through food i've been able to find my identity
that duality between coming up in a west african home but then being a new york city kid
wanting to be as american as i can be but not running away from who i am
we're here at east end bistro restaurant and we have some giants in the cooking game people
who are just as passionate about representing the diaspora in their walks of life and i'm
excited to talk and go for these guys when i think about west african ghanaian food i think about my
mom and my grandmother making a bengku and ken kay all these things that i grew up eating and
that was really the spirit of my restaurant and the cookbook as well
i'm here in ghana doing a series of photo shoots from my cookbook sankofa
these are all signed cover different carvings but the same meaning sankofa is an addictor simple
which means it's not wrong to go back for what you have forgotten basically to go back and retrieve
the reason i chose this title for the book is because i really wanted to blend the traditional
recipes and flavors of ghana in west africa with a lot of the contemporary things that i've come
and known to love with the ingredients with the technique with the flavor profiles of west africa
i'm here working with the local photographer and for the next eight days we're going to be spanning
the country just going to so many different regions capturing everyday ghanaians capturing
the beauty the nightlife the grit and everything in between that makes ghana so beautiful
we're here in mccullen market this is like the beginning
there's all this vibrancy you can walk around it's pretty intense is absolutely beautiful so
i'm really really happy that we got a chance to be here hello madame hello how are you this
merchant was telling us that these two different okras one of them is sweeter one of them is a
little bit more savory and then aubergines the garden eggs this is pretty much eggplant right
uh west african native eggplant one of the more popular eats in all west africa you'll see this
pretty much all throughout makola market and every guy in home beautiful indigenous ingredients right
here and ingredients that obviously have made their way through the transatlantic slave trade
so you'll see different versions of okra stew gumbo gumbo actually means okra you know um
the obviously the dish that we love and know and love from the south so it's really really
different applications that you can use thank you thank you thank you so i'll take this one
what do you call this one just your pepper
dried pepper dry pepper okay you make food with the peppers what do you do oh you're shy now
this whole display is beautiful this is one of my favorite areas in the entire market the melon
seeds a goosey is used for so much it's eaten raw eat and toasted you can make a granola soya beans
obviously we can use for milk and everything else under the sun hominy right here we have red beans
which we use for watching rice is such a huge staple in a lot of the west african diet rice was
braided in women's hairs when they were slaves and they brought this to the new country the
spirit of the food was obviously something that spoke to our ancestors they wanted to preserve
as much as possible all while being entrapped and enslaved which is absolutely crazy to think about
hello hello my pet green green one and then i'll take this one
you would have seen west africa you would have seen ghana in me whether i
was a designer whether i was an architect the fact that i'm a chef i'm actually
able to speak fluently about the food directly and i take that with a lot of pride
i am quite literally a kid in a candy store it feels like ghana ivory coast as well two
of the top leaders in the entire world when it comes to production of cocoa and the pods
majority of the world probably gets their chocolate from here
it's amazing to be here front and center and to see how beautiful this is in its natural state
and to know that it turns into chocolate later on this is the sources of the genesis right here
in america thanksgiving is probably the only time where we have a set
time for bringing family and friends together to sit down and eat throughout the 365 days in a year
this happens every single day here in africa it's a traditional thing to do for people of color food
is currency when we didn't own ourselves we owned that dish we owned what we put on the table what
we harvest in the fields and there was pride there was dignity that had to come from that a sense of
wealth yeah we're essentially carrying the names and of our ancestors and the dishes yeah and a
lot of stuff is this whole you know it's oily we don't write down our recipes our history
is oral we're not even supposed to be able to read and write right let's be honest this is a really
interesting time to be here too because i think because of the events of 2020 in america a lot
of people are looking towards africa in terms of cuisine and wanting to know more about it
prior to becoming a chef i was working with the united nations traveled around the continent
visited over 40 countries and i realized that in almost all the cities that i was living in there
was not a restaurant for that country where i felt that i could take my family that was a large part
of why i wanted to do what i do which is find a space to showcase our jewels enslaved people were
the footprint and foundation on five continents for many many years we've been left out of the
contemporary modern culinary conversation anything that african people created was less than it's
called institutional racism people of the diaspora from america from africa from here that we weren't
supposed to unite and talk about what we share you know i mean look at this table we're doing that
we are in the beautiful cape coast area of ghana cape coast castle where enslaved africans were
sent to a new world and it's pretty emotional it's pretty heavy i'm so happy that i'm here because it
gives me a full sense of who i am as an african as an american and those worlds kind of collide
into this one space here cape coast for a really long time i was always ashamed i remember as a kid
i don't know if it was a shame i don't know if it was a uh
embarrassment but i do know that i didn't know who i was fully and being here kind of just
brings all of that back it kind of boils down to just being proud to want to be an african other
than proud to be an american as well with all the trials and tribulations that happen on both sides
it's an identity that i'm so proud of now and i'm happy to showcase as well as i can as a as
authentic as i can i hope i can carry on that torch of of pride to the second generation
my daughter so she doesn't have to waste time thinking about who she is or where she comes from
to be here to be in this country to think about myself and my career
my family it kind of just brings everything all full circle
i feel very privileged to be an ambassador to be someone who can help bridge that gap between the
two countries and the diaspora it is a big title but i feel equipped and i hope i do it justice
you