Mint

Pani puri salad.

Check out season 2 recap of Dressler Parson’s Regenerative Baking podcast — what a great topic and amazing guests — including me 😊!

If you garden, you know mint is often the first plant that comes up – or more accurately, it never really goes away. It’s hardy, it’s prolific, it needs to be tamed.

Mint is a part of our daily lives — in our toothpaste, our gum, our vapes. While it’s highly commercialized as a flavor and a concept, I’d argue in the Western world it’s underutilized as a food source.

It repels mosquitos, attracts beneficial pollinators, and smells great. If you plant mint in a pot or in your garden, you’ll have it pretty much forever. It’s the type of food I like to highlight in this newsletter – packing a beautiful flavor-punch with no to little resources.

Pani puri salad

I feature mint in a riff on pani puri, one of my favorite things to eat. If you’re not familiar, pani puri is a common Desi snack/street food/party food, in which little puffed up puris are used as little cups for the pani, plus some variation of a bit of potato and kala chana and sev, then topped with chutneys. Here’s a Youtube short that breaks it down better than words can.

Let’s start with pani, or water. A mint-cilantro water, cooling with a tiny kick::

1 cup mint

1 cup cilantro (an herb that warrants its own newsletter)

3 tbsp lemon juice

2 Thai chili peppers (the little ones)

Dash salt

Process above in a blender and mix with 4 cups of cold water. Refrigerate for at least an hour.

Then the amli chutney, a sweet and sour tamarind chutney typically sweetened with dates and/or jaggery. Here’s a version I made using ingredients I already had:

I got treacle at a British grocery in the West Village.

1 cup tamarind pulp (followed directions from Hungry Huy to process).

Processing tamarind is a touch laborious, which I suspect is why it's been difficult to commercialize on a global scale. You have to crack open the shells, soak the fruit in boiling water, and then strain the flesh. But it's fun! Pick a hot lazy day when you feel like playing with food.

½ cup ginger syrup, which I had leftover from caramelizing ginger to make scones

1.5 tbsp treacle

dash or two salt

dash or two of jeera or cumin powder

dash or two chili powder

Mix all ingredients until treacle fully melts over medium heat.

And then salad composition time:

Base

Large bowl of shredded cabbage + small shredded onion + handful of navy beans

Dressings:

Pani + amli chutney

Crunchy bits:

Crushed potato chips

Newsfeed

“NYC Issued Over 10,000 Street Vendor Tickets, Confiscated Tons of Food in 2024,” City Limits. Those who have problems with people selling food on the street in New York should leave. The Street Vendor Project does important work to protect the rights of many workers in the city — and helps to keep the city a city.

Seasonal food guide, Grace Communications Foundation. A handy guide to what’s in which produce is in season in your state in the US.

“The Grannies who saved Albanian cuisine,” BBC News. I’ve been thinking of this article here and there since I read it two months ago. It’s about the loss of knowledge of traditional Albanian cooking arts resulting from the country’s totalitarian regime and subsequent collapse from the 50s to the 90s, roughly. Happily, some Albanian women of a certain age retained this knowledge, and now there’s an upswell in interest in rediscovering these lost foods and recipes. I’ve been doing some reading on fascism (no particular reason why), and the connections to loss of food knowledge specifically is a topic I hope to come back to here.

Li’l Nubs

I call this section “li’l nubs” in honor of the nubs on tamarind!