My Sisters' Kitchen

A large crowd gathered this Monday to attend the Monthly Gathering Community Cafe Dinner held in Chambers Crescent Theatre. Preparation took all day for the event, with a group from My Sisters' Kitchen working very hard to create three delicious dishes for the menu; a vegeterian curry, egg curry, vegetable noodles and savoury rice. As the food was bubbling away, a lot of care was spent decorating the theatre, turning it into an exciting colourful venue!

There was a last minute problem at My Sister's Kitchen this week, as the person who was cooking was unfortunately ill. But fear not, luckly Mohammed stepped up to the challenge of creating a meal with the ingredients that were already bought. He decided to make a vegetable curry, meaning lots of preparation to be done by the group; dicing the onions, cutting the pumpkin, peeling the potatoes and chopping the carrots with everyone practising the English word for each ingredient, and sharing the names in their own languages.

Delightfully chaotic cultural extravaganza with Alyson cooking traditional Welsh Cakes and Cawl, a Welsh lamb and vegetable stew. Fortunately the pot of stew was huge as we had many to feed. We had quite  a few of the regulars, including Aung Aung a 20 year old Burmese man who spent the first 19 years of his life in a Refugee camp on the Thai border. Aung Aung is busy completing year 12 in the hope that he will go on to ANU to study international relations and politics.

At this week's My Sister's Kitchen it was the turn of Puring, where she was sharing with us a recipe from the Philipines. The dish was a shrimp stir fry, something that many of the group had not tried before. To prepare the food, everyone helped in cutting the snake beans, pumpkin and onions. One job that some were not so keen helping with was de-veining the shrimp! Once the preparation was done, the children took part in a drama workshop as the grown up's got cooking, slowly adding the ingredients to the wok.

I have recently arrived in Darwin from Wales to visit DCA, and the first project I was able to take part in was My Sister's Kitchen. I had read about the project and knew a little so was really excited to see it and take part myself. The food being made this week was Samosa's, so, after we went shopping for the ingredients everyone arrived and the cooking began. Like myself, there were other new comers to the group this week, but everyone took part in preparing the food which gave an opportunity to chat and get to know each other.

“After hearing about “My Sisters Kitchen”, I was really enthusiastic about getting our Refugee clients there, and it seemed the only way to do that was to pick them up from home and take them to Malak. My friend and yoga teacher, Belle, was keen to help, so we took off in tandem to our first house, but unfortunately no-one was home! It’s always a bit of a problem with language barriers, and so we were not too surprised to find our next client was also not at home!