Menbi at the Meridian

We visited the Meridian on Saturday to talk about recipes for DATS MashUp.  Menbi and her son, Ray, posed beneath the Meridian sign.

We went in the mid-afternoon between service. What a beautiful restaurant. We're impressed!

Menbi brought a garlic butter mix and a blend of spices she made, both reflecting her Ethiopian food traditions. Chef Mark and Menbi immediately launched into a discussion about possible dishes. A few purple sweet potatoes from Stokes County are also on the counter.

Discussing technique. After settling on a dish, Menpi suggested a traditional flat bread to accompany it. Menbi mentions suppliers. Chef Mark says they'll make it on the premises. Can you be here at 11:00 on the day of DATS Mashup so we can do some cooking together?

Drawing up final plans for the October 9 DATS MashUp presentation. I suggest small samples for the audience. We can also make a nice presentation shot for the audience and show it during the event.

Could Menbi have a look at your kitchen? Of course! Chef Trevor is busy while Mark and Menbi talk about fresh fish. Mark is amazingly upbeat and generous with his time.

In just a couple of years, Menbi worked her way up to second shift supervisor and cook at American Hebrew Academy. She is not afraid of a big kitchen or serving hundreds.

Recipe notes for DATS MashUp!

Menbi, her son, and Betsy Renfrew, photographer and refugee documentarian. We visited the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts at the Sawtooth, site of DATS MashUp, located just a few blocks away from Meridian. We're ready!

StokeCORE

Tony McGee, Executive Director of StokesCORE, a nonprofit rural economic organization, gave me another ten pounds of purple sweet potatoes grown by the fine farmers of Stokes County. These potatoes are headed for Southern Lights Bistro, so chef John Drees and Adrian Harris stay well stocked in advance of DATS MashUp. Tony has been a huge ally in making DATS MashUp a reality.

John is interested in the cooking properties of the potato. As a matter of fact, when I mention that Wurood had made a hash-like dish using the Stokes Purple and Iraqi spices, he was interested because Southern Lights has had a hash dish, too. Maybe there's a chance Wurood's dish might make it into the menu!

Kwol Ksa, Montagnard Cook

Kwol demonstrating to an American dad how to use the baby blanket.

We have been friends with Kwol Ksa for about three years. Through her eyes we saw how refugees adjust to Piedmont life, how they obtained jobs, the work conditions they faced, what they told their kids about America, how they dealt with the health system, schools, rent, bills, and why preserving culture and language was so important to them, even as they, like herself, struggled to learn English and keep their families safe.

When she and her family brought in smoked ants and fresh river snails for us to try during ESOL class, we knew had a special friend. As a Montagnard Koho woman, she came to the North Carolina in 1992 to escape violence and war that continued long after America left Vietnam in 1975. Like many Montagnards here, she suffers from an abundance of talent, knowledge, and life experience for which there are few jobs. We were very eager to get Kwol connected to Table 16 because we thought her food knowledge would be appreciated.

New Sawtooth Center

The great looking, newly opened Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts — a mouthful. Otherwise known as the Sawtooth. DATS 2010 will take place October 9-11. The DATS MashUp event will take place at 2:30 pm on Saturday, October 9.

Jeff Bacon at the Triad Community Kitchen

Chef Jeff Bacon of the Triad Community Kitchen

Chef Jeff Bacon is a busy man who gave me time to explain the collaborative cooking project in detail. It didn't take much to get him behind DATS MashUp even though he had events stacked up and busy workers coming in and out of his office getting ready for the next event. On the classroom walls were rows of photos of graduated classes, proud new cooks who'd gone through the ten-week training course held in the Second Harvest Food Bank warehouse in Winston-Salem.

Second Harvest Food Bank in Winston-Salem

Warehouse facilities at the Food Bank.

Jeff said he could squeeze in time just a week before the conference. Would that be enough? He's a professional, he knows. One day for meet and greet, another day for extended work with the refugee cook in the kitchen. He'd pull it all together, but he suggested the individual I select be energetic and ready to go. This changes some of my plans and limits some of my possible contacts. I call Narayan, my contact at Senior Resources of Guilford County, who began calling some Nepali refugees. Let’s see where these contacts lead to.

Menbi, Ethiopian Cook

My wife and I were driving around and around the Greensboro neighborhood of apartment complexes located off a busy main road. Twenty years ago there were few if any ethnic shops or restaurants around. Now western Greensboro is full of Asian and Hispanic businesses. I called Menbi again, and then I spotted her, waving us in with a big smile. The apartment complex is tidy and far better looking than the ramshackle units we're familiar with in Northeastern Greensboro, often the first stop for newly arrived refugees.

Menbi graciously invites us in and soon we're sitting in her small, comfortable living room. A friend stops by and her boy is on the computer. Menbi was recommended to me by Omer, the executive director of African Services Coalition, because of her reputation in the community as an excellent cook who aspired one day to open her own restaurant. Quickly she produced for us ingredients and foods from her homeland that she loves. We get to taste and smell. It's heavenly. Food has a language of its own. We experienced this all the time whenever we used the subject of food to engage our Montagnard adult students in conversational English. Even the shyest and least learned would figure out a way to use their limited language to communicate their thoughts and feelings about a special food, a memory of what they ate growing up, or what was growing in their garden. Menbi's English is excellent, however, and she's so eager to share her traditions with us that she offers to cook us something there and then. We're so happy to see her happy!

Menbi is an unusually well educated and articulate newcomer with a college degree and a very stable job as shift manager and chef at a prestigious private school. She and her husband appear to have made a rock solid life in America in just a short time, but from the stories she tells about arbitrary arrests, threats and killings that directly affected her family in Ethiopia, we can tell that her life has not been easy. I'm impressed by her personality, generosity, and overwhelming love of cooking of all kinds, which includes Western and American styles. She has certainly impressed her employer, who allows her the freedom to add her Ethiopian cooking traditions into familiar fare.

At the car, I lift the hatch and give her a supply of Purple Stokes, a variety she has never seen before. I snap off an end so she sees the color and her eyes light up. A sniff and a bite follows, exactly as I have seen AJ do when looking over Kwol's ingredients, exactly as I saw Adrian do when Wurood's bags of spices covered the table before us.

In a few days, we'll go with Menbi to see Trevor and Mark at Meridian. This is going to be great!

What’s the difference?

North Carolina is the biggest sweet potato producer in the US. The purple sweet potato is a great Stokes County product. Notice the dramatic color differences. Our refugee cooks are also reporting different cooking times.

Adrian Meets Wurood and Tarek

Adrian trying Wurood's dish at Earthfare

First face to face meeting. Wurood came with her husband, Tareq, and their kids. An amazing meeting as she brought out spices she used in her kitchen, bag after bag, for Adrian to taste and smell. She also prepared amba, a vinegar-based condiment, seen in the open jar in the photo.

Why is Wurood's Stokes Purple recipe sample so small? Because we ate the rest!

And then she brought out, still warm, a dish she had prepared using the Stokes Purple, a tasty ground beef mixture with some white potatoes and spices, topped with a light sprinkle of cheese, baked in the oven. The color of the Stokes Purple clearly came through.

More discussion about the nature of the collaboration — to what degree should the dish or ingredients reflect Iraqi influence and tastes? My response: Both of you are the bosses. Do what you think is best! The goal of MashUp is to inspire communication and understanding through food. Everyone agrees.

Next meeting is arranged, to meet at Southern Lights a few blocks down the road.

Kwol meets AJ

Kabocha pumpkin is smaller and sweeter than American pumpkin

Kwol, her husband, Eugene Pierce,  and I went to Greensboro's Table 16 to meet AJ, Table 16's sous chef, who will be working with chef and owner Graham Heaton on the MashUp project. To help introduce the foods she enjoyed from the Central Highlands of Vietnam, Kwol brought by several vegetables locally grown by Montagnards and seasonal.

Her selection included the kabocha pumpkin, whose fruit, leaves, tendrils and flowers are all favored, lufa squash, hot peppers, water spinach, sweet potato greens, and cassava leaf, which is especially prized.

AJ was immediately interested in everything and the two quickly launched into possible recipes and combinations, with questions about how cassava leaf was prepared and local availability of some, such as lufa. Kwol also explained how Montagnards dried meat. And how she and her husband had been down to the Asheboro area harvesting river snails, another favorite, that would be quickly boil-cooked, then dipped in hot pepper sauce.

The conversation was exciting for me to hear, a conversation among equals in which both parties were eager to share and overcome barriers. As an experienced chef AJ was completely open to Kwol's ingredients and her cooking traditions.

Next steps, figuring out a time during the restaurant's busy schedule to get Kwol in to work side by side, experimenting and trying out new things together with AJ. 

This is going to be an exciting collaboration!

Sweet potato green

Lufa grown from a Montagnard garden

Cassava, a tropical plant, grown in Greensboro NC

The Purple Sweet Potato

The locally grown Purple Sweet Potato is the story of a plant from the Americas journey of 500 years around the world to return and fuel innovation in our local farming communities. It is story of a search for a healthy and sustainable crop to help diversify farmers from tobacco. A story of a unique plant, returned from Asia, and a local group working to expand the reach and impact of the crop to drive local food enterprises, technology and market horizons.

The Stokes Purple is a sweet potato cultivar (Ipomoea batatas) developed and promoted by StokesCORE, a local nonprofit economic development agency, to help Stokes County farmers diversify production and preserve rural heritage. Its striking color comes from its anthocyanin content, consumption of which is linked to reduced cardiovascular disease.

The sweet potato (not the same as the yam, Dioscorea alata) originated in Mesoamerica and was among many important world foods discovered and developed by generations of Pre-Columbian agriculturalists. Columbus brought it to Europe(1500) where it was carried to the Philippines, then China, India and Southeast Asia. In the late 1600s it was grown in Virginia. By 1700 it arrived in Japan. Today the sweet potato is an important world food. In the US, North Carolina is the largest sweet potato producer.

African Services Coalition

Omer is the executive director of African Services Coalition which is located in downtown Greensboro. He and his staff assist many refugees that are located here from countries such as Sudan, Somalia and the Congo. He's busy all the time helping people, so I'm appreciative of the time he gives me to explain the DATS MashUp project in detail after bugging him in hallways and between conference meetings.

I bring along some purple sweet potatos and Land of Saura sweet potato butter and we agree this event could be a great way to share culture with the American mainstream and introduce new ideas about diversity. Omer thinks aloud about possible clients he believes would be a good fit. He'll get back to me with some names after he contacts them, he says.