Oh, it has been a long time since we posted a recipe - shame on us! Still, here is the wonderful recipe from Eugenia in Tunisia - a missing country (no longer missing), and a type of tagine we had never encountered before! We happened to have more chicken that stated in the recipe, but the shop was out of parsley, so we adapted slightly. Everybody polished their plates - it was delicious! Toby says he has three favourite things in cooking: peeling, grinding and grating. In this recipe, he got to do all three!

Well, this was not the easiest dish! The recipe Ricardo sent us calls for Lussua leaves (and the recipe is named after them) - we'd never heard of this, but thankfully, Ricardo supplied Latin names for us. It turns out that Solanum Americanum is Nightshade...which we had heard of, but not in an edible context. Because we couldn't find it - and because it sounded like it shouldn't be the kind of vegetable you just grab from a random bush without knowing its toxicity, we played it safe and went for spinach, as suggested by Ricardo, instead. Now, on to our tamarillo search....maybe tamarillos are plentiful where you live, but we searched for months (not full-time!) - in the end, luck would have it that they were found in a supermarket in Malta, and carried home. Finally, we could make the recipe...except we hadn't planned on getting the tamarillos, and therefore hadn't considered where to get breadfruit from! So, in the end, we decided on potatoes...and the whole family cleared their plates. :)

We have to confess that nobody suggested this recipe - to be honest, we aren't quite sure how we found it. We think it might be because of the recipe from the Dominican Republic, which had plantains in it, and Toby wanted to know about plantains. Then we read that it was a staple in lots of recipes from Africa, as well as Central and South America, and so we stumbled across Matoke. We made this in our slow cooker, and it was delicious - but we learnt that the plantains need to be fully covered in sauce - otherwise, they dry out and aren't nearly as nice!.

We know that people eat different things everywhere all over the world, and often, we can get these things in our shops, too. But yesterday, we had the chance to explore a type of food that we never tasted before (not even Mummy) - bugs! We went to a talk by a food futurologist, who explained lots of things about food, and how what we eat depends on whether it's "fashionable", like clothes! For example, 200 years ago, lobster was seen as food for poor people, and now it's very posh and super-expensive. The food futurologist explained that, because there are more and more people living in the world, we need to change what we eat, because there isn't enough space to have cows and pigs and chickens to feed all carnivore people for ever. So she said we might end up eating insects, like lots of cultures already do. We got to taste salted mealworms, BBQ mealworms, silkworm pupae, weaver ants, bamboo worms, salted grasshoppers and salted crickets. 

Then, we asked on the Facebook page whether people ate insects, and quite a few people did. We got messages from people who had tried insects in Uganda, the Sahara and Japan. Kung sent us a link to a video about insects in Thailand (see below).

Several people told us they are vegetarian, too, and that is probably the best way forward to make sure that we have enough space to feed everybody.

Toby says: We bought this book when Nelson Mandela died, but it took us a while to read it. I didn't like how people weren't all treated the same, because that isn't right. Naledi and Tiro were very brave to go travelling all by themselves.

Mummy says: We'll probably re-read this one in a couple of years, there are so many undercurrents in this book that we'll keep returning to it many times, I'm sure! 

Toby says: "I really enjoyed The Little Prince. It was all about a person who could draw boa constrictors, and he went on a plane, and he crashed in the Sahara desert. He saw a little prince there. He told him the story of how he got to planet Earth. It's about if you see an ugly person, but you know he's really nice, then in your heart you'll see a beautiful person, so what your heart sees is more important than what your eyes see. But this didn't happen in the story, but there were lots of examples about what's really important in life, like people and friends and living and love and being happy."

Mummy says: "I think Toby said it all on this one :) "

We found a book in the library with recipes from ancient Egypt, and wanted to try these date balls. Apparently, the recipe was found on an ostraca, a shard of pottery used for writing by scribes, and dates back (no pun intended) to 1600BC.

Ingredients:
200g pitted dates
100g ground walnuts
1 teaspoon cinnamon

3 tbsp honey
small bowl full of ground almonds

Warm the honey (don't boil it) and put to one side. Mash the dates and add a bit of water, until you have a thick paste (we think we added a bit too much water, it was hard to get to a "paste" stage). Add cinnamon and walnuts, then shape into small balls. Coat each ball in warm honey and then roll in ground almonds. Serve immediately.

We didn't think in advance to build a suitably "ancient Egyptian" background for the photo, sorry! But these are very yummy, and both Toby and Mummy love them.