I came home today to the Winter issue of Heirloom Gardener, with my article printed in the middle of the magazine. It is such an honor to be able to help tell seed stories of amazing farmers, gardeners, chefs, and home cooks through the printed word and photographs. In this issue, I focused on Molokhia and other crops of the Syrian (and Palestinian) diasporas, and spoke with Chef Osama Herkal, Mason Harkrader (@bearbottomfarm), and Hoda Mansour( @ootybabo). Here’s an excerpt: “On a sunny day in July, Hoda Mansour and her children made their second annual visit to our farm to harvest from our 8-foot-tall molokhia patch. 4-year-old Youssef ran around with bundles of leaves exclaiming at the top of his lungs, while the rest of us harvested hundreds of tender new stalks and chatted. Noor, who is 13, learned where and how to snip, marvelled at my choice to be a farmer amongst the bugs and beating sunshine, and taught me the Palestinian and Lebanese pronunciations of this plant (mlukhia and molokhia, respectively, both with a fricative sound on the “kh”). When she was a toothless baby, the first food she loved to slurp down was molokhia prepared as a slimy, green stew. For her mother, Hoda, who grew up as a displaced Palestinian in Lebanon, handling the molokhia was boring, tedious work as a child. She wishes she savored every moment of sitting all day with her grandma and her sisters over tea and local gossip while plucking the leaves for the most important family meals. Now, it is a sensory memory that she replicates for her children: when she gets home from our farm, she and the kids pluck and gossip, and they freeze enough greens in dozens of portioned baggies to last their entire year. Before they left, Noor told me: “I definitely want to grow molokhia and I want to keep the tradition alive. That obviously starts with me sitting down and watching my mom at every step of the way asking her ‘how does this happen’, ‘how do you make this’, ‘what is the spice that you put into this’ and hopefully catching on and learning how to make it for my future kids.” #syrianfood #palestinianfood #molokhia #mulukhiya #jute #egyptianspinach #jewsmallow #saluyot https://www.instagram.com/p/B5i1dwngR0w/?igshid=fsh9g0ncbz0n
