Bountiful goodness of Myanmar

Like most of the Southeast Asia countries, Myanmar's people and history is a glorious hotchpotch of settlers and invaders from all points.

For Mohana Gill, a 77-year old Burmese award-winning author, Myanmar is more than just a birth place.

Wearing her dark green htamein, an outfit very similar to our kurung, with her hair swept up tidily, she greeted us with her warmth and charmed us with her Burmese hospitality.

She offered us juice, homemade, freshly blended green juice, a concoction of fresh cucumber, celery, pennywort and green apple that quenched our thirst on a hot sunny day.

Mohana said, “This is a house of juices – red and green, so in this house you must have juice”.

And so we did.

Mohana is the author of several award-winning books. All her books are on healthy food and cooking for wellness entitled: Fruitastic, Vegemania, Hayley’s Fruitastic Garden and Hayley’s Vegemania Garden.

Her latest is called Myanmar, Cuisine, Culture and Customs. This cookbook captures the sights, sounds and flavours of Myanmar that has until recent years been isolated from the rest of the world with of course recipes that guarantees the urge for cooking to its readers.

Born in 1937, Mohana has spent 20 odd years in Myanmar. She survived the war in a very carefree way. She also went through the agony of losing her father at the tender age of 7.

After the war, her parents drilled into her that education is the utmost important wealth that one can have and in time, she landed herself a master’s degree from the University of Rangoon. She travelled extensively in her younger days and in 1965, she got a position as a lecturer in University Malaya and moved to Malaysia.

She currently resides in Petaling Jaya, with her rock of Gibraltar, Dr SS Gill a practising nephrology who is 80 years old today. They are both blessed with three sons and a granddaughter.

Mohana gave up her lecturing position to raise a family, to tend to the upbringing and well-being of her three boys and in her eyes that was the best decision she had ever made.

Mohana said that her mother was the woman that shaped her to be the respectable and fulfilled woman she is today.

Her mother was a focused woman, having had to raise five children on her own; her mother maintained her strength and will to live through good and hard times without jeopardizing the importance of family values and humility in the most nurturing and empowering manner.

From her mother, she learnt the magical content of nutritional ingredients of the Asian fruits, vegetables, fresh produce and spices – that good tasty food need not come from thousands of miles away, neither would they cost a hole in the pocket for the household.

Mohana also proved to us that preparing food for the soul isn’t at all a complex process. She plucked some snake gourds from her vegetable garden and began to cook up soup and other Burmese cuisine.

Mohana Gill’s life and success stories are typical yet unique. Her story tells us that being true and proud of your roots will take you to wonderful places. And that reflecting upon the price that history paid is not at all a bad thing; instead it gives you the epitome to realizing your dreams.