Naw Doh brought her mom and some farmers from Novick Family Urban Farm to visit Truelove Seeds today, just like last year. This time, they brought a feast, and we harvested lots of vegetables to add to it, and for them to cook at home: turmeric leaf, ginger leaf, spilanthes leaf, pumpkin leaves (for soup) green tomatoes (for the tea leaf salad), and some type of smooth-stemmed bedstraw that grows like a weed, which they simply call “bitter leaf”. I am very grateful to this Karen refugee community from Burma for providing some of the seeds in our catalog (White Garden Eggplant and Rat-Tail Radish) and also for teaching me about all the edible, delicious foods right under my feet. Naw Doh’s favorite is pumpkin leaf, and she said our Lunga di Napoli Squash, with it’s green and white coloring, was the right type of leaf, unlike the Halloween pumpkins whose leaves are plain green and don’t taste good. She demonstrated how to easily peal the strings off the leaves and vines to make it more pleasant to chew in the soup. We ate truly ripe soft yellow cucumbers cooked in a lovely soup. We had deliciously sour Chin Baung (Roselle Leaf) sautéed with bamboo and shrimp, and Naw Doh shared their traditional seeds for this plant so that my friends in Florida can help regenerate them. We learned about the small squat pumpkin-shaped bitter eggplant that is eaten every year in the mountains of Burma as health insurance. The earth provides. Thank you to Naw Doh and the Karen community for sharing your food and your knowledge! Also, thank you @adamforbes29 and @novickurbanfarm for connecting me to this wonderful group. #karenfood #burmesefood #myanmarfood #pumpkinleaf #turmericleaf #gingerleaf #chinbaung #seedkeeping #seedsaving #bittereggplant https://www.instagram.com/p/B2AulKEgkqt/?igshid=1pyvfzjruh1q
