In this installment
Purple Barley Pancake Mix
Malaysian Red Curry Spice Kit
Purple Barley Pancake Mix
The Hayden Flour Mill was established in Tempe, Arizona back in the late 1800’s by Charles Hayden. As the legend goes, he was on his way north when he was delayed by flood waters on the Salt River. While waiting it out, he came to realize that this particular area would be the perfect place for a mill. There was (and still is) plenty of agriculture going on in that fertile valley and so the business began…and then decades later it started to fade in obscurity.
Enter Jeff Zimmerman and family and their vision for resurrecting Hayden Mills to its former glory. He wanted to bring back the process of minimally processing heritage wheats so that their unique flavors and uses could find some glory, too. Over the years we’ve enjoyed their crackers, their tortilla flour (a collaboration they did with Masienda…you might see their founder in some CapitalOne Small Business card commercials), a pizza mix that I’m likely to bring to our shelves in the future and then pancake mixes like this. Stone ground Tibetan Purple Barley is mixed with stone ground White Sonora Wheat and a handful of ingredients to create this easy use mix. They taste as great as they look and they look cool because of that faint hint of purple. Full flavored, nutty, a little purple and a whole lot delicious.
Malaysian Red Curry Spice Kit
Michelle Tew grew up in Malaysia—Panang in particular, the culinary capital of Malaysia—and her family has been on the island for more than 500 years. “It’s a port-city kind of culture,” Michelle explained to me over an internet call. She was in Malaysia, I was here in Michigan and there was a twelve-hour time difference, so my morning was her night. “Because all these different people and foods come into the port city, there’s influence from all over the world going back to the spice trade.” Even today, a third of all the world’s trade passes through that area.
“Even though there’s lots of different people, we all take our cooking very seriously. Households and clans are competitive on how good their food tastes!”
Her grandmother was well-known as a talented cook and opened a cooking school for wives and household runners. “My grandfather would type up the recipes because my grandmother wasn’t very good at writing, and I still have the recipes today.” Michelle said. “They’re faded but carefully typed out on index cards. They’re sort of a treasure.”
When she was a teen Michelle won a scholarship to Columbia University so she moved to the States. “It was hard and I was homesick.” She said. “So I cooked because of how much I missed everything, but it wasn’t the same. The ingredients were never quite right.”
Eventually, she got her MBA and found herself working in marketing—but cooking was in her blood. “I was in my small apartment, making pastes and planning meals. I started doing supper clubs and pop-ups around town and the response was so great that I finally decided to go for it!”
Instead of trusting her family recipes to co-packers here in the States, Michelle returns to Malaysia every 8-9 months to work with co-packers there to be closer to the ingredients. It’s a different experience over there and things aren’t always efficient, but the tradeoff is they work directly with local wholesalers for the fresh ingredients and they make it the way it should be made.
The spice kits are super easy to use. The recipe is on the back of the package and you should have everything you need in your pantry all ready. Well, assuming you have coconut milk, but otherwise you should be all set!