Tshepiso Ndlovu, a 33-year-old mother of three from Dunnottar in Nigel, widely experiments in the kitchen. Although she is a chemical engineer by profession, she is definitely creative in mind and a cook at heart. She has events on month ends at her house just to give people a taste of her cooking abilities.
Ndlovu mentions that her love for cooking developed in her from a young age, but taking up cooking as a profession was never something she had thought about. She is a woman of many talents and she pursues her engineering career and she also has rabbit farming as one of her interests on the hand, without excluding that she’s currently a chemistry teacher. She believes she can juggle around all the things she is passionate about at once. “I got into rabbit farming a while ago, before lockdown. I was an engineer but I got retrenched. I was at home during that time so my love for cooking and occupying the kitchen grew because I was more indoors with my family. That’s when Dining with Tshepi was born. My friends encouraged me to cook and have a mini restaurant at my backyard and I thought, why not?”
She also highlights that she got into rabbit farming as a way of introducing healthy food and she also wanted to expand and familiarise the rabbit farming business in South Africa since it is scarce. Her starters are always rabbit kebabs because they just give that appetizing taste of how the meat tastes like. “Rabbit meat is lean and healthy and although its market is not big here as it is in other countries, it’s growing gradually.
When I have these events on month ends, I try to tell my guests about it and let them taste it and the feedback is quite positive,” she explained. She adds that business on its own is not easy but she is determined to make it work. Her recent Valentine’s Day event accommodated couples who wanted an intimate setting, an exceptional home-cooked 3 course meal with home-made passion fruit lemonade drink and chilled music. “We hope to see the market grow and someday we would like to own our rabbit farm and restaurant that specialises in rabbit meat based on our own cuisine in future”, added Ndlovu.
By Palesa Ndinisa