Happy New Year in April?

Nigerians say “anywhere belle face na front” So if I say Happy new year in April will I be out of order considering this saying? It has been a whirlwind of activities since the year started. From events to shoots to taking over a kitchen as executive chef (shhhh!) A lot!!!!! has been happening. Let me try to capture from December shall we?

A few things I did as Afrolems late last year before I went AWOL! I had a few breakfast content pieces that I shared on instagram in October after the “End Sars Saga.”

The pictures don’t do the content piece justice. So go on my Instagram page and check it out here

Consultation Projects

BLACK OLIVE

I worked on a few projects, consultation wise that I shared about as well. The first being the “Black Olive Restaurant Project.” So the Black Olive team reached out and ask for a few new items to be added to their menu. We worked on deciphering the personality of the brand, crafted a menu to fit that, trained the staff and launched. We also created lovely images with Anjola Awosika for the brand that really helped sell it! On launch day, the restaurant was so full just after a week of marketing and I was happy to conclude that project with great feedback from the client. Some images from the brand are as seen below.

PECKISH

Fast forward to a different project I worked on which was a ghost kitchen. I promise it has nothing to do with ghosts lol. Ghost kitchens are also called cloud kitchens. The premise of it is a delivery only service but from a fully set-up kitchen. I worked with some Architect friends that have a love for soul food for the night time crawlers. In the pandemic however, it was a little difficult to set this up in the format it was actually supposed to be but we made it work. The business is called Peckish for people that felt like a light bite later in the night when businesses aren’t really open. Our menu was short, simple and soulful. Here are some images from the business.

SANDWICH LAUNCH

Are you still reading? You must really like my exploits oh! Ah well, lets carry on. In December, a magazine I had contributed to earlier in the year had an event and wanted me to be the culinary curator for the event. What that meant was I organized the food and drinks according to the theme of the event. It was exploring the juxtaposition in classes of society so the theme was around Akara and Champagne. Crazy right? I know! So we had someone frying Akara on site and building Bougie sandwiches and champagne flowing as well. It was quite a fun day.

The magazine is called the Sandwich Magazine and for the first time they were on the continent with the theme of the African Scramble exploring culinary stories of class. The relationship between the help and the madam through the culinary lens and stories as such. You can purchase a copy here.

Then the Sandwich Magazine had a digital launch where we shot a documentary with majority of the contributors to the magazine. It was a 3-hour documentary that was hosted by the African Centre and explored a lot of the culinary conversations that we had highlighted in the magazine but in a digital format. Here is the promo video below;

PLANTAIN SERIES

I am really outdoing myself with the length of this post but you all deserve this recap if you waited this long for content from here. I mean I could get someone to write for me but it defeats the purpose of my voice on here. Ah well, let’s continue. So at the beginning of the year, I started to question direction for the blog or the business in general and how to structure my content. I saw the Puff Puff series worked out so well so I decided to take another topic and delve deep. My topic for the year is Plantain. Well to be honest, It started out being the topic for the month then the quarter but I think I need a full year of deep dive amongst all the things I am doing.

So far we have explored some recipes, some information around plantain farming and some stakeholders in that ecosystem. You can check out all that plantain content on my Instagram page @afrolems but for the purpose of the blog I will post some images which will come as recipes much later. We have tried from plantain scotch eggs to plantain peel stew so I think you will enjoy the series. This may just be where I sign off because this blog may go on forever. What interesting things have you been up to since we last spoke on here?