Hello and welcome! I am Bintu and I love creating fresh, exciting recipes with colour, flavor and a dash of spice. You will find good food made with real ingredients, ranging from colourful healthy dishes to decadent desserts and everything in between.
I want to get you creating exciting dishes from whatever ingredients you find in your pantry. Anyone can do this, cooking just needs practice and imagination. My other mission is to get people to cook both traditional and fusion African recipes – I was inspired by my grandmother, and I want to inspire you in the same way; African cooking is easy and delicious (my English husband seems to think so, anyway).
I live in a little cottage with two front doors on a farm in the British countryside, surrounded by miles of curving hedges and tiny lanes. I am lucky enough to have access to a kitchen garden, a barn to store stuff, old oak trees with great branches for swinging on (and serious tree-house potential), and a stony yet charming beach. All this inspires me in my culinary adventures.
I adore cooking to music, I have a passion for travel, am teaching myself food photography and styling, and love spending me time with a good book. In between all that, I have two lovely children who also love cooking (especially licking out the bowl when we make cakes).
I have been writing this blog since 2012 and have been featured in Superfood Magazine, At Home Magazine, The Guardian, Psychologies Magazine, The Kitchn and Morrison’s Magazine. I have been a runner up for the Best of Pinterest UK Food Awards, the UK National Blog Awards and was shortlisted for the Red Online African Cookbook Competition.
A few random things………..
- I would love to write an African cookbook
- My pantry is so full, that I spend ages trying to find things
- I am Sierra Leonean by birth
- I have a NEED to travel
- Top 5 dream travel destinations – Sri Lanka, New York, Tanzania, Grenada and Italy
- I like music almost as much as I like food. My dancing skills however….
- One day, I plan to be great at origami and passable at drawing
- I live on a farm
- I live in my wellies
- Children’s party games is driving them around the farm in the tractor #bestgameever
- First time Freddy took me to his local beach, I looked at the pebbles in horror and said “you call THIS a beach”
- Favourite fruits – mangoes, pineapple, soursop, papaya and guava
- I don’t like washing up
- I hide the washing up in the pantry when impromptu guests drop in
- I have 2 freezers. I like being prepared.
- Red is my favourite colour, followed closely by turquoise
- I used to be an entomologist
- I would spend days wadding through rivers to collect insect larvae
- I have a PhD
- I got married in a bright, daffodil yellow dress
- I have 2 girls – they are wonderful, fun and seriously hard work….
- I don’t know how to ice cupcakes well
- Sad but true, I finish all my Christmas shopping by August.
- Claim to fame – I once helped Charlie Dimmock design a Christmas window for Oxfam
- I have met my chef crush Ottolenghi
- I got chicken pox the first week I moved to the UK
- The first thing I bought when I moved to the UK was a winter coat
- The kindle – best invention ever
- I sponsor a child in Cameroon
- I loved climbing mango trees for fun
- My maternal grandmother was one of the strongest people I know
- My maternal grandfather was a medic in the war
- I grew up in Sierra Leone and I miss living there every single day
- Favourite Sierra Leone eats – plantains, Jollof rice, stewed black-eyed beans and ginger beer
- Favourite spices – ginger, cloves, baharat, cinnamon, cardamom and caraway seeds
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