hello! I’m Natasha
Wife, Step-Mama, Chef, Baker, Restaurant Owner and Now a Farmer…of sorts.
I am South African born, but moved to the United States when I was 12 years old. After 26 years of life, love, and work, I moved back. To the soil, to the air, to the heartbeat that is this beautiful country.
South African born, American breed.
Here in Johannesburg, I opened a Southern American restaurant to celebrate all the food I fell in love with while in the USA.
I have always loved farm to table cooking. I believe deeply in organic, sustainable, regenerative farming, and quickly built relationships with farmers around the area, who supplied the restaurant with amazing meat and produce.
As humans I think we have gotten far away from real food. In modern society we go to the store and buy what is on the shelf, packaged in plastic, without a thought about where it came from, or how it got there.
At some point I got it in my head that I could become a farmer, and somehow I convinced my family to take on this adventure with me.
So we may be city folk, but we are out here in The Cradle of Humankind, trying our hand at growing food. Closing the gap between us and what’s on our plate.
hello! I’m Jason
Husband, Dad, poet, Photographer, beer guzzler, and Colorado native
Beyond the Chicos…into the bundu.
South Africa has a smell to it. It’s in the earth. It’s in the air. It rides ahead of the thunderstorms when the dry season breaks. It’s in the game parks and lodges and the smoke lifting out of the braais and the grassfires.
It smells nothing like my home: the San Luis Valley of Colorado. The forest of chico brush that blankets the floor of the Valley has its own scent. You don’t smell it when you stand in the brush looking towards the mountains. You smell it when you’re walking in them and the branches rub against you. You smell it when the monsoon season brings rain and the chicos rejoice.
How did I become and American expat in Johannesburg? I married a woman that, as the locals say, has The Power. The red sunsets, red soil, red grass called her back. It was time for her to return and in August of 2018, we moved us and our three cats from the U.S. to Jozi.
This blog is a place for me to tell you about our journey that stretches beyond the chicos all the way to the back of beyond; or, as the Shona call it, the bundu.
“Until death it is all life”-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
