Washington Post – Maryland Festival Goers Introduced to Salvadoran Food, Culture

Ping Eng and her daughter Sarah walked slowly through the crowd, each holding a tiny plate with a corn tortilla filled with cheese, beans and pork.

“I am excited about this,” Eng said as she took a bite of a pupusa. She later wondered aloud how cooks were able to get the meat filling inside the pupusa. “It must be difficult to make.”

For Eng, a Gaithersburg resident who was born in China, Sunday’s annual World of Montgomery Festival in Wheaton was a chance to try the Salvadoran signature dish for the first time. Her daughter was especially curious about trying the food from the country of origin for many of her high school classmates.

To find out who won Sunday’s Pupusa Cookoff at the World of Montgomery Festival, click here to read the full article.

 

Wheaton Patch – Salvadoran Restaurants to Compete in Pupusa Cookoff

If you need another reason to come to the World of Montgomery Festival in Wheaton on Oct. 21, let it be for the pupusas, those fried corn-dough pockets of cheese, pork and beans.

Five Salvadoran restaurants in Montgomery County will be competing in a pupusa cookoff, with festival goers as the judges. Here’s how it works: buy a $5 ticket online or at the festival, sample pupusas from each restaurant, and vote for your favorite.

Tasting and voting will go on from 12-3 p.m. The winner will be announced at 3 p.m., but pupusas (and other Salvadoran food) will continue to be sold until the end of the festival.

To read the full article, click here.

 

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance – Financial Lessons from Immigrants: Work Your Way Up

As a 14-year-old in El Salvador during its brutal civil war, José Wilfredo Flores faced a choice: Join the guerrillas or join the army.

“The guerrillas would come to our house,” says Flores. “We had to hide. You couldn’t say no because then they would think you were on the army’s side and shoot you. A few hours later, the army guys would come and say, ‘We want food. We want to take you.’ If you said no, they’d think you were with the guerrillas.”

In 1984, Flores’s mother made her own painful choice. She paid $1,400 to a smuggler, or coyote, to help guide her son to Washington, D.C., where his uncle and his 18-year-old brother lived.

To read the full article referencing LEDC’s work with immigrants who want to start small businesses, click here.

 

Washington Post – In Down Economy, Nonprofits Explore Profit-Making Ventures

Nonprofits are not adorable, cute, little organizations that help the needy. At least that’s how chief executive of D.C. Central Kitchen Mike Curtin puts it when people try to shame his nonprofit’s earned-income ventures.

“We’re a business and if we don’t approach it that way, we’re not going to be successful,” Curtain said to nearly 60 nonprofit leaders at a recent conference hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton at its McLean headquarters.

The panel discussion is one in a series of conferences that Booz Allen has organized since 2007 to provide small nonprofits with management and fundraising insights.

To read the full article, click here.