+ Follow the teams' progress leading up to DATS!
Reyonolds Place, MRCA
Saturday, October 9, 2010
2:30 — 4:00 pm
Four cooking teams each consisting of a professional chef and refugee-immigrant will present and discuss their joint creations using the Stokes Purple sweet potato as their point of inspiration. Each team will face language, tradition and cultural barriers as they work to communicate, collaborate, and create a great new recipe. (You can learn more and follow the teams' progress leading up to DATS' MashUp.)
Today people from all over the world have brought new flavors, ingredients, techniques and tastes to the Piedmont. The Stokes Purple sweet potato is an exceptional product available at Whole Foods and developed by enterprising Stokes County farmers from a variety of Ipomoea batatas cultivated in Asia. As a world food, the sweet potato is a familiar ingredient to newcomers from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central and South America.PARTICIPANTS
Table 16 is working with Kwol Ksa, a Montagnard woman from the Koho tribe. Kwol came to the US in 1992 as a refugee from Vietnam. She lived in the jungle for many years to escape war and violence which continued throughout Southeast Asia after the American departure in 1975. She is eager to share many of the foods and vegetables that are less known to an American audience. She's assisted by her husband, Eugene Pierce.
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Chefs and owners Mark Grohman and Trevor Dye operate Meridian Restaurant. Each is a classically trained chef who has chosen to make Winston Salem his home. They have worked at some of the finest restaurants in the Triad area as executive chefs. The cuisine at Meridian Restaurant represents the combination and culmination of classical training and passion for Mediterranean and local cuisine.Meridian is working with Menbi Halu, an Ethiopian woman who came to the Triad just two years ago with her immediate family. Menbi is an enthusiastic chef who worked in Nairobi, Kenya after she was forced to flee her native land. In her own words, she describes herself as someone who simply loves to cook.
Meridian Restaurant
411 South Marshall Street, Winston-Salem, NC 27107
(336)722-8889
http://www.meridianws.com/
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Chef John Drees reopened Southern Lights Bistro at its new location in June 2010 . The award-winning four-star restaurant, and one of Greensboro’s most popular eating establishments for more than two decades, Southern Lights Bistro is delighted to welcome you back. Inside you will find many aspects you fondly remember about the original location, such as popular menu offerings like Cream of Tomato Basil Soup, Tribecca Sandwich, Reference Burger, Grilled Salmon with Cucumber Dill Sauce, Chocolate Walnut Pie, seasonal items, house-made desserts, fresh daily seafood and chalkboard specials. Adrian Harris represents the Southern Lights Bistro kitchen in this community-minded collaboration project!Southern Lights Bistro is working with Tarek and Wurood Almashhadani, who came to the Triad one and one half years ago from their native Iraq. Both are very interested in sharing their food customs and traditions with a larger American audience and see this collaborative opportunity as a chance to portray their country and its long, rich history in a positive light.
Southern Lights Bistro
2415-A Lawndale Dr., Greensboro, NC 27408
(336) 379-9414
http://southernlightsbistro.com/
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Triad Community Kitchen students use donated and purchased food during their course time to create vacuum-sealed, ready-to-heat meals in a bag for distribution to Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest NC's partner agencies like soup kitchens, group homes and Kids Cafes.
Triad Community Kitchen is working with Roshan Shrestra, a GTCC culinary student, and a team of three Nepali refugee women, Ganga Mainali, Devi Timsina and Hari.
Triad Community Kitchen
Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest NC
3655 Reed Street, Winston-Salem NC 27107
(336) 784-5770
http://www.hungernwnc.org/
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The Stokes Purple sweet potato is about how innovation and economic development can be used to sustain local agriculture. It is a technology and globalizationstory that began five hundred years ago in America, went around the world, and came home to Stokes County, NC.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.
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Andrew J. Young (DATS MashUp organizer) is an artist, educator, game designer and advocate. For two years he volunteered and then worked at Montagnard Dega Association as an ESOL teacher and employment specialist in order to study and understand the community. He is currently working with his wife, Betsy Renfrew, and backstrap weavers from Southeast Asia to together preserve and promote traditional weaving through a sustainable model.
