 with the City of Portland, Maine, I work in the Office of Economic Opportunity and today we're here to celebrate Welcoming Week. Welcoming Week is celebrated in thousands of cities across the United States to help make sure everyone feels like they belong. Fostering a sense of belonging is a key element to the Office of Economic Opportunity's work. I know that many of you are joining us, I can see it now, on joining us on Facebook Live and on Zoom, so we will give a few seconds before we get started with the cooking instructions. If you're joining us from home in your kitchens, make sure you have your meal kit handy and then we'll get started with the cooking instructions. Today we're filming at Wayside Food Programs. Wayside Food Program supports people in our community who are experiencing food insecurity, they partner with tons of pantries and community meals, and they're also a key partner for Welcoming Week to help foster a sense of belonging for all. Today I'm joined by Chef Aklilu from Miat Catering. Chef, would you mind introducing yourself to everyone who's joining us today? Hello, my name is Aklilu, I'm the owner and the chef of Miat Catering. We're excited to share our last two recipes here with you guys for the Welcoming Week. Why not say thank you for the Economic Opportunity Office and the Wayside Program that they chose us to be part of this program. So there's no place to feel more welcome like when you're in someone's kitchen, so today we're cooking in this Wayside kitchen and I hope that everyone is cooking in their own kitchen experiencing a sense of home. Chef, I do have some questions already coming in for you and we promise that we try to answer as many of them as possible and a question that keeps popping up is where are you from? Originally I'm from Ethiopia, I came to Maine 15 years ago. Wow, and so in Portland's been your home for over 15 years now? Yes, this was my first state and I'm still here and I love it. Awesome, so those of you who've seen the numbers grow, we're so excited to have you. Thank you for participating and welcoming me for helping to make sure that everyone can feel like they belong in our city of Portland, Maine. For those of you who are joining us, we're going to ask you to take out your meal kit. So you may have picked up an orange bag at Wayside earlier this week or you may have had one delivered to your house and in it you'll find ingredients for two totally different recipes. One is for Neat Catering's Amazing Lentil Stew and that's going to come out on this kind of orange-ish piece of paper. The other is on a green, with green bubbles, that's for Kero Cafe for tomorrow night. So you can set that one aside and we'll just focus on this orange piece of paper. When you flip it over, you'll see you've got the recipes in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English because these are some of our top languages spoken in the city of Portland. You can follow along and just do the recipe all by yourself but we'd love to get those pro tips from the chef on how to make his famous lentil stew. What else do we have in the meal kit to make our stew tonight? The first ingredient we have is lentils, brown lentils. This should be like two cups. Exactly two cups, I measured it myself. Very good, so this is the first ingredient we're going to work on. We will also need medium onion, yellow onion. We also have one tomato. No predestination for tomorrow night, there for the other recipe. Yes, and we need one of this olive oil and then the spice mix of this. The secret spice mix. Yes, that's and I will get a few cups of this. So once you use these two clubs, we're going to want to save a couple other clubs for tomorrow night, but we can move them for tomorrow. But these are the things you'll need to get started. Just to make the stew perfect fall dish, love lentils, really healthy, great for people who have iron deficiencies. There's offensive health benefits. We've got a totally vegetarian meal here. What do we need to do first? So the first thing we do is we wash these lentils. They really need to be washed very well. So I dump them here and then I'm going to get water. You can use your hands to just rub them around to make sure they get washed well. Wash them, I put them aside here and then this one gets how big should the onions be? Can you use just kind of any kind of onion? Which is the best onion for your lentil soup? Like a medium sized onion. You can use less onion if you don't like onions. There is really not a size on the onion. So it's going to be any size onion and it's going to be sweet onions, yellow onions, red onions, anytime. And I prefer this one because this is a little cheaper. If you need a more quality one, a lot of people like red onions. So it's up to our taste what we like to make. Awesome, thank you all. You can keep on dropping to get them to the shack. Okay, so I'm going to chop the onion. I just throw the dry parts, the top skin. I use one of these and mix them together with the olive oil and then turn it on. What you said, who do you think Josh? No, I think we're fine. I think I picked it up. So the heat can be a little bit on a medium until these things are straight for like five minutes. That way the onions, the onion doesn't burn from us. I'm going to now cut the tomato. It's locally grown. Are these amazing recipes? I don't see if you're wearing the gloves, be careful the gloves sometimes. This will be done until the result of COVID. Then wearing the masks is probably different. What else have you done to keep your business open? It's time for business because of COVID, but physical opportunities in the city of Portland, current resources which are helping us to keep going. Okay, so I'm going to add this onions, garlic, smash it and separate the skin out of it for the stew. I'll now add this into the stew. A lot of people like it because onions are low in calories. We have a lot of vegans and vegetarians who really ask for this. Let's do something else off of your menu. Just contact us through our Facebook page. We're happy to deliver it for you. Awesome, thanks. Thank you. So now if you can see it's turning a little bit and cooked together for another five minutes, it's good. You don't want this to burn if you leave it there for too long. So what I do is we have water here warming up, just put a little water and then mix them together. The executive director of Wayside Food Program and she's part of a reason we're able to celebrate welcoming this week, this year. Mary, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thanks for doing this. We are all about cooking and sharing food and I think this is a great way to kick off welcoming week. Awesome. So just for those of you who don't know, maybe you could share with us a little bit more about how Wayside Food Programs works and how you guys have started. Yeah, well, Wayside actually started many, many, many years ago by just a group of neighbors that were coming together to realizing that there was a need to have some extra meals in their community that people were really hungry. For many years, Wayside actually ran the Soup Kitchen at Preble Street Resource Center and in about 2011 we separated and started doing what we call our community meals, which are meals out in the community at different neighborhood sites and weekly so that people could develop a following and could feel comfortable going there. So much of what we do is we do food rescue. So we rescue food, which means that we take donations of food from all kinds of large stores and food purveyors and we share that food with countries. We put that food in our kitchen and share it with our community and we've been doing this a long time. I'm really excited. So for those of you who have your meal kits at home, just know that Wayside has been the warehouse, the drop-off, the distribution center, the packers and the measures. We've taken over their kitchen for welcoming weekend. We're so appreciative for all you've done to make this happen. So today we're driving courses with some people who really know an awful lot about food. We've got Chef Akli Lu and Mary, who are kind of food experts. And so the big question is, tell us more about the Berbera spice. Like I feel like I need to know more. Mary needs to know more. We all need to know more. Okay. So Berbera will look like this. It's a red powder. It's a mixture of different spices. I can, with some of the ingredients, add it. So it can be like cumin powder, some, I don't know how to say this, curry. And then turmeric powder. So the secret about Berbera is how much of the spice you mix together with this red pepper, which is ground. And in Ethiopia, traditionally, this can be added in all stews. It can be, you can add this in chicken stew, beef stew, lentils stew, and other vegetables you want to make. Well, it sounds like I can't everyone share in our secrets. So Mary, this question's for you. Tell us a secret. How does someone get connected to the food system in Portland, Maine, if they're in need, or if they want to help somebody else in the community figure out where they could get a meal or groceries? Well, we are on, we have a great website that's very interactive. We are on Facebook, or on Instagram. We're right here in Portland. So sometimes people just kind of wander in and ask us for some suggestions and help where they can call us. But I would always tell people to start at the website and see if there's anything else you need, and then give us a call. Awesome. And so I've got another question then for both of you. I'd like to know, you know, what about food helps you bring people together, whether it's at me at catering or wayside food? What's the best way to bring people together and how do you use food to foster a sense of belonging for everyone? Well, I think you just explained it. All this spices, there's a particular tradition associated with it, and you know what you need to make to make it your tradition. And I think people love sharing other people's traditions. And so to understand the, in that food that you're making is a long history of many, many, many other chefs and the desire to bring people together and to share that food with others. What about you, Chef, how are you bringing people together with food? I agree with Mary. She said it's exactly correctly. And people always like sharing recipes and tasting different foods, because let alone here at home, people travel from different places to see the culture, food and taste different types of food. So I agree with what Mary said. And not only that, but some most here in Maine, without business, many people on purpose come out to support us, even if they are not really, are not going to consume the food, they would just come to support us by purchasing our food. What do you guys think you think we should go stir this stew and give it a try, see if the lentils are done yet. And for those of you at home watching the timer, I don't think it's been our full 30 minutes, but maybe we can have a sneak peek. Yeah, let's go check it out. Not really cooked, but we can always, yeah, try. You can tell by looking at it, it's a little bit dry yet. So when you put the berber in that, you put it in right away. Yeah, if you want to get the spoon, I know it's not really cooked yet. So we're going to take a few steps back and try to get six feet apart. Unless these COVID times you don't stay the course and keep wearing our masks, but I just need to know what these lentils taste like. I mean, I mean lentils, and this is lentils, special lentils because it doesn't just taste, you don't just taste the lentils, it's the spice. Yeah, that's the point. That's the secret of the stew. Yeah, you can just boil it, make it different way, but the spice is the in the secret of the lentils. Again, I've got one more question. Mary, what's the webpage that we should go to? So it is Wayside Food Programs. I'm trying to think of the address. Yeah, WaysideFoodPrograms.org. And if you just Google Wayside Food Programs, it'll pop right up. And for people who are interested in making a contribution to kind of thank you for your generous support, they can make those donations online. Totally online. We still get people who like to send us checks with nice little notes because we really want to hear from people about how they're feeling, how they're doing. These are difficult times to not be able to connect with people we've worked with for so long. Awesome. And then, Chef, I do have a couple more questions coming in. And then we want to let people go ahead and connect with those who are in their house and eat their stew, but I'm ready to know what else is on the menu at the catering. So we can get in on some corporate events, pop-up shops, groups larger than 15 or more. Tell us, what else we can have besides this plantal stew, if we were to call you? We have beef stew, chicken stew, cooked veggies, rice with chicken and any other orders we can make it in our way. And it all comes on a special bread called injera. I have a sample if you want to see that. So this is the special bread, we call it injera. It's a spongy Ethiopian bread. It's supposed to be made out of small grain, which is called teff. So this is our traditional main bread. And it can be eaten with all different stews of your choice, beef, chicken, veggies. Yeah, we buy the teff flour. This one is a brown teff, 100% teff by itself, but sometimes very hard to find the teff flour, so we sometimes we will mix it with some wheat. But with the bread, we may, yeah. It takes, it's not easy to make it. It takes about four to five days to be fermented. And we have a special grill, which we cook on. So using that, we make all this at the pork food lab. Alice, I see your question. Is teff flour gluten free? Can people who have a gluten intolerance enjoy injera? Yes, teff flour normally is gluten free, but sometimes it's tricky. It depends on who prepares it and where they mix them. So sometimes it can come in contact with the facilities where they make others. So it's always good to be careful. So for those of you who are enjoying the show tonight, you can keep on sharing the story, sharing these amazing recipes from me at catering and wayside food program. We'd love for you to let us know using the hashtag I belong in Portland because. So what makes you feel like you belong here? We want to know hashtag I belong in Portland because thank you for celebrating welcoming me and joining the national movement to foster a sense of belonging for everyone. If you're at home, it might be time to check your lentils and serve them up for your family. Tune in tomorrow night to meet Kiero Cafe. We'll have two amazing chefs, one from Chile and one from Colombia telling us the secret to their rice and beans. Same platforms. See you soon. Thank you all so much. I hope that you'll join us on social media to keep spreading the word about me at catering and wayside food programs. And from all of us at the city of Portland, stay the course.