(light music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loons cawing) (upbeat music) - Cruising your way next "Off 90".

We meet the couple who founded Eureka Kids childcare.

We visit an art cooperative in Minneapolis.

We get our groove on at the Rochester downtown roller disco.

It's all coming up on your next stop "Off 90".

(exciting music) Hi I'm Barbara Keith.

Thanks for joining me on this trip "Off 90".

After moving to the United States from India Mangesh Mane met his wife Hema Sai Kishore in Texas.

Eventually the couple moved to Minnesota.

After living in Rochester for a few years they decided to open a childcare center called Eureka Kids.

The center prepares children for a lifetime of learning and strives to help them become global citizens like Mangesh and Hema.

- You know I've read so much about United States that it's a country that is welcoming for immigrants.

So I never had any doubts that you know I will be able to make a good living here and be successful if I put my heart into it.

My name is Mangesh Mane.

I work in Mayo Clinic in IT.

We also have a business that's called Eureka Kids childcare center that we opened three years back.

- My name is Hema Sai Kishore.

And I work with Mayo Clinic in the IT division.

And we also run a childcare center here in Rochester Minnesota.

- So I did engineering computer engineering back in India.

And that time in computer was you know growing field.

And I thought I want a part in there in the US.

So I decided to migrate to United States.

I came to through a company in India who had a system company here.

And came to Chicago was my board of entry.

Worked in multiple places, worked in Chicago, worked in Florida, Ohio, California, Alabama, and eventually came to Minnesota.

And now Minnesota is my home since 1999.

- So I grew up in India in the Southern part of India.

As you know India is very diverse with a lot of different cultures.

We grew up in a joined family, so it was a family of 25 people with all the aunt, uncle, siblings, everyone together.

I came to Dallas through my job at IBM and lived there for one year.

And that's when I connected with Mangesh.

And.

I traveled to Rochester, I liked the place, I liked the family, and then decided to move into Rochester.

We got married and I moved into Rochester with my two kids.

So he had two kids and.

If you see our family you will not say that you know we are a blended family.

- We got married in 2015.

We both have our own history.

I went through a struggle in my life with my first marriage.

Hema went through her struggles in her first marriage.

Luckily we met together online.

And when we came we thought you know we need to do something different.

Because we had lost so much time in our first marriage.

And we wanted to basically see what can we do different on two levels.

One for our personal satisfaction, and the second is Rochester this town has given us so much in the last 20 years.

And how what can we do differently and give it back to the community in a meaningful way?

- After we settled in it was a settling period of two years, two or three years then we decided okay now we need to settle our financial life.

Plus.

We like the Rochester community a lot because this community was diverse as compared to when I lived in Dallas it was very different.

I could see a lot of difference between Texas and Minnesota as well.

Forget about India and US, Texas and Minnesota itself was too different.

And I love kids.

Mangesh also loves kids.

(cheerful music) And then we felt you know, we see the kids growing up and you know, every day when the kids are learning something and seeing the kids grow in itself is very satisfying.

- So we both sat together and said, you know we came up with different options but decided to you know open our create our own childcare center.

Because we had experienced that problem you know growing up finding a good quality childcare for our own kids that caters to diversity and inclusion.

And our staff is very diverse.

Most of our kids come from a diverse families from different backgrounds and different cultures.

And you celebrate all their cultures, all their festivals.

We also have cooking classes, yoga, you know dance classes.

- So we try to teach the kids that okay there are these people from different cultures here.

So that way you know growing up they are aware that there are people with different color, different culture, different religion.

That aspect it is very important that kids know so that way it's not a culture shock for them when they go to school or maybe at work.

With regard to food also we try to bring in that multi culture cuisine.

What we try to do is take the best of the worlds from different cultures and you know try to provide that for lunch or breakfast.

And kind of encourage the teachers to talk through when the kids are eating those foods talking about where which culture that food is from and you know what makes it diverse.

- We are trying to give a fulfilling experience for our kids at this young age.

Something that we got me and Hema got at a later stage.

Now we can do that and give it back to the community to these young kids so they can be prepared to become a global citizen.

(upbeat rock music) - Black Table Arts is a community driven arts cooperative located in Minneapolis Minnesota, gathering black communities through the arts toward better black futures.

(light piano music) - At a young age.

Getting.

And building relationships with mentors that took arts advocacy seriously and took community organizing seriously really was the threshold for me to think about as a participant how can I exercise my creative muscles in a way that are really refreshing and connect me to my peers?

One of the stories of the Twin Cities is that in some ways we're always showing up to the front lines around police brutality.

So when I was coming up there was a lot of organizing work around Terrance Franklin.

And that mixed with also teaching arts literacy just really provided the spaces locally to do writing workshops around changing local conditions.

Whether that is police brutality or food deserts or gardens or what have you.

I'm Keno Evol I'm the Founder and Director of The Black Table Arts Cooperative.

So Black Table Arts started in 2015.

There was sort of a void in the city to gather black artists and young black people to think about what are the ways in which the artists can respond to the happenings of this particular city, but also find joy and not let grief have the last word?

How do we get together and gather in ways that are refreshing that aren't seeped in sort of anxiety or paranoia or any of these things but that are fun?

At Black Table Arts we say that art keeps the enthusiasm of social movement alive.

For us that means that to be a artist located at the grassroots that you have an eye on society.

You know Gwendolyn Brooks coined the term verse journalism which means like poetry is a report back.

It's a more accurate account of what's you know going on in the city outside of the official reports you know what I mean?

Manolo Callahan says we must renew our habits of assembly.

We must try to get better at the theory and practice of getting together.

And I think that that is what we try to do is try to get better at the theory and practice of assembly and getting together as a more radical democracy.

And poetry is a way to do that with a kind of imagination and empathy.

That's what we're trying to get at.

And it's fun.

You know when you're at a school board meeting and you hear a poet or you're at a protest and you hear a poem or you hear a singer or you see someone dance.

It makes you wanna stick around a little bit longer and get plugged into issues.

Where art is there's joy.

Before we got our building we did our programming and partnerships with venues in the city.

So places like The Loft Literary Center, the University of Minnesota, the Illusion Theater.

So these spaces look like for example like the free black table open mic that happened at the Illusion Theater which was our first program.

That's really how we got our name from the free black table.

And that's sort of how Black Table Arts emerged then.

Thinking well this event is going you know really well.

What other spaces can we hold that gets at the sort of black joy unapologetic black joy and gets people to gather and hang out and find friends and think about changing conditions?

The heart of Black Table Arts has always been political education.

So with that you find language around the space.

I mean each room is named after a black woman writer.

So we have the Lorraine Hansberry reading nook, we have the Suzanne Sizer room, we have the Octavia Butler room, and the Toni Cade Bambara conference room.

And these are all writers that greatly influenced the work in myself.

We're a pay what you can art cooperative.

And we start at 10 dollars and people can become a member on our website.

We do this bi-weekly writing program called Black Lines Matter.

We do events every month.

Black Lines Matter is bi-weekly.

And then we do events all the time, that's on our social media accounts.

We have a bonfire coming up that we try to do bi-monthly called The Glow.

And it's a bonfire for black artists.

And it happens in the parking lot next to our building.

We do a study group the last Friday of the month around black abolition.

We have a program that we're rolling out called The Youth Cooperative Lab which will be a two day a week writing program writing for social change program matching a writer with a community organizer.

And you know really making that connection again between artistic craft and grassroots organizing.

So we're be on the look out for that 'cause yeah I'm excited.

In the Twin Cities sometimes given the violence that's visited upon black people you can get convinced that you are isolated, you can get convinced that grief is perpetual.

Part of the ways in which these harsh conditions continue is to again like convince us that there is no alternative.

But when you get folks who have been you know disenfranchised for so long talking about imagination and talking about forming study groups and talking about you know getting together to discuss alternatives then that's inherently subversive to those harsh conditions.

Artists remind people that despair doesn't have to have the last word.

And artistic spaces, that joy is available to you, that you can be surprised by how many people show up to a writing workshop.

You know you could be surprised about how many people show up to a bonfire.

And people do show up.

It's important because I think it's important to make ourselves available for surprise and joy in this midst of so much disparities and various violence's that is visited upon black folks in the Twin Cities.

(upbeat rock music) - Rochester chef Shari Mukherjee shares her recipe for a seasonal pumpkin Alfredo.

(light acoustic music) - My name is Shari and I am back with another recipe.

This recipe is perfect for fall, kids love it, you will love it, it's really easy.

So today we're gonna make a pumpkin Alfredo.

Here I already have some pasta that's been cooked, this is just a farfalle.

You can really use any pasta shape that you like.

This is not very much, this is maybe about a half a pound of pasta.

So the recipe I'm having today typically if I make this for my family it's gonna be about double the amount.

Here I have half a cup of pumpkin puree.

If you do not have pumpkin puree this is just out of a can, you can definitely make your own pumpkin puree.

We have a little bit of heavy cream.

Some Parmesan cheese.

Some sage leaves.

If you do not have fresh sage leaves dried work perfectly fine, you'll just wanna use a little bit less.

Here we have garlic.

And I'm gonna show you, this is minced garlic, so I'm basically just using the small little grater and a garlic clove.

And you just go ahead and grate that garlic.

We want it to be really fine.

We don't really want big chunks of garlic in this dish.

If you really love garlic and that's how you wanna go then you know you do you, (Shari laughs) it won't hurt it at all.

Here I have a little bit of Parmesan for garnish.

So garnish is what you put on the dish when it's completely done to make it look pretty.

To do this kind of a cut on the Parmesan I simply used a vegetable peeler.

And you just go ahead and slice it on the Parmesan cheese and you get these beautiful little shards.

So that's how you make those.

And some butter.

I also have nutmeg.

So nutmeg is the only spice that we're gonna put into this.

It just adds that little extra something to the dish.

It gives it a little extra flavor, a little extra body.

The first thing we're gonna do with our sage, if you're using fresh we're going to want to julienne it.

To julienne it you simply stack up the leaves.

It's really easy.

And then we're just gonna roll it like a cigar.

Really nice and tight.

You simply take your knife and just start slicing.

I did keep a couple whole sage leaves here.

At the end I'm gonna julienne these and I'm gonna use these as a garnish.

Because I'm not cooking them right away I do not want to julienne them yet because they will kinda turn a little bit black, they'll oxidize.

These if you have small sage leaves you can go ahead and add those whole into the pan, you do not have to julienne.

But these were pretty large so we really kinda want these pretty little ribbons.

So now I've got the pan going at a medium heat.

We're gonna go ahead and add some butter.

Just a good dollop of butter.

Now browned butter is basically you'll notice the milk solids in this will start to brown and it'll kind of separate.

It'll foam up, all of that, you'll get a nice nutty color.

All right sage in.

And we're gonna add in our garlic too.

Now this is about a teaspoon.

We want that garlic to no longer be raw.

And you can always kinda tell the difference when garlic is cooked, the smell almost mellows out.

If you're using ground nutmeg I would start with about maybe one eighth to one quarter of a teaspoon.

If you look closely you can see that our butter is starting to turn brown, and so is our garlic.

We do not want this garlic to turn any more brown than this.

We do not want burnt garlic.

So now we're gonna go ahead to cool our pan we're gonna add in that pumpkin puree.

Now I'm using about a cup of cream.

And maybe a little bit less to start with.

Let's do about three quarters of a cup.

And if we need more we'll add a little bit more.

So now you can see I've stirred in that pumpkin puree with the cream.

I still have a little cream left.

I also have some water.

If you cook the pasta right when you're doing this saves some of that water that the pasta has boiled into.

That's gonna thicken up your sauce beautifully.

This is about a cup of grated Parmesan, this is how we're getting our Alfredo sauce now.

And I think it does need a little salt.

So I'm gonna go ahead and grab my salt.

Now we're gonna go ahead and add our pasta.

I feel like no dish is complete without a little bit of fresh black pepper.

This is how I wold plate it up for my family in the evening.

Again I mean this was really quick dish.

This took about five minutes to create this sauce.

You know you boil the pasta, you can have this on the dinner table within 20 minutes on a busy night.

And then I just like to add a little bit of fresh sage on top.

And just a little bit of those Parmesan shavings.

I'm telling you you guys this is fabulous, it's a quick and easy meal, something your family will love, perfect for fall, can't get any better than this.

(upbeat rock music) - The people are cool and the rink is hot.

Rochester's first ever roller disco celebrates all things funky, sparkly, and fun on wheels.

Downtown turns into an outdoor roller rink complete with a DJ spinning high energy tunes, skate rentals, party lighting, and of course a disco ball.

(upbeat music) - [Molly] Disco as we are presenting it at this event is joy, exuberance, moving your body, dancing, having a good time, bright colors, glitter, really good energy.

- DMC is really excited to support the Rochester Downtown Alliance and the first roller disco in downtown on Peace Plaza.

iT's a great event and we're really excited to support it 'cause it brings so many people to experience downtown in a whole new way.

- The Roller Disco is two days of outdoor rollerskating for free on a rink that we are bringing in from a national company that actually travels around the country.

This has been featured in Boston, Philadelphia, and at Coachella.

So if it's good enough for Beyoncé it's good enough for Rochester.

We'll have a DJ, we'll have disco lighting, we'll have tinsel, we will have a photo booth, we will have a very good time.

But the important thing to understand is that we're actually bringing everything to you.

We're gonna have the rink, we're gonna have the skate rentals, all you need to do is show up.

We are bringing in a lighting designer.

We don't want just the off the shelf lighting.

We gotta take it up a notch.

We absolutely wanted an event that could appeal to different audiences.

Saturday is more focused at our younger crowd, so we're gonna have a teen hour when we first get started.

And then we'll go into an adult open skate in the evening with a DJ.

We'll have some vendors here, some will be vending adult beverages.

On Sunday it's more of a family day.

- So we're having this good time, don't you know that's what you came here?

Sunday fun day.

- And that one we're really kinda looking back to the roller skating birthday parties of our youth.

Maybe celebrating that vision a little so there will be some competitions, there will be pizza, and different kinds of vendors.

MedCity Roller Derby is coming to give instruction on both Saturday and Sunday.

- The MedCity Roller Derby has been in Rochester since 2012 and we are the local roller derby team.

We're just gonna be normal roller skating at the event this weekend, no contact, yep.

The roller derby team we're volunteering as event staff, and we're gonna be there to give tips and tricks for roller skaters and any beginners.

If you've never been on eight wheels before we're there to help.

It's really just giving instructions as far as you know how to give yourself better balance and learning how to fall.

We give tips like fall small.

And as long as you're there and you're having fun it doesn't matter.

- So we've got a lot of fun vendors that are also gonna bring their energy to the event.

We have Taco Labs, Carroll's Corn, the Rochester Art Center, Neon Green Studios, and then of course a number of our brick and mortar restaurants are just a few steps away.

Roller skating is fun, it's being with your friends, it's celebrating some of the simpler joys of life.

It is exciting to kind of see our community and the public in general get excited about roller skating again.

I think it's a way that lots of generations can come have fun together.

We are really excited that we're able to present this for free this year.

We're very grateful for our supporters and sponsors and partners on this event that we're able to help us make that happen.

- A vibrant downtown is extremely important for every community.

And part of the DMC initiative is to help grow that vibrancy.

And when we heard about the roller disco and other events that have been held here this summer those types of events are extremely important to draw people downtown to the center of gravity to share in experiences, to create memories together.

And those are the types of things that we continue to look for to partnership in to continue to create a downtown that is welcoming and inviting for all.

- Roller skating for me is my biggest outlet.

Whenever I get to go out and skate with my teammates it's really amazing for like my physical health but also my mental health.

Our team really wants this to be an opportunity for people to discover the love of skating that we have.

And who knows, maybe it'll lead to the potential for a permanent roller rink somewhere in Rochester, that would be our dream.

(upbeat rock music) - We've reached the end of this tour "Off 90".

Thanks for riding along.

See you next time.

But before we go, Jon Swanson with the Minnesota Marine Art Museum dives deep into their collection to share a piece of art with us from the vault.

- Hello and welcome.

I'm Jon Swanson Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona.

Today we're gonna look at an object from our vault.

An item that hasn't been shown or exhibited recently.

(light music) What we have here is a Napoleonic era ship model made from bone, wood, and hair.

During the Napoleonic conflicts in Europe, France and their allies verses various European factions, were involved in a nearly a 12 year battle on land and at sea.

A lot of the French prisoners captured by the British were imprisoned in ships and prisons built in England.

In order to pass the time they were giving raw materials to make various objects including what you see here, a ship model.

Now this became kind of a little industry.

Prisoners were able to sell these models and gain a little bit of money.

So what you see is a very detailed highly accurate ship model made from beef bone, sheep bone, whale baleen, or whale bone, human hair, horse hair, and bits of wood.

These sailors having served in the Navy, and worked on these wooden ships, had intricate knowledge of all the standing and running rigging, how the sails worked, how everything was built.

So these models became highly collectable and highly sought after.

This model dates to the early nineteenth century about 1803 to 1815, somewhere in there.

It's by an unknown artist, most likely French.

And this rare and unusual object is one of the many things that we have in our vault at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum.

(light music) (upbeat rock music) (light music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loons cawing)