A Taste of our Community
What favourite recipe did your grandmother teach you to cook? Or was it your auntie that showed you her secret recipe for authentic Goan curry or Butternut squash puree? Whatever it is or wherever it came from we want to hear about it.
The social housing community in this country represents a diversity of cultures and origins seldom matched. At Emerald we want to harness this diversity and share it.
I love my food, let's face it most of us do, and I've been lucky enough to travel to some of the world's more interesting countries including Kenya, Goa and Thailand and while there have eaten some amazing food. Over the last few months I've been kicking around the idea of collecting as many interesting recipes as possible and creating an online reference for people to share.
The final push for me was when my colleagues attended the Annual General Meeting of Arawak Walton, a BME landlord in Manchester, and enjoyed a fabulous spread of authentic food, some of which was inspired by Arawak's tenants. The food had my colleagues raving about the quality and range on offer, and having attended the meeting the previous year I know what they mean.
As well as the recipes I want to know the history, where it came from, who passed it on to you, what memories it evokes, which occasions you use it and any other stories or facts that make it interesting. What I'm also interested in is creating a list of easy to cook foods, foods for all occasions that can be cooked simply without some of the expensive and rare ingredients that some cookbooks require. It may mean that people have to venture into shops that they have previously never been into, to ask for ingredients that they have never bought, and to ask for advice on how to prepare them, but maybe that will broaden people's horizons. I know when I visited Leicester recently certain streets reminded me of the local markets in Goa and believe me there are items on sale there you would be hard pushed find in Tesco or Asda.