Eating like an Immigrant, Part VII (final): Summary

So, after the long ramble, here’s the simple bit. I would love to know what you all think, or your ideas along these lines.

• Identify your local immigrant cultures. Where I am now, it’s Hispanic food, but there’s also a small Asian and Middle-Eastern population. There are so many amazing and inexpensive Hispanic restaurants and grocery stores with amazing and exotic foods and spices. Look around you!
• Identify your inexpensive food sources. Down here, it’s an international farmer’s market in Atlanta, & we’re doing CSA boxes with a friend. In Pennsylvania, there are urban farmer’s markets scattered all over major cities. And through this, make inexpensive staples/seasonal foods the basis of your cooking explorations as much as possible.
• Experiment with spices.
• Feel free to substitute similar ingredients, using things that are available where you are, or ingredients that your family likes. We can’t eat things too hot-spicy, so we usually make things flavor-spicy instead, if that makes sense.
• Save yourself time when you can by doubling what you need.
• Use food as a learning experience.
• Practice hospitality as you’re learning.

Cross-posted from In Search of Lost Time.

Eating like an Immigrant, Part VI: Education and Culture

Participating in the My Kitchen, My World challenge has reinforced to me how much foods preserve and pass on cultural identity. You can learn so much about a culture by the foods they eat and how they eat their meals. I’m thinking at the moment of the communal nature of Ethiopian food, sitting together at a small table together, with a large round of injera flatbread spread across it, and stews for all to share as everyone tears off pieces of the bread to scoop it up.

The resonance between food and identity is so powerful. The PBS documentary I mentioned earlier, The Meaning of Food, discussed a recent cookbook, In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. It consists of recipes passed around by Jewish women at a concentration camp. Separated from family, home, and sustenance, they wrote down their recipes as a way of preserving and passing on their culture. I haven’t read it yet, but I find the concept incredibly moving.

As my kids grow, I imagine many interdisciplinary teaching moments coming out of cooking foods of different countries. I really want to (eventually) design a course for the home-school co-op that I’ll be teaching at on food and music of different cultures. As you cook, you can bring in ideas about another country’s situation or needs, as well as people you might know who serve in that country.

Or–closer to home–cooking immigrant foods could be paired with hospitality. Many of you have immigrants in your community–one way to reach out to them could be to cook them a meal, perhaps one from their country. Or ask them to teach you how to cook one of their traditional meals.

Also, for us, a meal from another country has become a cheap substitute for travel. Or anticipation of future travels, if we’re in an optimistic mood. We’ll make a meal from a particular country or region, and then watch a film from that country, or watch a Rick Steves lecture. Or try other pairings–a meal and a book (I just finished reading Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy and am indulging in its sequel, Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, and find myself wanting to cook Italian food many nights, especially since she stops the narration occasionally to give a few seasonal recipes), a meal and music (Shepherd’s pie and some Irish folk music?), or a meal and an art exhibit.

Recipes

Here are a couple of fun food and culture pairings we’ve done–of course (a recipe I mentioned in the last post) there’s pairing the Pixar film Ratatouille with ratatouille.
The Godfather movies with antipasti.
Tapas with Rick Steves’ travels to Spain

Cross-posted from In Search of Lost Time.

Eating like an Immigrant, Part V: More on Convenience

I know that these posts are interconnected, but I wanted to revisit an idea I mentioned earlier, the ideal of convenience.

When you’re making food from other countries/immigrant cultures, it doesn’t have to be elaborate. Sometimes we’ll make a Mediterranean antipasto platter with good bread, meats, cheeses, vegetables or a salad (maybe tabbouleh or a couscous salad), and olives. On a hot summer night, it feels so exotic and fun, but incredibly easy. Or French onion soup (in the crockpot) and croque monsieurs (fancy French grilled cheese sandwiches).

It also saves effort to either double or triple what you’re making and freeze it (or eat it for lunches) (I guess this works better in small families like ours). Or use it for more than one purpose, like ratatouille as a stew the first night (I always crockpot it), over spaghetti the next, and on top of toasted bread as bruschetta another night. Also, if you get a fun ingredient–say, a bunch of fresh herbs, or some unusual vegetables–find a couple of things to use it for, so it doesn’t go to waste if you don’t need it all for one recipe.

Recipes
Ratatouille: recipe and five ways to use it
Simple French onion soup

Cross-posted from In Search of Lost Time.

Eating like an Immigrant, Part IV: Staples

Recently, I’ve been doing a blog challenge called My Kitchen, My World, in which bloggers pick two countries to “visit” a month, make a meal from the country, and blog about what they’ve done. Here’s a link to the countries I’ve “visited” so far.

It’s really fun, but I don’t always plan ahead, and don’t have the energy for an “extra” grocery store trip. So, a lot of times I’ll google the country’s name along with the ingredients I have in the house. This really has brought home the fact that a lot of cultures use the same basic ingredients–rice, pasta or bread, beans, lentils, common vegetables and herbs (often grown in one’s own garden), widely available meats or fish–but are distinguished by their use of spices to flavor the foods. So, for me, having good spices in my cupboard is an investment that actually makes a lot of sense (and you can get good spices for not too much, if you look at ethnic stores, like I said above). Good spices can be combined with inexpensive ingredients, like beans, rice, and in-season vegetables, to make incredible and economical meals.

And use what you have on hand–especially with good spices. Sal, a first-generation Sicilian friend of ours freezes bits and pieces of leftover meats, and then he makes the most amazing tomato sauce you could imagine from whatever he has in the house. That could be a whole ‘nother post, creative ways to use your leftovers, but I don’t want to make this series too long. I feel like if I get another meal out of leftovers, it’s like getting a free meal. Think about soups, stews, egg-based dishes, fried rice, and so forth as ways of using up small bits of leftovers to make another meal. Or you can repurpose leftovers: old bread as french toast (or if you’re PA Dutch, hutzla), strata, ribolitta, or bread crumbs.

I’m about to order the Mennonite cookbook Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook which encapsulates some of these ideas, especially cooking with staples even in exploring exotic cuisines.

Recipes

*This post includes our family recipe for Hutzla passed down through several generations.
*Ribollita is a great way to use up leftover bread (you can freeze some and save it, if you’d like) as well as bits and pieces of vegetables.

Sal’s Sicilian Sauce

Well, it’s more of a process than a recipe, following what his mom taught him. He freezes leftover meats–pork chops, sausage, beef, etc.–and then when it comes time to make his sauce, he browns the meats, adds a couple of large cans of crushed tomatoes, a small can of tomato paste, Italian seasoning and a pinch of red pepper flakes, and maybe some diced veggies (celery, carrot, etc.). He cooks it for an hour or so until everything is tender, and tastes to see how sweet it is, and adds wine, and some sugar, if needed, and cooks it down if its too runny.

Then he sautees a whole pile of onions and garlic in olive oil, and adds it (which is really good–all of the tomato sauces I’ve seen call for it at the beginning, but this is really tasty), mixes it in, and cooks it for a very few more minutes.

Meanwhile, he boils pasta al dente, doesn’t rinse it, and when he’s getting it ready to serve, he mixes the pasta and a cup or two of sauce in one bowl, and serves the rest of the meat sauce on the side, for people to pour on top.

I had some last night–we had made up an entire soup pot full of it and froze it into several containers. It had chicken sausage, kielbasa, smoked pork loin cut into teeny cubes, and little bits of ham–not a ton of any one meat (they were all leftovers I had frozen before), but they each added distinctive flavors to it.

You can see Sal (and his famous sauce!) here.

Cross-posted from In Search of Lost Time.

Eating Like an Immigrant, Part III: Economy and Convenience

When we moved, our income changed along with our family size, so that eating out regularly wasn’t a good choice. In Pittsburgh, we had a slew of inexpensive and fun ethnic restaurants we would visit together. Athens, well, it isn’t quite the same. At the same time, I realized that if I cooked more exotic foods at home, it would make it feel more like an adventure than a sacrifice. The two kinds of foods we loved the most were Indian and Thai foods. So I focused on learning to cook Thai and Indian food, and found that there are simple and economical meals for both of those cuisines.

In doing some reading, I realized that most food cuisines are based on what’s locally available. It feels almost redundant to write that, but look at recipes for bouillabaisse, for example. It was originally based on the leftover small fish that got caught in fishermen’s nets. Now, people argue about the authenticity if you don’t use particular kinds of fish, etc. But then, it was a matter of what was there, what was inexpensive, what was not wasteful, what was convenient. It can be easy, again, to get lost in the web of Authenticity, and not use what’s at hand. For immigrants, many didn’t have the luxury of their old local ingredients, and had to adapt to the availability of foods in their new country.

Along this journey, I found a fabulous Thai cookbook, Quick and Easy Thai: 70 Easy Recipes, written by a woman who lived in Thailand, learned to love the food and culture, and then came back to the US where a lot of the more exotic ingredients were hard to come by. The cookbook is written with both common ingredients that can replace the more unusual ingredients, as well as the more authentic option, if you have access to it. For example, she suggests replacing wild lime leaves or lemongrass (common in Thailand) with grated lime or lemon peel and a little extra lime or lemon juice in the recipe.

I haven’t actually used it, but a similar cookbook–but for Indian food–is 5 Spices, 50 Dishes: Simple Indian Recipes Using Five Common Spices. It uses five common spices–cayenne pepper, coriander, cumin, mustard, and turmeric–as the basis for numerous Indian meals.

Recipes

I adapted these basil rolls directly from the Quick and Easy Thai cookbook, as well as the ideas for the zucchini and squash curry that I paired with it that I blogged about in this post.

Cross-posted from In Search of Lost Time.

Eating like an Immigrant, Part II: Ethnic Stores

Another step in Pittsburgh was realizing that the little ethnic stores scattered all over the city (but especially in the Strip District) had fabulous, exotic and inexpensive ingredients. Many times, it’s working-class people who are shopping at these stores, and it keeps prices reasonable. For example, getting cumin or curry powder from the local Indian store totally beat out anything I could find at the grocery store (the spices at the grocery store were at least 5x-10x more expensive than what I would find at ethnic stores), and it was so fresh tasting.

In one area of Atlanta, apparently there is a large Ethiopian population, and sometimes we’ll get injera (like an enormous sourdough buckwheat pancake), and then I’ll make some stews to go with it. And there’s a lot of overlap between countries with spices, for example, cumin and coriander are used in Hispanic, Indian, and Middle-Eastern dishes. We’ve found a place where we can get Thai curry paste for about $1.50 for a cup of it (which makes dozens of meals).

So, your challenge is to go to an ethnic store and check out the ingredients–I focused on the spices here, I know, but look at the vegetables and herbs, check out the meats, try to see what the backbone of the food culture is. Is it rice based? Noodle? Are there interesting ingredients you’d like to try out? Do you see any similarities between the kinds of foods you’re seeing here and other foods that you’re familiar with? And please leave a comment if you do this, I would love to hear about your experiences.

Recipes

*Shwarma is a fun, Middle-Eastern spiced variation on gyros.
*I’ve made a few Thai curries using the inexpensive pastes, here’s one of them, Thai chicken, vegetable, and pineapple curry
*Here’s our Ethiopian feast that we paired with the injera from the tiny, family-run food store, with links to some recipes for Ethiopian food (I found them to pretty adaptable to what I had on hand, more on that later–next time I’ll make it, I’ll blog about some of the streamlining I did)

Cross-posted from In Search of Lost Time.

Eating like an Immigrant, Part I: Out of this Kitchen

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time (and been meaning to blog about for quite awhile). It’s sort of become a whole philosophy of food for me, especially through participating in the My Kitchen, My World challenges every couple of weeks. We just watched a really cool PBS series entitled The Meaning of Food, which illustrated how food helps to preserve and pass on identity (I’ll talk more of that in a later post), which sort of pushed me to go ahead and do this series. And I also know many people are trying to find creative ways to eat for less money in this economy, so maybe this could be helpful. I’ll try to include a recipe or food suggestion with each post

So, let me start out with a cookbook that I read a few years back that I think was the yeast that started fomenting these ideas in my head.

Out of this Kitchen: A History of the Ethnic Groups and Their Foods in the Steel Valley

It started when I was in Pittsburgh and one of my professors gave me a cookbook that his ethnomusicologist-turned-regional-historian wife had worked on, featuring recipes, oral histories, and newspaper clippings over the past century from the different ethnic groups who came to work in the steel mills in the Pittsburgh area.

Each immigrant group–Lithuanian, Slovakian, Italian, etc.–has navigated its own path to adapt and preserve its own native foodways to the new land and new economy. It wasn’t so much about Authenticity (like you would find in some gourmet cookbook that calls for rare and expensive ingredients so that you make it exactly right), but about adaptation–preserving a heritage within a new culture, and using your little bit of money to feed your family (probably large and/or extended).

Tim’s own family heritage is Slovokian, so it was fun reading over the foods and culture that the Slovokians brought to Western PA. My mom’s side of the family, too, has Eastern European influences, mainly Polish from my mom’s side. So reading through this cookbook brought me in touch with the immigrant history of my own family’s past. Tim’s great-grandparents (on both sides), and my great-grandparents (on my mom’s side) immigrated over from the same side of the world.

This article has several links to recipes in the cookbook.

Here’s my own Not Authentic take on pierogis, sort of continuing with the adaptation theme.

Cross-posted from In Search of Lost Time.