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Published: December 5th 2011
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My mother has requested a special blog on something we call “Family Dinners” here at SLP. Essentially, for about 3 months or so, I have been planning and shopping for one meal a week, eaten by the majority of the foreign teachers at my school, as well as a few stragglers here and there. Our theme is to eat a meal from a different country each week and we go alphabetically. We recently finished the A-countries and begin with the Bs this month with the Bahamas.
We had been talking about doing weekly dinners for a while and, with my parents visit, I had access to my country coffee table books which include a lot of information on what sort of food you should eat when you visit. Using that information, as well as additional information from cultural websites and the websites of other people who are attempting this feat (there are many! Of varying quality), I put together a menu each week. Once I’ve made the menus for the whole month, I create Facebook event pages and invite everyone who might be interested and people RSVP based on what they’re interested in eating. Most people come to all of the meals but some people have certain dietary issues (vegetarian, hate seafood, etc).
I do all of the shopping, but everyone puts in $10 a week to cover groceries. Then I do any preparatory cooking and many people help doing the cooking the day of. I would say they’re almost always successes (Andorra was an exception, and only because we didn’t have the time to fully cook all of the beans, which were a large part of the dish. Nobody really enjoyed crunchy beans) Some of my favorites have included Albania (pepper and cheese stew w/ bread along with some sort of goop that was supposed to be cookies. It didn’t turn into cookies, but it WAS delicious) and Argentina (beef empanadas and alfajores ). I think the overall group favorite was Australia (cheeseburgers with the usual toppings, plus a fried egg and a pineapple slice).
This week is the Bahamas and we’re making a Red Fish Chowder, Peas n’ Rice, and Bahama Mama. It’s heavy on the meat and rice, but so are many of the cuisines worldwide. That’s maybe the most interesting part of the project. Although different cultures have different cuisines, many of them are quite similar. Meat, vegetables, grain of some sort. Mix. Enjoy thoroughly.
As organizer of family dinner, I was nominated to organize Thanksgiving Dinner. I worked hard to find out how to get turkey (It IS possible…) but it ended up being just too much trouble. My friend Josh got turkey for HIS group dinner and he had to do some black market deals and pay a RIDICULOUS amount of money for this person to smuggle a turkey off the army base. So we got chicken. It was delicious. We don’t have ovens, which is fairly common in Korea. Our school serves lunch to roughly 150 people daily and THEY don’t have an oven. So, luckily, there’s a man that sells roasted chickens out of the back of his truck on the walk between our work and our apartment (less sketchy than it sounds) and we got 2. They come stuffed with delicious date stuffing. Added bonus. Not everyone cooked, but many people did and our meal was amazing. I made cranberry relish, there was homemade stuffing, sweet potato casserole w/ brown sugar and walnut topping, cheesy mashed potatoes with bacon on top, broccoli salad, and a sort of pumpkin pie (pumpkin pudding poured into a graham cracker pie crust and frozen). If we couldn’t be home for Thanksgiving, this was a great alternative!
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Mom
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thanks
Thank you for the blog! I appreciate that you still listen to me sometimes. I couldn't help but notice the row of alcoholic beverages in the Thanksgiving photo. Love You! :*