Ziggy Marley and Family Cookbook. Ziggy Marley

      Introduction

      I first started dabbling in the kitchen as a teenager. I enjoyed making cornmeal porridge, and it helped me to begin appreciating the idea of nourishment, the idea that food can make your body feel better. I would make Irish moss and some of my dad’s juices. I grew up around great cooks, especially my mother, my great-auntie Viola, and Ms. Collins, a woman who helped us out around the house. But no one taught me how to cook—I just watched and made things up as I went.

      Matter of fact, the first food I ever remember eating was fruit from a tree. In some ways, fruit picked from a tree is the most basic kind of meal there is. Where I grew up there were mango trees, cherry trees, many different fruit trees. This was in Bull Bay, an area of Jamaica to the southeast of Kingston, where my family moved in 1972.

      Bull Bay had a very rural kind of vibe, a community vibe. Most of the food came from the garden. We had some chickens—eating chicken was special back then, not an everyday thing. We also had a goat, and when my father’s music got more popular we expanded to three or four goats. The nicest meals you ever got was on Sundays. Sundays you were going to get dumplings in the morning, maybe rice and peas later in the day.

      Our Rasta culture was different than regular Jamaican culture. We used to have both sides then, because my auntie would cook the more traditional Jamaican food. On the other side, our Rasta culture drew us to a different way of eating. My father would always have a lot of juices and greens and nuts. We were introduced to ital food—fresh, organic, and nutritious, less salt. We were basically eating kosher food in those days. We ate chicken and red meat.

      Fortunately, healthy food can be found almost everywhere now. Back when I was a younger musician, I used to try some of that truck stop food when I was on tour, but not anymore. These days, my livet (diet) doesn’t really change when I go on the road.

      The food of my youth, and my wife Orly’s, continues to be the food of our adulthood. An Israeli of Iranian descent, Orly really understands food and family. She grew up with a stable family structure, and she places a high value on family meals. We eat a lot of Persian and Israeli food at home. We celebrate Shabbat every week, along with Jewish holidays like Passover and Hanukkah. All of this has taught me even more about the relationship between food and family.

      My own upbringing was much more loose when it came to meals. Some evenings my auntie would be in the house working while my mom and dad were on the road, so we’d just be playing marbles or other games when mealtime came. My parents made sure we never went hungry, but sometimes me and my friends found ourselves roaming around Bull Bay with empty bellies, foraging and eating off trees. I remember a few times when we would shoot down a bird with a slingshot and then just cook it right up. You won’t find that recipe here.

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      In 2013 we started a company called Ziggy Marley Organics, offering a line of hempseeds and the world’s first flavored coconut oils, which are important ingredients in the food we eat. It was the very positive response to Ziggy Marley Organics that first planted the seed in my mind to harvest a family cookbook, inspired by the food of my life.

      Many of the recipes in this book are my versions of the ital food and Jamaican meals that we ate growing up and still do today. Other recipes have

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