Category: International Project

I’ve been cooking quite a bit lately (at least for me) and I’ve been making steady progress on my never-ending International Food Project. This is a project I started 22 (yes, you read that right) years ago through which I cook foods from all over the world, alphabetically. In 22 years I’ve only reached the K’s, so this is a project that will never reach the end (I’ll never know what Zimbabwean food tastes like, and probably not even Swedish) but it keeps me entertained.

In the last six months or so I’ve started “K” cuisines, but I’ve also explored cuisines I’d skipped in the first place, usually because I didn’t know about them. For those cuisines, I usually just made one dish. I think now I’ll concentrate on just finishing “K” before catching up on any others.

These are the cuisines I cooked:

K Cuisines

Kabardian: I made a chicken and a beef stew from this Caucasian region.

Kachin: curried chicken and beef from this hill people

Kansan: my favorite finding from this US state were bierocks

Kenyan: a variety of ethnic dishes from this wonderful country

Korean: we had a whole meal with a stew, a main dish and sides

Korean-American: I made the one dish that Koreans invented in America, LA galbi

US States

I had decided against cooking meals from every US state originally, given that most states don’t really have a cuisine of their own. While there are some exceptions (think Hawaii), most states’ cuisines fall within regional culinary traditions. But I changed my mind after cooking Kansan food and realizing that I hadn’t given states enough of a chance to impress me. So I am going back and cooking a single dish from A – I states. So far, I’ve made:

Alabamian Fried Fish: it wasn’t very flavorful

Arizonan Navajo Tacos: taco fixings on fried bread, a winning combination.

Connecticut Lobster Rolls: hubby liked them

Delaware Fried Chicken: did you know Delaware is a chicken state?

Floridian Key Lime Pie: super easy!

And also from Florida, a Cuban-American Cubano sandwich

Idahoan finger steaks and scalloped potatoes

Illinoisan Chicken Vesubio: a delicious Chicago classic

Global Jewish Cuisines

I also caught up on the cuisines of the Jewish diaspora, making:

An Afghani Jewish beef pilaf

A layered beef dish from the Jews of Baghdad.

Three dishes from the Jews of Calcutta

A matzo & potato layered dish by Egyptian Jews.

A Georgian Jewish chicken dish

Other Catch-Up Cuisines

From the Caucus, I made a Balkar stuffed flat bread.

From China, I explored Shanghai’s Haipai cuisine by making a Chinese borscht and Hunan cuisine with Chairman Mao’s famous red-braised pork.

And from India, I made a lamb curry from the Bodo people, a chicken curry from Chettinad, and the most delicious lamb curry ever from the Dogra people in Jammu.

For the last 21 years – yes, 21 years, you read that right – I’ve been on-and-off trying to cook international food alphabetically. I started with Afghanistan long ago, and I’ve now just finished cuisines that start with the letter “J”.

At first, my list of cuisines only included major national cuisines – but as I gathered more regional cuisine cookbooks, I added those too. With time, they’ve multiplied to the point that national cuisines are now the exception. In all, in these 21 years, I’ve visited 215 different cuisines and cooked 690 different dishes for this project.

When I first started, I’d do a menu for a cuisine, including an appetizer, a main and dessert, and invite friends over. Later, when I had kids, I could not manage dinner parties except in the most special occasions, so I started exploring these cuisines as every night dinners. Accommodating my children’s changing tastes and diet preferences wasn’t always easy, but we managed. Still, it’s been a very slow process. If I want to finish it – something I never thought possible -, I’m going to have to speed things up.

So as I start 2022 and tackle “K” cuisines, with just one child at home (but still a picky eater), I’m going to try something different. Whenever possible, I’m going explore national cuisines for Sunday dinners, doing full menus. Not every cuisine lends itself to an appetizer-entree-dessert format – indeed, my first K cuisine, Kenya, does not – so in those cases, I’ll just explore different dishes on different nights. Otherwise, I will leave regional and ethnic cuisines for weekday nights but limit my exploration of them to just one or two dishes. We’ll see how that works.

Meanwhile, here are the J cuisines I explored, as well as the A-I cuisines I discovered and explored (usually for just one dish) in the last year:

Jakartan: Indonesian food rocks so I was happy to explore the food of the capital. The dishes I made included chicken sate, a beef & noodle soup and a great cake for dessert

Jalisciense: I didn’t make Jalisco’s most famous dish, birria, but I fell in love with their tortas ahogadas

Jamaican: there were so many good choices for this island cuisine, and I finally figured out how to make a good jerk pork.

Japanese: I didn’t try my hand at sushi, but learned I couldn’t make a vegetarian miso soup anyone liked. Other dishes, however, were great.

Javanese: coconut beef, coconut chicken and coconut balls. If you like coconut, Javanese cuisine has lots to offer.

Jerezana: this Spanish city offered tasty dish after tasty dish, from braised oxtails to their own version of chicken cordon bleu

Jewish American: a roasted chicken was a failure, but their cheese blintzes and apple cake rocked

Jiangsu: I only made one dish, ribs, but we enjoyed it a lot.

Jiangxi: we enjoyed the fish and chicken from this Chinese regional cuisine, but the steamed pork with rice powder was a disappointment.

Jordanian: This was the only “J” cuisine from a country I had visited. I think my dishes were better than anything I ate there.

And these are the regional and ethnic cuisines I briefly explored, mostly for just one dish:

A’chik Mande / Garo: I enjoyed cooking an unusual dish of chicken with papayas from a tribal group in the Indian highlands.

Acholi: While I only made one dish, peanut & banana pancakes, it was great to learn about these Luo people from northern Uganda.

Adjarian: bread with cheese and an egg, hard to believe it but it works!

Ambonese: unfortunately, the one dish I cooked from the Indonesian spice islands, was a failure

Balochi: I made the most famous grilled chicken dish from these southern Pakistani cuisine

Bukharian Jewish: The single dish I made from these people from Uzbekistan was a complete mess, but it was fun to try a new cooking technique.

Cornish: I tried my hand at traditional cornish pasties and failed terribly. No wonder they’ve improved on the recipe in the last century or two!

Gagauz: the culinary traditions of this Muslim people from Moldova may not be particularly exotic, but I did enjoy their chicken with a paprika gravy.

In the last few months, I have (mostly) finished cooking “H” cuisines and I’ve been making my way through the I’s. I still have five of these cuisines to go (Indonesian, Iranian, Irish-American, Italian Renaissance and Italian) but I figure this is a good time to announce the many new cuisines I’ve added to my International Food Project:

• Haryana: I made pakora, butter chicken and garlic cauliflower
• Iceland: baked fish, chicken with saffron and pepper cookies
• Imperial China: a chicken wing recipe from the 8th century, braised chicken from the 10th-13th and beef and walnuts from the 18th.
• India: chickpea, red bean, and chicken curries plus chicken and tofu tandoori
• Indo-Chinese: noodles and cauliflower
• Iraq: lentil soup, two types of kibbeh, chicken in yogurt sauce, lamb shanks, rice, and farro pilaf
• Ireland: Irish stew, beef & stout pie, potato biscuits, and bread and butter pudding.
• Iroquois: ghost bread and three sisters stew
• Israel: corn shakshuka, meatballs in tahini sauce, lamb shawarma, grilled chicken and olive oil cake
• Italian-American: minestrone, fetuccini alfredo, baked zitti, spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, vegan lasagna, chicken scarpariello and chicken parmesan.
• Ivory Coast: grilled chicken, roasted lamb, stewed chicken and peanut sauce.

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