I met Ann Shen, a twenty-year-old marketing student from Guilin, China, at work. I was writing catalogues of CIEE’s international exchange programs, and she was taking phone calls from fellow students who were working summer jobs in the United States. When she discovered that I write this Immigrant Kitchens column, she said that she would love to teach me how make one of her favorite, easy, Chinese side dishes.
Argentinian Family Secret
Growing up in Argentina, Valy Steverlynck came from a family of not-so-great cooks. “At dinner,” she explains, “the meal would be set up with an announcement that the named family member actually produced something that was edible.” Aunt Nina was the exception. She was the only one who could really cook. Once, when Valy [pronounced like “volley”] was seven or eight years old, she smelled heaven coming from the kitchen.
A Twist of Goodness
A fifteen-year-old young woman from Pakistan recently taught me how to cook her favorite dish from home. The town of Gilgit, where she is from in the Himalayas, is in her words, “a 4-hour drive to China. There are mountain peaks covered with snow throughout the year. And K2 is nearby.” It’s about a 24-hour drive from there to the Arabian Sea, but she’s never been. “This [living in Maine] is my first time with the ocean. I love it. My host mom loves the ocean, too. On Saturday or Sunday, when we’re wondering what to do, we just drive to the ocean.”
Cutting Out the Fuss
Indian food is one of my favorite cuisines, but it can be the most complicated to cook. In my experience, it tends to require 15 spices you don’t have, a lot of work, and extremely long cooking times. The chicken biryani I wrote about last year takes four hours to cook. That’s not saying it isn’t worth it. It is worth it, especially for a party. But wouldn’t it be great to know a relatively easy Indian dish that you could cook in less than an hour?
It’s a Bun. It’s a Roll. It’s a Popover.
Josephine Morris, from York, England, is whirring around her kitchen in New Gloucester, Maine faster than I can take notes. I ask her who taught her how to cook. “Me mum,” she answers. “And then me self.” I guess I can skip the DNA test to prove she’s from Yorkshire. Watching her move so assuredly in the kitchen makes me doubt the poor reputation of English food. When a cook moves like that, only good can come of it. She has gravy cooking in one pot, cabbage and green beans steaming in another, a beef roast and potatoes in the oven, a cheese sauce forming, a blender full of batter… Whatever she’s making is basically the opposite of a one-pot meal.
Add Fresh Toppings to Soup
My friend's husband, Hieu Nguyen, grew up in Dalat, Vietnam, until he was five. He remembers Vietnam’s gorgeous rolling hills, beaches, rainforests, and lakes as a cross between Vermont and Costa Rica. He hasn’t been back since he left in 1975, the day before Saigon fell. He hopes one day to visit with his wife and kids. In the mean time, he lights incense and cooks a Vietnamese chicken noodle soup, called pho (pronounced fuh), combining his grandmother and mother’s methods with his own, discovered after years of cooking it every Sunday for his family.
This is Not a Hamburger
I recently had the pleasure of cooking with a woman from Burundi in Eastern Africa. The minced cassava leaves in the bottom of her large pot looked like a wad of grass clippings removed from the inside of a lawn mower. As they heated up on the stove with water, they smelled like a health-nut’s green smoothie.
We’re Making Dominican Food, Come on Over!
By Lindsay Sterling
In August, Angel Ferreras, 39, did what any Dominican would do. I was looking for his neighbor who wasn’t home, and he invited me over for dinner. He didn’t know me. It wasn’t a special occasion. But as he explains, “In Dominican, everybody is like family.” You wave over anyone you see in the neighborhood and hang out together.
“What are we having?” I asked. His teenage daughter, Pamela, responded, in English and in Spanish: “Vamos a comer la bandera.” The dish name translates to “the flag” and consists of rice, beans and meat with twice-fried plantains, called tostones, on the side. Dominicans eat la bandera so often that it apparently defines the country as much as the flag.
In his kitchen Angel (pronounced AHN hell) covers 1 cup of red pre-cooked beans with water in a small pot. He adds 1 tablespoon diced green pepper, 1 tablespoon sliced red onion, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 shakes of Goya Adobo seasoning, and 1 teaspoon oregano powder. When the water starts to boil he adds 4 ounces tomato sauce and 2 tablespoons fresh chopped cilantro and cooks the mixture for thirty minutes. The green plantains look like giant green bananas. He peels the skins off the hard, cream-colored flesh with a knife, slices the flesh into medallions, and shallow-fries them on medium heat until they turn sunflower yellow.
Then his American girlfriend, Robin Hetzler, got out a tostonera, a wooden contraption for smashing the fried plantain rounds into flatter circles. After she smashed the medallions, she passed them to Angel who fried them again. He served the beans in their cooking liquid on top of the white rice along with the tostones, and meat, which tonight was his girlfriend’s shish kabobs marinated in sofrito, garlic, vinegar and oil, then grilled. My whole family agreed when I made this meal for them at home that la bandera was delicious -- a keeper, and especially beloved by me because it’s so easy to make. My kids said the tostones were almost as good as French fries.
I couldn’t have selected a more perfect dish to make as Columbus Day approaches, because Columbus’s first permanent settlement was actually on Hispaniola, the very same island where la bandera is cooked five hundred years later. The natives weren’t cooking it when Columbus arrived because they had never experienced rice, cilantro, oregano, plantains, or garlic. The Spanish weren’t cooking it before he arrived because they had never experienced the wonders of green peppers, tomatoes, or these bean varieties. It was only after his voyages that knowledge of these tasty edible plants and sources of energy was shared.
I always feel uncomfortable on Columbus Day because the celebration completely ignores the tragic reality of what happened, leaving unacknowledged the sorrow and loss of hundreds of thousands of native people as both a direct and indirect result of his voyages. On that island alone, in just 15 years after Columbus arrived, the estimated initial population of 250,000 Arawak natives fell to just 14,000. And this is not mention that we’re celebrating a man who was bull-headed and wrong about pretty much everything. (This wasn’t a New World. People had been living there for thousands of years thank you very much. And this isn’t India!) What we all can celebrate together is that in 1492 for the first time in human history, for better or for worse, we started becoming one world. Let's celebrate the best of our togetherness. Change Columbus Day to One World Day and make la bandera.
The Recipes For LA Bandera
Dominican fried green plantains
Chunky French Classic
My houseguest, a sixteen-year-old French brunette, pointed at the French toast we were serving for breakfast. “What is it?” She asked.
“It’s French toast!” I cried, baffled. “What - it’s not French?”
“Non.” She said, as confused as I was.
Well if French toast isn’t French, what is? She offered to make us her favorite dinner from home: ratatouille.
A Commemorative Feast
I went to a gathering of thirty Azerbaijani-Americans in a home near the Portland Jetport to learn how to make halva. It’s a confection served in various forms in the Middle East, parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. Sometimes it’s made with pistachios and sesame paste, but in Azerbaijan, the caramel-like sweet is made made out of butter, flour, water, sugar, salt and a little turmeric.
A Full Fridge
A cooking lesson with an immigrant is like love. It comes when I least expect it. This time I was getting my teeth cleaned. The accent I was listening to was my dental hygienist’s, Sanja Bukarac, her golden green eyes upside-down next to her face mask: “How about next Friday?” Turns out, she is not only the best dentil hygienist I’ve ever had – not a moment of discomfort – she also grew up in what used to be Yugoslavia (the part that is today Bosnia and Herzegovina) and would be happy to teach me how to make her favorite meal from her childhood: burek, a meat pie wrapped in phyllo dough.
When A Guest Comes to Visit
When a guest comes to see Mona, an Iraqi immigrant in Maine, for a cooking lesson this is what Mona shows her how to make: a platter of yellow rice topped with golden chicken pieces, tomato-and chili-flake soup, a platter of beef dolmas, flatbread, pickled vegetables, fresh salad, watermelon and a lemon-yogurt drink. It doesn’t matter that her husband is working so she’ll have to make all this and watch her 4 kids under the age of ten at the same time. Let the boys jump off the couches like diving boards. Give the teething baby some Cheetos to chew on. A guest has come, and cooking must be done.
Some Law
The story of how Makara Meng came to cook her favorite Cambodian curry stew in the United States starts when she was four years old. Communist Khmer Rouge soldiers invaded her rural village, divided her family by age and sex, and placed them in separate labor camps. In her camp, soldiers forced Makara and the other kids to wake at 5:00 a.m. to weed the rice fields. At noon, they were given their meal of the day: between 5 and 20 grains of rice in a bowl of water, depending on how well they behaved.
Some Good Lamb
Twenty-one years ago an Afghani woman (who wishes to remain anonymous) and her husband had a hankering for some good lamb. What they had found at Shop ‘n Save was very different than what they were used to. Where they were from in Afghanistan, lamb came straight from the farm, and I mean straight. Since “sheep farm” wasn’t a category in the phone book in Maine, she asked her sister to watch the kids while she and her husband got in their car and headed away from the city. They figured they’d come to a pasture with some sheep on it eventually.
Peanut Revival
I’m into peanuts these days for a handful of reasons. I recently learned how to cook an awesome peanut soup from Ghana. Soon after learning that, I happen go to a professional peanut conference in Napa Valley. I sat next to – I’m not kidding – a VP of Peanut Butter. He works for Smucker’s. Nice guy. Scientists basically told us at the conference that peanuts are little vitamin pills. A couple days after I get home, my Bolivian friend offers to teach me how to make her favorite soup, sopa de mani. Guess what mani means. Peanut. I’m like, what thuh...why are peanuts suddenly coming at me from everywhere?
So You Think You Can Foufou?
African foufou is not something you learn once and get. I’ve had three different teachers, Kenyan, Congolese, and Ghanaian, and I can “do” it, but I look like one those unbelievably bad dancers on "So You Think You Can Dance." Portland designer, Ebenezer Akakpo, instructed me on foufou dynamics in his Yarmouth apartment. “It’s going all over the sides [of the pot]!” He poked fun as I attempted the stirring motion. “Try to keep it together.”
So You Think You Can FouFou?
Okay. African foufou is not something you learn once and get. I’ve had three different teachers, Kenyan, Congolese, and Ghanaian, and I can “do” it, but I look like one those unbelievably bad dancers on "So You Think You Can Dance." Portland designer, Ebenezer Akakpo, instructed me on foufou dynamics in his Yarmouth apartment. “It’s going all over the sides [of the pot]!” He poked fun as I attempted the stirring motion. “Try to keep it together.”
Peeling Chestnuts in Love
If I'd been given a surprise test, a world map with directions to fill in all the country names, I would have missed Azerbaijan. (It’s above Iran, next to Armenia, and under Russia.) Tarlan Ahmadov and his wife Zemfira, two generous and kind-hearted people who immigrated from Baku, Azerbaijan, seemed grateful for the opportunity to give me an introduction to their homeland by way of sharing their favorite meal.
So You Think You Can FouFou
The bag of cassava flour was light beige, slightly more fine than corn meal. I’d bought it by mistake. Three pounds of it. I had no idea what to do with it. The package said it was from Nigeria so I went to ask an African friend, but she wasn’t home. Walking back to my car I noticed an African store. “Why not?” I thought, and swung in there with the big smile on my face that happens for some reason when I’m facing a long shot.
A Congolese Feast
I met Constance Kabaziga at the checkout at Mittapheap world market. She was buying frozen cassava root and dried beans, and I really wanted to know what she was going to do them. “You look like a good cook,” I ventured. She smiled, laughing, but couldn’t return any English. A bilingual young man walked in. I hid my nerves and asked him to translate: “Would she ever teach me how to cook?” Three days later I was in Constance’s small apartment kitchen, watching her slice red onion and green peppers really thinly, sauté them in a lot of olive oil, and then add tomato paste and water.