I’ve lived in this warehouse in east London since 2010, the year of my first peanut-butter stew experiment, which was the beginning of Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen. It’s a great big space, set back from the road, super quiet and peaceful and flooded with sunlight. When we moved in, it was essentially an empty white box – we built the kitchen and two bedrooms ourselves. It’s cosy, but cluttered. I love living right by the canal at the end of the road, and that in this little compound, everyone knows each other – there’s a great sense of community.
The asanka pot on the chopping board is basically a Ghanaian version of a pestle and mortar. Beautifully tactile, and very heavy, it’s a really versatile piece of kit: you cook in it, blend things in it. If I’m giving a lot of love and attention to a particular dish, I’m using the asanka pot. This house has been entirely furnished with things I’ve found or been given: I love rescuing things. At some point, a neighbour of mine, Kanchi, was moving to Berlin just as I was coming back to London, and in the crossover I inherited a lot of things from her: a pink van, this retro trolley and a few other bits and bobs.
Making coffee is the first thing I do in the morning – I need as much as I can get inside me before I do anything else. I bought the pretty duck egg blue coffee pot on the windowsill at a secondhand shop in Berlin. If I had the time, I would spend all of it in charity shops and at flea markets. There’s so much lovely old stuff out there – I just never understand why you would want to buy new things.
A friend called Sarah from Harlem introduced me to Zabars – an institution on the upper West Side. Their gourmet decaf blend you can see on the windowsill is the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life: this one is a single origin from Ethiopia. It doesn’t feel like a decaf; it’s really potent. It smells of chocolate. Strong and perky as hell. I’m always requesting bags of it from anyone I know who’s going to New York …
I inherited the big brown-lidded cooking pot on the table from my great aunt Maureen. She used to cook a lot, but this pot is like new inside. It’s been very well taken care of. Ugly as hell, no doubt, and so retro, but I think it’s lovely. It’s my favourite thing to cook stews in. It’s rare that I have the time in the summer to cook at home, but if I was having friends over for dinner tonight, I’d probably be cooking up a stew in that pot.
I have to hide my chef’s knives – the big ones on the chopping board – from my flatmates. The weight, the length of the blade, the sharpness – it’s all very important. I like to have the right knife for the right task. I’ve had these for a long time, they were all gifts – if anyone ever wants to know what to get me for Christmas, that’s it – knives.
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Zoe Adjonyoh is a chef and food writer. Her debut cookbook Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen is out now; zoesghanakitchen.co.uk
