In Bibi's Kitchen by Hawa Hassan

I love the cover of this cookbook.  Something that is hard to come by in the pandemic is a communal activity, even one that is so inherently communal as food preparation.  My husband and I have often parallel cooked, where we are both in the kitchen at the same time, but not making a common dish.  For many years we rarely crossed over into the realm of the other.  I make soup and vegetable sides and pasta, and he makes meat main courses and rice and bread.  I made the dessert more often than not.  Now we change it up ever so little, with he making dessert more often than I these days and I occasionally venturing into the realm of incorporating meat into a dish, but other than things that we fill, like dumplings and egg rolls and tamales, we rarely make things together.  Still, I like this idea of shared preparation, where many hands doing a tedious task makes it go faster.

This cookbook covers the food of the eight African countries that touch the Indian Ocean which are Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, Comoros, and South Africa.  So far I have been reading the stories that accompany each section and have been largely stuck in Somalia recipe-wise, but it is a beautiful cookbook that will likely broaden your palate as well as what you know.