In Sunday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, you can read a profile I wrote of Susan Pavlin and the good work she does through the group she founded, Global Growers. Pavlin, her executive director Robin Chanin and their small staff have helped more than 250 immigrant families find land in community gardens and on urban farms to cultivate. For these people, particularly women, the opportunity to farm has been both empowering and therapeutic while offering a bit of much-needed extra income.
I was keen to meet some farmers and hear their stories, but also to learn more about the intertwining helixes of culture and agriculture — how the same plants are cultivated for different culinary uses around the globe.
Some of the African farmers, for instance, grow beans for their leaves and summer squash for their stalks, but are less interested in the vegetables themselves.
Most of the Asian and African farmers grow a plant called roselle, which has thick red stems and pointy, maple-like leaves. This plant (Hibiscus sabdariffa) is native to West Africa, where local cooks had use for both its leaves and its fleshy red flowers. In the New World, we pretty much just use the flowers to make hibiscus tea (sorrel in Jamaica and agua de jamaica in Mexico). In Southeast Asia and India, the leaves are prized for their lemony-sour flavor and are the star ingredient in salads, soups and condiments.
As we planned the story, Pavlin contacted some refugee families who let me visit them at their farms. Would they let me watch them cook as well? Pavlin made inquiries and then set up three home visits and three extraordinary meals.
Halieth Hatungimana, whom I discuss in the story, prepared a grand feast of Burundian dishes in her tiny Clarkston kitchen. On the menu were goat stew, bean leaves, potatoes and white beans tossed together and a special green she cultivates called mchicha. (It’s a kind of amaranth, used in Jamaican callaloo.)
All of it was seasoned similarly — with onions, tomatoes, Scotch bonnet peppers and roasted peanuts ground to a fine powder. Hatungimana made the greens two ways, one pot cooked traditionally with a serious glug-glug of red palm oil, and a healthier version made with water. Both delicious.
Ignatius Than and Noela Man, a husband and wife from Burma, grow fantastic onions and garlic that Global Growers sells through its cooperative as well as roselle and suntok (golf-ball Burmese eggplants) that they sell directly to local Asian markets.
They invited Pavlin and me to their Cumming home in a subdivision set amid horse farms. The meal, which was already prepared, began with raw and steamed vegetables, including suntok, to dip in either fiery chili sauce or light ranch dressing. Then came a salad of sun-dried roselle leaves with dried shrimp and locally foraged bamboo shoots in a piquant dressing. Cubes of fresh pork, both braised and fried, as well as crisp roasted chicken pieces crowded the table.
But the showstoppers were three soups — one with pork, one with fish and bamboo, one thin and tomatoey — that showed off roselle’s sour power and elusive floral flavor. There are many variations of “chin hin” (sour soup) in Burma, which I began researching as soon as I went home.
Mohan and Bishnu Chhetri, who are ethnic Nepalis from Bhutan, lease a small plot from a private homeowner in Clarkston. The Chhetris were both health workers at home. Bishnu served as a midwife (she claims to have delivered upward of 5,000 babies!), and Mohan helped run clinics. In the early 1990s, the Bhutanese government began deporting ethnic Nepalis to refugee camps, even though their families had lived in the country for generations.
After a spell in Nepal, they joined their grown son, Bikash, and his family in Clarkston in 2011. The extended family lives in a spit-polish-clean ranch house in Stone Mountain that Bikash bought last year. When Pavlin and I arrive for dinner, everyone gathers in the kitchen to watch Bishnu and Sujita, Bikash’s wife, cook a half dozen Bhutanese specialties. “Normally the men don’t come into the kitchen until the food is ready,” Sujita says with a wink.
Through the kitchen window, you can see the backyard, which Bishnu has turned into an edible landscape, the patio and grassy lawn bordered by tumbling pumpkin vines and high stalks of corn.
Sujita does all of her cooking on the stovetop and uses her stacked ovens for storage. Bishnu prefers to work on the flawlessly clean, no-shoes-allowed floor with a cutting board and an enormous cleaver, hacking bone-in chicken into bite-size pieces for a curry.
Much like Hatungimana, these ladies cook a wide variety of dishes but rely on a fairly standard set of seasonings: ginger, garlic, tomatoes and panch puran — a five-spice mixture of cumin, black mustard, fennel, fenugreek and nigella seed. Pumpkin vines cooked this way are insanely good.
“Can you eat spicy food?” Sujita asks the assembled crowd. After hearty assent, she puts together a pot of ema dashi, which is perhaps Bhutan’s favorite dish. The name means “chili cheese,” and it’s a quick affair. Into a pot of simmering salted water she cuts every garden vegetable she can get her hands on. Potatoes, daikon, green beans, tomatoes, jalapeños. Then in goes a heaping spoonful of hot red chili powder and two slices of American cheese. It emerges creamy, pink, dangerous, addictive.
The piece de resistance at any Nepali or Bhutanese meal will be a steamer filled with the dumplings called momo, and so it is here. Bishnu mixes a filling of ground pork, onions, gobs of ginger and curry powder, and Sujita pleats wonton skins around it with lightning-fast fingers.
The momos are so good we never even make it to the dining room, instead crowding around the kitchen table, popping a bottle of wine and toasting a new friendship.
I will devote a future column to momos. In the meantime, here are some recipes that show off the world of cooking happening in Atlanta today.
Burundi Style Greens
Adapted from a recipe by Halieth Hatungimana.
Hatungimana made this recipe with mchicha, amaranth greens from her garden. She says it works with any kind of green, including the cruciferous greens (collards, kale) popular in the South. But if you have bean vines in your garden, you should try eating them this way. You can buy palm oil at the Buford Highway Farmers Market.
Total time: 45 minutes
Hands on: 15 minutes
Makes: 8 servings
1/2 cup red palm oil (or 1/3 cup vegetable oil)
1 large yellow onion, slivered
1 Scotch bonnet pepper, finely chopped
2 large beefsteak tomatoes, peeled and slivered
1 heaping teaspoon of salt, plus more for seasoning
About 2 gallons fresh mild greens, such as bean leaves, callaloo, Swiss chard or kale, rinsed, stemmed, torn and left wet
1/2 cup unsalted roasted peanuts, pulverized in a food processor
Heat oil in the bottom of a large pot over a medium high flame and add onion, pepper and tomatoes. (Try snipping this very hot pepper into the pot with a pair of shears; that way you won’t get it all over your hands and a cutting board.) Keep stirring until the tomato has broken down, about 4 minutes. Add a heaping teaspoon of salt and stir. Lower heat to medium and add greens but do not stir. Cover greens with a piece of foil or parchment paper, then cover the pot with its lid. Check after 10 minutes. If greens are well wilted, stir into the vegetables on the bottom of the pot. Lower heat to medium low and continue cooking until greens are soft. (This may vary depending on the type of greens used.) Stir in the peanut powder and adjust salt seasoning. Cook for 10 minutes longer to allow flavors to meld.
Per serving: 320 calories (percent of calories from fat, 56), 11 grams protein, 31 grams carbohydrates, 11 grams fiber, 20 grams fat (8 grams saturated), no cholesterol, 118 milligrams sodium.
Ema Dashi — Bhutanese chili and cheese
Adapted from a recipe by Sujita Chhetri.
Hands on: 5 minutes
Total time: 20 minutes
Serves: 4
“This is so weird,” said my daughter when I tested the recipe. “It’s like mac and cheese meets India!” It is indeed like nothing you’ve ever had. While some recipes call for farmer’s cheese, Chhetri uses white processed (American) cheese to give it that flavor of creamy comfort. You can add any vegetables you have on hand and, of course, the amount of chili powder is a personal preference.
1/2 cup green beans, trimmed
1/2 medium onion, slivered
1 small daikon, peeled and cut into thin half moons (about a cup)
1 jalapeño pepper, cut into rings
1 large potato, peeled and cut into half moon wedges
1 large beefsteak tomato, peeled and cut into 12 wedges
1 heaping teaspoon hot chili powder
2 slices of white American cheese
Salt to taste
Bring 2 1/2 cups of salted water to boil in a medium saucepan. Add the beans, onion, daikon and jalapeño. Add more water to just cover vegetables if there isn’t enough and simmer 5 minutes. Add potato and tomato, adding more water if necessary, and simmer an additional 5-10 minutes until potato is soft. Stir in the chili powder and then the cheese until sauce is thin and creamy. Adjust seasoning and serve. (If you like, you might add another slice of cheese.)
Per serving: 103 calories (percent of calories from fat, 40), 5 grams protein, 12 grams carbohydrates, 3 grams fiber, 5 grams fat (3 grams saturated), 13 milligrams cholesterol, 265 milligrams sodium.
Burmese Sour Soup (Chin Hin)
Inspired by a recipe from Noela Man.
I wasn't able to watch Man cook this soup, so I researched recipes for chin hin, and found a plethora of options. This one with shrimp, which I adapted from the website bestoodles.com, makes a terrific first course that is exotic but easy to love. While you can substitute sorrel, roselle is increasingly available — both at Buford Highway Farmers Market and in Indian markets, where it is called gongura. You can make the soup with a water base or, if you like a bit more pungency, boil the shrimp shells for a quick stock.
Hands on: 15 minutes
Total time: 30 minutes
Serves: 4-6
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 medium onion, chopped
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder
Salt to taste
1 pound shell-on shrimp, shelled and deveined
1 tomato, peeled and chopped
1 1/2 cups roselle leaves (or sorrel), washed and chopped
1 tablespoon fish sauce
If desired, collect the shrimp shells, wash them and cover them with water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Strain out shells.
Heat the oil in a large pot over a medium high flame, and add the garlic and onion, cooking until lightly browned. Add the spices, stir quickly and then add the shrimp with a healthy sprinkle of salt. Toss for 1 minute until shrimp turns pink and the bottom of the pot begins to brown. Add the tomato and its juices, and stir to loosen any bits on the bottom of the pot. Add about 2 quarts of water, shrimp stock or a combination of the two. Bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer immediately. Add the roselle and simmer for about 3 minutes to meld flavors. Season with fish sauce and salt to taste. The longer this soup sits, the more sour it will become.
Per serving, based on 4: 238 calories (percent of calories from fat, 50), 24 grams protein, 6 grams carbohydrates, 1 gram fiber, 13 grams fat (2 grams saturated), 173 milligrams cholesterol, 186 milligrams sodium.
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