Venture to the rescue.

I was 24 and single when I left South Africa for the first time as a recreational diver to go and dive with whale sharks and hammerheads in Punta Malengane, a coastal village in southern Mozambique. It is drift diving far out to sea at its finest with beautiful coral, fish and game fish with the odd shark thrown in for your diving pleasure.

After I got married, I went back to Punta d’Oro (Point of Gold) as a certified scuba instructor with my students, husband and son. Here we experienced the local food first hand. Fresh seafood to the likes of shrimp so fresh, it crawled in the buckets, fresh barracuda cooked in news paper over coals buried deep in the sand, fiery hot chicken, succulent tropical fruits and a home made strawberry ice cream (Suzie’s ice cream), the likes of which I will never forget.

My fondest memory of traveling to Mozambique, is of my son-Craig-snorkeling with dolphins for the first time. He was 8 and on the dive boat with us. We were far out to sea, with land just a speck on the horizon, waiting to do a deep dive on a spectacular reef. There a pod of dolphins welcomed us before our dive and he was in the water with them in a flash. After our dives, we would swim in the waves and here I taught him to body surf. At sunset we delve into cuisine good enough to remember after almost 18 years. We camped close to the beach and ate at large communal tables in a “boma”, a reed like structure with palm leaves on the roof, with fellow divers from all over the world. Fast friendships were formed within days.

My husband-Stan-makes the best Portuguese piri-piri sauce and uses it over chicken that he slow cooks for hours. The sample recipe is from the book under construction and in the Recipes section on the home page. To discover the full 3 course Mozambique meal, please see the book when it becomes available. More about Mozambique food appears in the Foreign Lands section of the Home Page

Photos by me

After the fall at the end of the pass

In front of the house in Gaborone Botswana where the journey started

I’m staring at the rifle pointed at me. Tears make streaks through the red dust on my face and turn it into mud. We’re standing at a boom gate in a restricted diamond mine area on the west coast of South Africa, not too far from the Namibian border. I’m in terrible pain and we’re horribly lost. Two hundred kilometers back we were riding a dirt path in Spektakel Pas (Spectacle Pass), an arid mountain range just outside the tiny town of Springbok. We’re on two Yamaha XT600’s, doing a two-thousand-mile round trip, iron butt motorcycle tour from Gaborone, Botswana to Cape Town, South Africa. I’m a new rider, still on my learners permit and not used to dirt riding and as it stands, it is a tough pass to ride as an experienced rider. The road slopes almost 45 degrees towards a straight drop into nowhere and there are no barriers to stop anyone from going over. There are sharp corners everywhere. My experienced husband stands up and takes it easy. I don’t have the confidence to do that and it’s this lack of confidence that causes my demise. I’m doing 20km an hour, sitting down, so I’m going too slow, and I have no control because I’m sitting down. The dirt road is full of little round stones, and it is like riding on ball bearings. My husband disappears around the next corner, and I start chattering down towards the abyss. The only thing that can save me from going over now is to drop the bike. I drop it, but not hard enough and it goes down with me and lands on my butt, hip, and ankle. My face is lying in the pebbles and dust, and I thank the Lord for a full-face helmet with screen, leathers, and good boots. My husband didn’t see me fall. The bike is still idling, and gasoline is slowly starting to trickle out. Lying in that awkward position, the bike is too heavy for me to lift off my butt on my own. I twist over to turn off the ignition and saw my foot. It points in a direction it shouldn’t be pointing in and looks pretty broken to me. I don’t feel anything. Probably too much adrenaline. My husband comes back around the corner, as he could no longer see my dust trail. He lifts the bike off me. No damage to the bike. My hip hurts and my ankle feel like it’s starting to push against the sides of my boot. There’s no way I’m taking the boot off to look. We look at the 5km steep incline where we came from, and we look at the 200km flat dirt road ahead of us we still need to tackle to get into the next town. “Do you want to leave your bike here, get on the back with me and I take you back to the town to a hospital?” “No. I’m not leaving my bike here. This is Africa. By the time we get back, it will be vandalized or gone. It’s a brand-new bike. Let’s get off this road and hit the next town.” I get back on the bike, crying. The pain arrived and it is excruciating. We’re in the desert and decide to take a short cut across the sand in the general direction of the next town. It was the days of no GPS and only paper maps. More tough riding across sand that I’m not used to riding on. This goes on for hours when Stan finally stops and yells, “I see a car! It’s going fast! There’s no dust behind it! It’s asphalt!” Suddenly I got my verve back and we head for the glimmer, only to end up at the boom gate. We’re right in the middle of the restricted diamond area. The guard hurtles toward us. He points the gun: “How did you get in here?!! You’re not supposed to be in here!! This is the exit gate!! You were not supposed to get through the entry gate!! How did you get in here?!!” I remove my helmet and now I’m crying so hard I’m hiccupping. Stan explains to him what’s happened. He takes pity on us. “Go and go fast and do not turn back!” We don’t turn back. Our next stop is in Hondeklipbaai (Dog Stone Bay). We ride into a little resort with cabins in the dunes. There is not a person in sight. We limp over to the main house. The owner’s there. It’s Christmas and they’ve closed the resort, because they have family coming to spend Christmas with them. They could take us out with a 4×4, so my ankle can get seen to, but the truck is out of gas and there is no gas in the area. Someone will have to take an ATV and jerry can to the closest town and then there is no guarantee they will find gas. Everything’s closed because of Christmas. This is Africa. They have a cabin we can stay in until after Christmas when somebody can go and get us gas to re-fuel the bikes so we can get out of there. We have no choice. We gate crash someone’s Christmas family gathering, and we are thankful for the kindness of strangers. That night we buy out their stock of wine in the little bar. Someone had gone diving for crayfish (spiny lobster) in the cold Atlantic and comes back with crates full. We buy dirt cheap crayfish for that night’s dinner. Someone brings out a guitar. We sing songs until the early hours of Christmas morning. The wine dulls the pain in my ankle. Christmas morning, we help them in the kitchen. They have an herb garden at the back of the house full of fresh herbs. Everyone is an artist of some form. A singer, an actor, a painter, a sculptor, a potter, and we end up spending time with an amazing assortment of interesting people. I steam lobster in bamboo baskets with lemon grass fresh from their herb garden. Later I will submit the recipe to a provincial recipe challenge hosted by Service Inspired Restaurants Corporation in Ontario, Canada. I ended up winning the challenge. My prize was a cooking course for two at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, California. I am humbled by the experience and share my recipe with you in the Recipes section on the Home Page.