Woman cooking Botswana Fat Cakes - a favourite food of Precious Ramotswe
Precious Ramotswe, leading character of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is “writing” a cookbook to share her favourite recipes for Botswanan dishes.
The cookbook is actually the brainchild of charity worker and former BBC journalist, Stuart Brown. While working for a charity in Africa, Brown collected authentic Botswanan recipes and with McCall Smith’s blessing, the cookbook project came to life. “I am delighted to be working with Stuart on this book, which will raise funds for worthwhile causes in Botswana,” says McCall Smith who will write a forward and reflections from Ramotswe for the book.
Precious Ramotswe’s generous figure is a recurring theme throughout the series and in Blue Shoes and Happiness, the seventh book, she tries dieting before deciding that satisfying her appetite is more important. As for the cookbook, Brown says that concessions have been made to healthy eating but much of the food is of the calorific type enjoyed by the heroine. “As fans of the series know, Mma Ramotswe is quite a fan of doughnuts, or fat cakes as they are called in Botswana. They feature heavily in her recipe book, as well as fruit cake. The book is a celebration of what she calls the ‘traditional African build’, as she is very much against the tyranny of the thin shape which dominates the fashion world.”
Watch for the book in November the scheduled date for publication by Polygon.
The 
In 1885, Carl Fabergé created a seemingly plain white egg for Czar Alexander III to give to his beloved wife, Marie Fedorovna. It was the surprises hidden inside that made it special: a diamond miniature of the Imperial crown and a ruby pendant. This gift began a tradition that would last for more than three decades: lavishly extravagant eggs commemorating public events that, in retrospect, seem little more than staging posts on the march to revolution. Above all, the eggs illustrate the attitudes that would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Romanovs: their apparent indifference to the poverty that choked their country, their preference for style over substance, and, during the reign of Nicholas II, their all-consuming concern withthe health of the czarevitch Alexis, the sickly heir to the throne-a preoccupation that would propel them toward Rasputin and the doom of the dynasty.
The beauty of the robin’s egg is not lost on the child who discovers the nest, nor on the collector of nature’s marvels. Such instances of wonder find fitting expression in the photographs of Rosamond Purcell, whose work captures the intricacy of nests and the aesthetic perfection of bird eggs. Mining the ornithological treasures of the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, Purcell produces pictures as lovely and various as the artifacts she photographs. The dusky blue egg of an emu becomes a planet. A woodpecker’s nest bears an uncanny resemblance to a wooden shoe. A resourceful rock dove weaves together scrap metal and spent fireworks. A dreamscape of dancing monkeys emerges from the calligraphic markings of a murre egg.
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prise with what happens next.
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Earlier this year my colleague Heather Boulding was in Las Vegas on a business trip. She visited two rare booksellers in the City of Sin - Bauman’s Rare Books and Amber Unicorn Books. Bauman’s are very famous for their Philadelphia bookstore and their amazing array of high-end rare books. Their arrival in Las Vegas caused a major stir in the rare book world as, of course, Las Vegas isn’t thought of as a book town, let alone a rare book town. Amber Unicorn is a cookbook specialist run by Lou and Myrna Donato.
Looking for a unique, fun gift idea for someone in your life? Well, if that person likes to cook, and rock and/or roll, look no further.