Bonnie’s Red Curry Vegetables Over Brown Rice

Vegetables cooking before coconut milk has been added

The Black Panther Greens were a big pretty hit, so in the spirit of Ujima, to build and maintain our community together and to make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems own  to solve them together, here is another dish for folks with the problem of looking to have another vegan cooking trick in their culinary bag–Bonnie’s Red Curry Vegetables (pronounced Ve-je-tah-bulls) over Brown Rice named after …my wife, Bonnie! Curries are a pretty easy and flexible dish, particularly when you use curry powder or paste, in that you can use the base in many, many ways i.e. chicken, shrimp, lamb, different vegetables & tofu, etc. so you can change this up pretty easily. This recipe makes the curry from scratch, so it requires a little more preparation, if you don’t already have all the spices. This recipe’s selection of vegetables really worked well and were the choice of Bonnie. However, as I said above, once you have the base of spices, onions and garlic, anything else can follow.

Ingredients: 

1 good sized tomato, chopped

1 good sized yellow onion, diced

3 clumps of garlic from a jar or 8-10 cloves

2 carrots, diced

1 sweet potato, diced

2 red skinned potatoes, diced

1 red pepper diced

2 shakes of a bag of peas

1 lb of spinach, use whole leaves

 

1 can of coconut milk

1/4 tsp of cayenne

1 tbs of cumin

2 tsps of chili powder

2-3  tsps of coriander

1 tbs of turmeric

1 tbs of paprika

3 tbs of olive oil

1 1/2 cups of brown rice

Directions 

Cook onions and garlic in olive oil for 5 minutes or so and then add spices and cook for another couple of minutes. Don’t put the heat to high or you’ll burn the garlic. Then add the rest of the vegetables and cook for 15-20 minutes and then add coconut milk and cook for another 30-40 minutes on a medium heat & until they are level of softness you like. (My kids have never liked their vegetables too crunchy. Of course this would be healthier, but it’s all vegetables already, so you’re already kind of winning.) Meanwhile, boil the brown rice with a couple pinches of salt and cook it for 45 minutes. I haven’t cooked with brown rice for a while and I forgot how much better brown rice keeps itself as separate kernels, rather than merging into one pretty sticky rice clump. When the curry is ready, spoon it over the rice and serve.

Ok, so there’s another vegan dish you can bring to a Kwanzaa event or make for your own Kwanzaa event at home or make anytime during the year. As I said before, once you get a hang of the curry base, you can curry anything!

 

Hill CDC Meeting Announces Lower Hill Deal

Take two after losing the post I wrote last night. Last night, The Hill District Community Development Corporation (The Hill CDC) had a community meeting focused on two subjects: The recent deal outlining what would come back to the Hill from the gift given to the Penguins by our local government in order for them not to leave i.e. the rights to develop the 28 acres in the Lower Hill District.  The second element of the meeting was an envisioning of what might happen on Centre Ave. As there were a lot of details and potential implications to both issues, I will not try to handle this all in one post. First- what I heard from Councilman Daniel Lavelle re: the deal on the Lower Hill.

I came in on the tail end of the presentation and so the part that I was able to hear pertained to a fund that will be created to spur development in the entire Hill. According to the Councilman, the fund will get its dollars from  a TIF or Tax Increment Financing deal that will send 65% of the increase in taxes raised by the redevelopment of the Lower Hill to the Hill District Growth Fund and 35% back to the City of Pittsburgh. TIFs are something I am still trying to get my head around, so I hope to come back to that in a later post, but the headlines that I heard are the following:

•  the deal could lead to anywhere from $22 million to $70 million in dollars to fund development across the Hill District;
• the signatories were the Mayor, the Councilman, the Penguins and the Hill District CDC;
• the committee currently managing the Hill District Growth Fund will appoint new members to the body and other political entities, such as the city or county will not be able to weigh in on who sits on the committee;
• the agreement will be posted on the Councilman’s page.

Questions from the audience ranged from how would the fund be governed and ensured to benefit the Hill District residents to could the fund help with the eventual tax increases that property owners in the Hill will face as a result of the new development, which is a fascinating idea in and of itself. Wouldn’t that mean from a taxing strategy perspective that the city was developing property in the Lower Hill to raise taxes for its own operations, sending a chunk back to the Hill to help it redevelop “itself” (the Hill is still a part of the City) and then some of these same dollars were then coming back to the City treasure chest in the form of abatements given to residents to offset the the taxes caused by the redevelopment?  Owning two properties in the Hill, I can’t say I’m mad about that idea, and what I like about it is that it essentially means that Hill District residents would not have to incur the same price for the redevelopment of their neighborhood, but could reap the benefit in increased home values.  Interesting.

Anyway, the Councilman’s response on making sure the dollars allocated to the Hill were actually going to benefit the Hill had much to do with governance. Here he talked about the way the current members of the committee managing the Hill District Growth Fund would manage these dollars and that this committee would be the only one with the power to appoint new members, so that there could be no interference from other entities such as the City or County. This was posited as community control and while it surely will be controlled by residents and stakeholders of the Hill District (there was a resident clause to the membership on the committee that I missed), I have raised questions going back a couple of years as to how “community” is operationalized. This will be key if the fund is going to provide anything approaching equal access to all ideas and not be severely weighted towards those close to the Councilman and the Hill District CDC, which can happen even without intentions of graft, corruption and the like. Funding organizations (and I work for one) are notorious for providing access based on proximity to the board and staff of the organization, so this fund, garnered in the name of the Hill District community, has both the opportunity and burden of actually developing a process that leads to attracting and fairly funding all kinds of community ideas and to date. One idea I suggested two years ago that I don’t believe has happened and was not mentioned last night was to rotate members of the committee governing the fund.

The opportunity is to set a standard for how communities could decide funding processes and priorities for themselves and that all kinds of funding orgs, like philanthropy, government and intermediaries could learn from or be encouraged to take up. From what I can see this hasn’t happened to date  I was encouraged that the Councilman spoke of a need to think about the processes governing the fund, but said it was best to speak to the POISE Foundation as to how this would actually happen. In a later twitter exchange that included my wife, Dr. Bonnie Young Laing, who has written about anti-displacment policies and how cronyism helps to foster and preserve slums, Councilman Lavelle weighed in that he agreed that the governance of the fund and its transparency was all important.

As Mayor Peduto has said this is the largest TIF deal in the city’s history, there will be much to think about as to how this will benefit the neighborhood and I am very glad we have this to think,  talk and act about.