Look at this nice dark-skinned food. Fair and Lovely can’t touch this!
In recent weeks I’ve been making a lot of nori rolls for dinner for my evening savory dish in the latter part of a week. The sauce base is like six tomatoes, an onion, a bell pepper, ginger, celery, and sometimes fresh basil or cilantro, all blended. The “meat” that goes into each roll is a handful of shredded or julienne-sliced zucchini (where rice would be in a cooked California roll), and then a stick or two of asparagus, a slice of bell pepper and a few slices of tomato (make sure the bell pepper and tomato filling is sliced slenderly lengthwise so it fits nicely in the roll). But it can be done however with whatever – there are plenty of other tasty veggies under the sun.
You take a sheet of raw untoasted nori paper (I order these online in bulk so it’s affordable), slap it on the bamboo nori roller, dap a big spoonful or two of the sauce and spread it around the bottom two thirds of the sheet, put the zucchini down on the bottom third and the other veggies on the middle third, and then cover the naked top third of the nori paper with more sauce (and throw some sauce atop the zucchini) and roll it up quickly before the paper wilts and deforms as it hydrates. Don’t over-fill each individual roll or it will be too fat and won’t close up nicely and securely. I make like fifteen or more of these at a time, because I’m a hungry man and I eats ’til satisfaction (that’s out of the shreddings of four to six good-sized zucchinis). I don’t bother slicing the rolls up into little sushi-like buns or sections. I prefer to eat them burrito-style, plus why go through all that extra time and trouble getting fancy when I already done spent all that time with all the other dang steps?
So that’s a zucchini-based raw nori roll done the Precision Afrikan way, handled and eaten burrito-style, long-wise. Some good savory nice filling nutritious food for the low fat raw vegans out there that be hungry.
Finally, all praises and respect due to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I leave it to the ancestor Charles Mingus and his jazz to contemplate the ongoing struggle.
I think that the ecological and economic reasons for raw veganism, or even conventional veganism, make it one of the best diets for Afrikans on the continent. Most Afrikans have other ideas, and Afrika might be the continent with the least vegetarians, or at least the fewest conscious vegetarians. A lot of Afrikans see meat as a prestige. It was isolating being vegan in Afrika, and it made me think a lot about how I could spread vegetarianism there, even though I usually never operated as a vegan evangelist before. The sorts of classes I took in Ghana, on sustainable agriculture, women and development, and traditional medicine, all helped confirm for me that we need a vegan movement in Sub-Saharan Afrika. I feel we need to grow all sorts of great tropical fruits and vegetables for ourselves, and eat them. We must move away from cash-crop economies which leave us dependent on the West, and make us import their rotten meat, their subsidized rice, and so on.
