Coco-Nuts for Helping

One of ISY’s key service learning groups, Community Kitchen, has been working on exciting things over the course of this school year in order to achieve SDG 2 – Zero Hunger. Back before online school, Community Kitchen would meet weekly on Fridays and make food to send to an orphanage called Kyaik Waing. However, safety concerns and restrictions due to COVID made it difficult to continue making such weekly home cooked meals and visits. Therefore, they started sending packaged snacks such as fruit juices and oreos to the kids there.

This year, Community Kitchen had started to expand to not only helping the orphanage at Kyaik Waing, but also care centers or those who are in need of food in general. However, due to the current circumstances in Myanmar, this new goal has also been put on hiatus. Instead, Community Kitchen is now working towards internal improvement. Specifically, improving the cooking skills of members as well as increasing the reach of their social media pages. They are now working to create a website with all of their projects allocated into one place as well as testing and creating easy, but tasty, home cooked recipes for the future.

Last week, the members of Community Kitchen got together on Zoom and made mote lone yae baw (a traditional Burmese Thingyan snack that are small white glutinous rice balls filled with jaggery). Katherine (G11), the communications leader of Community Kitchen, stated that “our goal is to spread love and positivity through the home cooked food we make. We hope that we can continue to do so in the future, but for now, making food alone at home is plenty of fun!”

Here is a message from the members of Community Kitchen to YOU!

For the upcoming Thingyan Water Festival, members of Community Kitchen made Mont Lone Yay Baw. Mont Lone Yay Baw is a traditional Burmese dessert that is usually eaten during the Thingyan festival. The literal meaning of Mont Lone Yay Baw is “round snack on the water”, as the procedure consists of boiling balls of rice dough which float on top of the bubbling water when they’re ready to eat. For those who want to follow along and make it, here’s a recipe:

Makes 25-30 small balls

Ingredients:

200g glutinous rice flour
50g rice flour
⅛ tsp salt
200mL water
200g palm sugar, divided into 1cm balls or chunks
Handful of fresh grated coconut

Steps:

Mix flour, salt, and water and knead into dough.
Make 25-30 small balls out of the dough.
Wrap each palm sugar chunk using one small ball of dough. Repeat with all balls. Make sure there are no holes and the palm sugar is completely covered.
Place balls in boiling water. They are cooked once they float up to the surface.
Plate with grated coconut on top.