Project Check-in 2: Moon in Her Mouth Recipes

Hi everybody! Feel free to check out the project Tess, Will, and I are working on and let us know if you have thoughts!

What:

1. Briefly describe how the form of your group’s final project has changed and/or developed from what you described in the first check-in. 

In our initial project check-in, we focused on explaining how our ideas for this project came to be; this project check-in will focus more on specific logistics and the execution of the project. Firstly, we’ve narrowed our focus to specifically black womanhood and cooking and have been delving into research connecting the two. We’d also hopefully like to discuss the relationship between black girlhood and black motherhood, and how food and family recipes intentionally connect multiple generations. Secondly, we’ve cemented our intended audience and have begun a promotional video in order to market our project. Finally, we’ve created lists of necessary supplies, as well as plans to procure supplies we don’t have.

2. How has your group addressed the feedback you received on your first check in?

We’ve gone through and discussed Professor Curseen’s comments and suggestions on our first check-in in order to assess where our project could be stronger. For instance, one of Professor Curseen’s comments on our initial project proposal was to thoroughly research ingredients in order to place them in Sassafrass’s specific context and geographical place. In order to do so, we’ve been finding newspaper articles and scholarly journals to thoroughly understand what role food was playing in Sassafrass’s context (see below). We’ve also been discussing how to communicate our theme of black womanhood to our audience and have decided to center our cooking time around a guided meditation.

Sources looked at:

Clark, Patricia E. “Archiving Epistemologies and the Narrativity of Recipes in Ntozake Shange’s ‘Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo.’” Callaloo, vol. 30, no. 1, 2007, pp. 150–162. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30135883

Stivers, Valerie. “Cooking with Ntozake Shange.” The Paris Review. 7 June 2019.

Who: 

1. Describe your intended audience for this project and how it has changed and/or narrowed from what you described in the first check-in. 

Our intended audience still includes members of the BC community who are specifically interested in learning about Black culture and have a love of cooking. We mainly hope to have members of our class, friends and family attend, as these are the groups we are most likely to reach with our outreach.

2. What steps have you taken thus far to reach your intended audience (i.e. sent evites, created a hashtag, developed a link to a virtual platform, etc.)

We’ve created a google form to send to roommates and friends. The purpose of the form is to collect emails and gauge who would be interested in receiving updates about our project/copies of the recipes so they can follow along with the cooking. With the information provided from the form, we will send out the link to our live stream as well as reminders about our event as the day approaches.

The form is attached below: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe67TtohksGkp5xg7gJgWYmb3xtbNwTLeC5C4T1UN3yae-MYg/viewform?usp=sf_link

We’re also working on a promotional/behind the scenes video that we will send via email to interested participants.

3. What do you want your audience to receive from your project? How will you know if/when your audience receives what you want them to receive from the project?

Hopefully, our audience will be able to have a deeper understanding of the history of black womanhood and cooking, as well as a more intentional approach to cooking themselves. We’ll be able to know if we’ve achieved our goal by reaching out to audience members post-livestream in order to garner feedback and responses. 

Why: 

1. Review the 10 project requirements with the details of your project in mind.

As stated above, we’re delving into reputable historical research in order to accurately contextualize the ingredients Sassafrass uses and view them in the same light she would have. We’re using the act of cooking to form a relationship between the senses, specifically taste, touch, and smell. We hope to more deeply comprehend the intentionality behind these recipes by actually performing them with a full knowledge of their histories. Furthermore, we plan to connect this cooking project to the larger conversation about race, specifically black women, by planning a guided meditation for our audience with questions and discussion.

2. At this stage, which of the requirements are you most confident your project will satisfy?

We’re definitely confident that our project will connect different senses well, especially taste, smell, and touch. We also hope that our project will build a bridge between discussions of race and sensory perception. Furthermore, in discussing Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo’s recipes, we automatically discuss its engagement of sensory materials.  

3. At this stage, which of the requirements are you least confident that your project will satisfy?

We’re having trouble connecting our recipes to reputable scientific research, although we’ve tried to bring in the intersection of science and cooking as a further way to legitimize the creativity of cooking.  

When: 

1. When do you plan for your project to take place and/or go live? (Be as specific as possible.)

We plan to do our cooking project the weekend of May 8th in order to complete it with enough time before the 13th due date, but we haven’t set a specific time yet. 

2. Working backwards from when you expect to launch your project (i.e. your answer to the last question), identify your deadlines for the three most important things your group needs to accomplish between now and when you launch your project:

• Finish our promotional video / invite our audience members by Wednesday, May 5th 
• Research the history of the connection between black womanhood and cooking in order to write our guided meditation by Thursday, May 6th
• Each individually buy our cooking supplies by Thursday, May 6th

How: 

1. What, if any, supplies or tools do you still need to acquire in order to complete your project?

We still have not bought some of the ingredients. Below is the whole ingredient list. The items we have not acquired yet are not crossed out. These items are all available at local grocery stores, we just haven’t bought them yet for freshnesses sake. Our plan is to go to the store 3-4 days before we present our project to pick up these last items. 

• medium grain Brown Rice
• smoked cheddar cheese 
• pimentos 
• condensed milk
• baby green peas
• Diced garlic  
• fresh walnuts 
• Cayenne to taste 
• Japanese spinach (or regular)
• Tamari 
• mushrooms
• Sweet hot peppers
• vegetable oil 
• Safflower oil 
• Duck 5-7 pounds, cleaned
• onion
• pan cornbread
• paprika 
• ground red pepper pod 
• butter
• oysters 
• celery, chopped
• pecans chopped
• Salt and pepper
• Cornmeal 
• Cooked beans (Chickpeas) 
• Mashed sweet potatoes
• Baking Soda
• Cinnamon
• honey
• Oven
• Baking sheet
• Blender
• Knives / Cutlery
• 3 Pots / 3 Pans 
• Aprons 
• Cooking gloves

2. Are there any materials or tools for which you need my help to acquire?

No, we will be able to gather all the necessary materials with relative ease. 

3. What, if any, of the project’s logistical aspects do you still need to sort out?

We need to formalize an invite list and a member minimum and maximum, as well as write the official script for our presentation. 

4. Consider the three main deadlines you listed above. For each of these deadlines, please describe the steps and/or tasks your group must complete in order to successfully meet that deadline.
   • Steps to Deadline I: Promote / invite 
     1. Work on promotional video
     2. Reach out to family and friends, especially those with a known interest in cooking and history 
   • Steps to Deadline II: Research 
     1. Connect different sources, whether they be scholarly articles on JSTOR or newspaper articles found online, into a cohesive narrative
   • Steps to Deadline III: Ingredients 
     1. Collaborate with all group members in order to not buy anything extraneous
     2. Make sure everyone has the same or similar ingredients before beginning to cook.
5. Considering the above steps, tasks, and deadline, please describe how you plan to distribute the work among your group.

Considering we’re all cooking separately over Zoom, we all need to buy our own ingredients and supply our own cooking utensils. However, we’ll collaborate on the research and promotion aspects of the project through Google Docs and other shared platforms. 

What, if any, questions do you have for me?

-About how long should the cooking take? Is there an expected amount of time? 

-Should our meditation center around Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo and the sisters’ stories, or can it be about black womanhood more broadly? 

-What would success on this project look like?