On What's For Dinner part 2

Charlotte and Prerna mixing dough

Food is made for sharing.  It’s entertainment, it’s comfort, it’s socialization.  Living at Castle Irwell, I am surrounded by people from different countries, and the one thing we love to share above language, music, or stories is food.  In order to best share our multifarious cuisines, we started having large group dinners.

The first dinner was Italian food.  A few of my friends here are Italian, and if they are any indication of Italian people in general, it is a completely true stereotype that Italian people love food.  They made baked pasta with homemade pasta sauce.  Another night, I had fritella, which translates to “fritter” and is really like a chewy pancake.  I called it “Italian paratha.”  Yet another night, we had Classic Italian Pizza night with fresh pizza dough and classic Italian toppings.  There was margherita with tomato sauce and fresh mozzarella; white pizza with cheese, sausage, boiled potatoes, and rosemary; a ham and cheese pizza baked between two pieces of dough (like a sandwich); and for dessert, baked dough smothered in nutella.  Whoever called nutella a sandwich spread is brilliant -- it makes eating the equivalent of frosting totally justifiable.

Me topping the semla with canned whipped
cream (called "squirty cream" in the UK)

The second weekend we experienced the delights of my friend Charlotte, who is basically a Swedish goddess of baked goods.  She made us real Swedish cinnamon buns (I helped!), swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam, mashed potatoes, and roasted root vegetables with feta and thyme.  I will of course be stealing recipes from her so I can take them back to the States.  Everything was incredible.  Charlotte also taught us about another Swedish pastry served on Fat Tuesday called semla.  To make them, you make a rich tennis ball-sized bun, then you cut off the top, scoop out the soft insides, mix them with marzipan and hot milk, and then stuff the paste back into the bun shell and top with whipped cream.  Sounds good, right?  These little delights knock paçzkis out of the park.

Not wanting to be left out, I insisted on having American dinner.  I made mac n’ cheese, obviously, as this is my specialty back home.  Alongside it, I served glazed carrots and salad with ranch dressing.  I picked salad because the US is a nation obsessed with ranch (and rightly so), evidenced by the way we put it on everything we can, and I chose carrots because I was inspired by discovering “American ginger ale” in the grocery stores, which promised to be sweet rather than dry.  The carrots were a hit, but when I tried the ginger ale it resembled neither any American drink I’ve ever had, nor anything palatable.  For dessert, three friends and I baked a small mountain of chocolate chip cookies, which I instructed everyone to dunk into milk.  The leftovers were gone within hours.

Another night we had Indian night, in which we had rice and chipatis with a number of Indian curries, including mutter paneer, at my request.  My friend Prerna, the chef extraordinaire behind all the Indian food, has promised to teach me how to make it.  We also had Polish night, in which we made easily over 200 pierogis, all from scratch.  At the busiest point, we had over ten people making pierogis at the various stages of production, ranging from mixing the dough, rolling it out, cutting circles, filling and forming the pierogis, boiling them, and buttering the finished products.  We are masters of teamwork.

Through all this joint cooking and eating, we’ve discovered that a lot of cuisines include the same foods by different names.  What I call a potato pancake, others call a latke, rosti, or tortel de patate, among various other names.  It’s also become apparent to me how hard it is to make food without proper equipment, like an electric mixer.  If you’ve ever tried to cream butter and sugar by hand, you know what I’m talking about.  To accomplish these group dinners, we’ve had to pool resources and borrow dishes, mixing bowls, pans, what have you.  It’s been a challenge, but it’s been great.

Making and eating food, especially with good friends and exciting new food makes me happy.  Writing about these dinners even makes me happy.  It keeps getting harder and harder to describe how I’m feeling over here, because on one hand, I am having such a good time, and I am so happy so much of the time.  On the the other, I do miss home and everyone who’s there.  To cope, I've had to redefine "home" for myself.  I feel a little lost sometimes, because the home I left doesn’t exist anymore -- if I went back, it wouldn’t be the same -- but this place doesn’t feel like home yet either.  Nowhere is home, and home is nowhere.  Home isn’t a place anymore; it’s an item on a plate.  In my case, as it has always been, it’s a plate of chocolate chip cookies.