"It's not a dessert", he insists. I balk and hesitate, yet I skip the pie and add more turkey to my plate. Try as he does, I will never accept the Bermuda Cassava Pie for anything less than a sweet ending to a meal and it will always be relegated to an honourable spot between the pound cake and the fruit cake when my entrée is done.

This is a pitched battle that plays out between my beloved husband, Shannon, and I every year around Christmas time; he cannot understand why I will not eat the pie with dinner and I will never understand why he does.

It has been four years since I was introduced to that intrigue that Bermudians call Cassava Pie. I had been dating Shannon for a while and we were at that stage where we found everything about the other fascinating (now we find them "endearing") and I wanted to know more about his culinary culture. After watching him traipse all of Harrisburg and rejoice shamelessly upon discovering the right frozen cassava in a nondescript Vietnamese grocery, I could not hide my disappointment at this brown-topped pudding-like thing that was sweet, yet contained meat and chicken broth.

I paused then too, even as now, and thought about all the less-than-pleasant things I had ingested in the course of being raised as the child of an African diplomat; the dog in Burkina Faso, the lizard, freshly caught and skinned in Ghana, the putrid durian at the insistence of a very sweet Indonesian lady in Germany and the putrefying nãto in Japan. Pushing the thoughts aside, I praised God for being born in Africa and thus having the gastronomical fortitude of a cement-mixer and bit into the pie, not bad, not bad at all; in fact, quite delicious; for dessert. The battle to reinstate Cassava Pie as an entrée in our household was in full sway from that day on.

I know cassava; I've grown that stuff before in a little patch of land after my father got nostalgic and complained about my siblings and I being out of touch with the Africa that grows its own food.

In my world, cassava is grown for one purpose only; to be made into fufu. If you don't know what that means, you are overdue for a trip to Ghana. Fufu is what you get when you have peeled and boiled the cassava till every last nutrient has bolted from it and then just to put the nail in the coffin have employed a virile young male to vent his frustrations upon it using the biggest heaviest pestle while artfully dodging the fingers of the deft woman turning the stretchy, sticky white lump.

You then pour a scalding-hot and spicy soup upon the finished product and attack it with all five digits of your right hand. I digress, but what pleasant revelry therein, back to the pie.

In our household, we have deeply entrenched Christmas traditions; starting next week and leading up to Christmas, I will drive my husband insane by my zeal to purge our house from top to bottom for the Christmas visitors I know we will never receive (we never have).

I will draft the wonderful Christmas letter chronicling all our achievements, hopes and dreams of the year that I will never print or send out. I will drag out the tree (that I made him drive out to Wal-Mart one Christmas eve in a horrible snowstorm to get) and complain that it's a "Charlie Brown tree" with too little ornamentation, and when the day finally rolls around, I will eat my Cassava pie with my dessert while my long-suffering husband finally melts down from all I've put him through.

This year, though he has hope; we have a young son around whom my life has been spinning somewhat differently.

I have ceased to complain about Bermudians' constant use of "I'm been" instead of "I've been" (Dear God, spare my son the scourge though), I've mentioned twice that Dockyard is too far away from our home in Shelly bay, I've paid a four-figure duty upon returning from vacation abroad, and have purchased shoes with heels that should keep the podiatrists in Bermuda rolling in the dough (but, Mercy! they are beautiful).

My husband has viewed these changes with measured nonchalance. I think he hopes to have fooled me by not daring to say out loud that I am acting Bermudian. I think he's withholding judgment for the 25th of December to see if my metamorphosis is complete. Maybe, just maybe, I might eat some cassava pie with my dinner this year!