Jollof rice, bean and cheese burritos, ugali (cooked white cornmeal), strawberry Pop-Tarts, nyama choma (barbecued meat), and a clay pot rice dish from a local Vietnamese restaurant are among the foods Kiano Moju remembers eating regularly while growing up in California. Born to a Kenyan mother and a Nigerian father, Moju learned to embrace the different cultures that surrounded her and helped shape her worldview and her palate. In her debut cookbook, “AfriCali,” the recipe developer and video producer has put together a collection of dishes inspired by those childhood tastes and, as she writes in her introduction, “the delicious meals I’ve had thus far in life.
” In addition to the food of her mother’s home country, “we would get a lot of takeout” from all sorts of restaurants - including Korean, Nigerian and Afghan - during the week, Moju said on a video call. “She was a single mom, so she was not cooking every night,” she said. Moju would also “forget” her school lunch a lot.
“I knew if I didn’t have lunch, my mom would bring me something really good,” she recalled, such as “the best tuna melt” from a nearby soda fountain. “California food culture embraces the flavors of its immigrant communities while celebrating the state’s agriculture and the flavors of fresh produce,” Moju wrote. “I bring that philosophy when cooking the dishes of Africa that I grew up eating and enjoyed while traveling.
” It’s a departure for Moju from the t.