The GULP project has been happening, with some great local food shares and workshops, to come up with some lovely local recipes using seasonal produce, from the community, for the community!
We have so far been working in collaboration with various organisations including My Sister’s Kitchen (Darwin Community Arts). My Sister’s Kitchen encourages women from all backgrounds in the community, to come together and share art and crafting and cooking on Mondays in Malak. The Malak community centre also has a wonderful garden. If you want to get involved, come along or contact Darwin Community Arts.
At the end of last year we started running workshops in conjunction with My Sister’s Kitchen and the lovely ladies there, to see and share how they cook some of our wonderful local produce.
We have had several workshops there and today we just had another one which came up with some great recipes…
We take lots of fresh local ingredients to the sessions, sourced from gardens or the market and see what everyone would like to cook or learn to cook.
We started off looking at green or slightly ripening pawpaw. We started making raw pawpaw salad with shredded pawpaw, peanuts, lime, palm sugar,chilli, fish sauce and fresh coriander and Rosia and Marcia added their own stance on it, adding grated cucumber, which added a refreshing crunchy twist..
Sandar Win and Maaye, who are from Bhurma and have been cooking with banana parts for a long time, showed us all how to prepare banana trunk and make a great salad..
Banana trunks are cut down after harvesting a bunch of bananas and the heart of this trunk can make wonderful dishes. Sandar Tun says that the sweeter the bananas, the better the trunk for cooking. The trunk we used was from sugar bananas.
The trunk is peeled to get to the middle part and then this is finely sliced.
The slices are soaked in water and turmeric, so they don’t go black. This is then blanched in hot water and squeezed out.
The photo below shows two ways the banana trunk can look when cut. The lower piece, with more defined markings is the better part or type of trunk for cooking with.
Garlic, mint, coriander, chilli, fish sauce, lime juice and salt are added. Hopefully we didn’t forget to mention anything! The result is really delicious. And the salad is also looks beautiful. It had quite a few chillies in, but these could definitely be changed to taste.
Sandar Tun showed us a version of green pawpaw soup. You can pick a really green pawpaw or one on the turn. This one was on the turn (starting to ripen) and cut into thin parts, put in a pan with peanuts, thai coriander, tumeric, salt and chilli.
It is then boiled with coconut milk. The result is a rich and delicious tasting soup!
All of the wonderful food was shared with some dhal cooked by Jacob and rice together and marked the end of another great session and some new inspiration of how to cook our local produce.
Soon (we promise) written out recipes with quantities will be uploaded to the web!
A big thank you to all the ladies for sharing your knowledge and to DCA/ MSK for letting us run the workshops!
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This is what we did yesterday with GULP