If, when you travel, you are lucky enough to stay with people, it is essential that you bring ideas for what to cook them. So far we have had three people say, “How about you cook us a typical American meal?”
We do cook at home, but I’m still quite self conscious about cooking for people other than Jack and myself. To add to my general anxiety there is the challenge of making something representative of a culinary melting pot. Also, it must be made with seasonally and geographically available ingredients, in someone else’s kitchen, usually without access to the internet, meaning no recipes I’ve emailed to myself and nothing from recipes.com.
In Corsica, we made steak, mashed potatoes, cucumber salad and our old standby - waldorf salad. In Vienna we made stir-fried cauliflower and tofu and a a cabbage-apple-cashew-lemon salad we like. A few days ago in Morocco we made beef stew with cabbage, carrots, onions and potatoes, baked apples and …. a waldorf salad with guava standing in for grapes. It always feels like we’re winging it but so far it has gone okay. I do with I had a recipe for snicker doodles or something though.
BELOW: A tall guy cooking in a short kitchen in Morocco
BELOW: It rained about 10 days before our visit to the Sahara, so we got to sample a desert green called something like roquette. It tastes similar to arugula.
I checked some stores and then read wikipedia to confirm that kale doesn’t exist in Europe (or North Africa). Their loss! On the other hand we’ve had about five new kinds of guava, several kinds of greens and some delicious kumquats, which I don’t think I’d ever eaten. Also, in Italy we ate several varieties of eggplant, I’d never seen, including white ones.
BELOW: a raspberry guava or possibly a cherry guava
thank goodness, I was going thru withdrawals. you look happy and all the food sounds delicious. love you
ReplyDelete