You start somewhere... You suggest the food theme for DATS 2010 and that gets accepted by Carol Strohecker's roundtable at CDI. You think about a collaboration — something about a purple sweet potato, local restaurants and a cook-off. You change it some to include refugees who know a thing or two about their own foods and traditions...
George Scheer of Elsewhere Collaborative promises to connect Table 16's Graham Heaton to DATS Mashup... Margaret Norfleet Neff suggests Trevor Dye and Mark Grohman of Meridian... Salem Neff puts in a ton of good ideas about details small and large... Tony McGee is totally on board with the refugees bringing in new ideas and recipes and puts StokesCORE behind MashUp... Bill Cobb and Ben Lane join in... Charis and May both suggest Adrian Harris at Southern Lights Bistro... Adrian brings his boss, chef John Drees, into the MashUp... Sarah Ivory of Church World Services refers Tareq and Wurood Almashdani as our Iraqi cooks... Graham gets Sous Chef AJ Gregson working with Kwol Ksa, our Montagnard cook and former ESOL student at Montagnard Dega Association... Omer Omer of African Services Coalition brings in Menbi Halu, our Ethiopian cook, who in turn tells her boss, Paul Lasovski of the American Hebrew Academy... Diane Nussbaum and Sue Wilson bring our first Nepali contacts Saraswati and Ganga... Ganga brings in Hari and Devi, who Betsy and I know from her women's backstrap weaving group...Pastor Y Hin Nie is Betsy's partner in a UAC grant to promote women's traditional weaving and also leads Kwol's church... And he works side by side with Narayan Khadka of Senior Resources of Guilford, who connects to Roshan Shrestra, who's finishing up at GTCC's Culinary program and who happens to have worked with Jeff Bacon of Second Harvets Food Bank and Triad Community Kitchen, who was already connected to MashUp through Tony. Chef Jeff's incredible staff of Chef Pam, Harry, Theme and Deborah Lane help Roshan and the women cut, slice,, and dice purple sweet potatoes, which leaves Suzana McCalley to recommend our moderator Bryant Hernandez.
