Meal 60: France
No single country has contributed more to the world of cuisine than France. For sure, folks around the world have figured out how to cook food and serve it, but it’s the French who codified the process and lent us words like chef, sauté, and restaurant. France enjoys a unique physical situation, with both the olive-oil-pressing Mediterranean and the butter-churning north, coastlines teeming with sea life as well as rich interior lands for grazing livestock, and a variety of soils and climates and ...
Meal 59: Ethiopia
What makes Ethiopian food so delicious and rich? For sure, the classic berbere mix, that blend of chilies and roughly half your spice cabinet, lends a complexity of flavor uncommon in most cuisines. And there’s something to be said for eating with your hands, grabbing bite-sized morsels with strands of the tangy injera flatbread. But what I learned from this meal is that it’s an ingredient common to virtually every cuisine, cooked in a simple but rare way, that provides ...
Meal 58: Fiji
We had been planning this meal with 18 Reasons, a warm and welcoming non-profit community food space in San Francisco, for almost a year. Taking the day off of work to prep and cook with my parents, the larger audience of friends new and old, and the gorgeous organic ingredients from Bi-Rite Market all contributed to a special and gratifying experience. But didn’t really hit me how this meal was operating on an atypical plane until one of the volunteers ...
Meal 57: Estonia
Vikings, Russians, Swedes, Poles, Russians, Germans, Soviets… pretty much, if you were an empire within a few hundred kilometers of Estonia, you probably had dominion over this small country at some point. But things are now going well for the Estonians, who emerged from the USSR with a bang, and now enjoy a strong economy, EU membership, strong civil liberties, and Internet access so pervasive they have online voting. (Thankfully this made finding recipes a lot easier than expected!) Estonia’s ...
Meal 55: Eritrea
This wedge-shaped country on the Red Sea has seen a tumultuous history, especially in the past decade and a half: colonization by Italy after the opening of the Suez Canal, being stapled to its larger neighbor Ethiopia in the 1930s when the Italians invaded there too; a thirty-year war for independence that finally ended in 1991; and since then a highly autocratic government that is intolerant of any dissent. (Oh, and a border war with Ethiopia for good measure in ...
Meal 51: Dominican Republic
Another Thanksgiving weekend, another nosh in San Francisco! To go with the gorgeous weather, the calendar aligned on Dominican Republic, the second-largest country of the Caribbean. While the Bay Area is no stranger to foods from Spanish-speaking lands, there’s few Caribbeans around, so these dishes made for something more of a novelty here than they would have been in Dominican-immigrant-heavy New York. Thanks to the kind folks at Hattery, I had a big kitchen to discover the intriguing Dominican way ...
Meal 49: Djibouti
Last week was Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice. To commemorate the moment when Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command, Muslims sacrifice an animal and turn it into dinner. In Djibouti, this would almost certainly be a goat, so that’s what we ate! Now, not too many people have heard of Djibouti, barely the size of the NYC metro area. During the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics a few months ago, all Matt Lauer ...
Meal 48: Denmark
Danish cuisine doesn’t exactly have a high reputation, among gastronomes nor dietitians, so I had pretty low expectations for the meal. While Denmark famously produces a whole lot of dairy and pork, it has a historical reputation for sending the best stuff abroad and keeping the remainder to feed the populace. Well, I am happy to report that so long as bold, rich flavors are welcome, Danish food is actually pretty good! For this meal I tried to evoke the ...
Meal 47: Democratic Republic of the Congo
What a special night! 75 guests, most of whom had never been to a Nosh before, gathered in the beautiful ballroom at Hostelling International on the Upper West Side, for a meal of classic Congolese dishes. The idea came from Ari, the community engagement manager at the hostel, who saw our email on The Listserve and reached out to see if we might want to do a Nosh with them. With a big venue and kitchen, we decided to align ...
Meal 44: Cuba
A friend who’s been to Cuba suggested that “for many Cubans, food at the moment is state-issued ham sandwiches, which you could approximate with some layers of wet cardboard standing in for bread, and finely shaved erasers for the ham, all encased in a blister pack of clear cellophane.” Our guest Tennessee reported that by far the most disgusting food she’s had in her life was “street pizza” in Havana, during her time as a student there. Fortunately, we were able ...