Cooking Our Mothers’ Recipes

Not long ago, I found myself sifting through my mother’s old recipe box with faded newspaper clippings and yellowed dividers labeled Meat, Casseroles, and Cakes. As I turned each card, childhood memories resurfaced, like the time I came home from school to find homemade egg noodles draped across our kitchen like a maze.

Food carries memory. Our family recipes remind us of parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and the special moments we shared around the table.

Now imagine moving to a new country, where your comfort foods, and even fruits and vegetables you thought were common, aren’t available. You walk into the grocery store, and nothing looks familiar.

Imagine the holidays without your favorite pumpkin pie, stuffing, or gravy. Your new community might not even celebrate the holidays you grew up cherishing. What would that be like?

That’s the reality many refugees and immigrants face. While they’re deeply grateful to be here, they still long for the tastes of home.

At Helpings of Hope, we grow four African vegetables, including lenga-lenga, to help make those tastes accessible again, while also providing fresh, healthy produce for our community.

From left to right: Kitty’s moms recipes; Fresh lenga-lenga; Lenga-Lenga with Dry Fish in process; (bottom) The finished recipe!

This Mother’s Day, our Lead Farm Assistant, Nana, shared one of her family’s favorite dishes. Her mom, Legume, made it for her when she was a child, and today it’s one of her own children’s favorites too.

We’re honored to share her mother’s recipe with you:

Legume’s Lenga-Lenga with Mungusu (Dry Fish)

Ingredients:
1 tbsp oil
1 tsp salt
1 tsp garlic
3 cups lenga-lenga, roughly chopped
2 large Roma tomatoes, quartered
1 large sweet onion, diced
1 lb dry fish
Green onions for garnish

Instructions:

1. Clean and chop the garlic, lenga-lenga, tomatoes, sweet onion, and green onions.
2. Heat oil in a pot. When it begins to sizzle, add all the vegetables except the lenga-lenga and green onions, cooking on medium heat until tender.
3. Add the dry fish and cook for another 10 minutes.
4. Add the lenga-lenga and salt. Simmer for 15 minutes.
5. Garnish with green onions and serve hot.

Every family cooks this recipe a little differently, but this is Nana’s favorite way—just like her mom made it.

We hope you enjoy the recipe and that it brings warm memories to your table this Mother’s Day.