Sneak Peek into Cooking into Cultures Blog

My project is a blog about an International Dinner Club titled Cooking into Cultures.  The blog has two goals beyond class goals:

1. Share what our dinner club has learned and done because it's been a life changing and wonderfully fun experience and
2. connect with others around the world who love cooking, eating and learning about other cultures.  

I hope we meet new people, gain new recipes, and insights into the role of food in their culture.  It's started now to find some people to read it!

The blog is open but if you just want a quick view the first two postings are below.

Cooking into Culture Dinner Club - An Innocent Beginning Blog post1
 

For the last six years I’ve been part of a wonderful experiment to learn more about other cultures through food. Four couples decided to meet 6 - 8 times a year to enjoy a dinner based on a theme of a country or region. What has evolved has been an adventure. We’ve experienced collaboration, generosity, friendship, extraordinary food and a window into a deeper understanding of ourselves and other people.

Our beginning was unremarkable in its inception. We met as parent volunteers, for our sons’ scout troop, with eight sons among us. When one of our youngest was accepted to attend school in Japan through the Rotary Youth Exchange, I invited his family over for a Japanese dinner.  My husband had worked in Japan and I’d been able to spend time there as a guest of the Japanese Government through the Fulbright Teacher Memorial Program.

That first dinner was our two families eating, laughing, mastering chop sticks to eat soba noodles and sharing stories of our fondness for the people of Japan and their cuisine. Later that week the other three “Moms”, exercising on the walking trail, talked the club into existence.

In this blog I’ll share what we have learned about creating and maintaining a successful club, cooking and enjoying food from cultures around the globe, and how it has enriched our lives in multiple and unexpected ways.

Please contact us with your stories, ideas, recipes, and menus. We look forward to evolving and sharing our journeys as we cook into cultures.

Quote of the Concept 
Food is so primal, so essential a part of our lives, often the mere sharing of recipes with strangers turns them into good friends. ~Jasmine Heiler, about recipezaar.com

Japanese Dinner Blog post 2

Make a Smilebox collage

At each meal we create a menu to help us know what each other has brought to the feast. For this dinner the menu was:  Appetizers Tempura   Salads Tofu and Tomato Green Beans in Sesame Dressing (Ingen no goma-ae) Entrees *Shrimp Sushi with Ginger and Wasabi Crabmeat in Naganegi (Leeks) with Gelatin Crabsticks with Wasabi Mayonnaise Scallops in Orange with Daikon and Red Miso Peppered Steak with Soba Noodles and Umeboshi Aka (pickled plum) Desserts Green Tea Ice Cream Coffee Jelly Japanese Cheesecake Chi Chi Dango Mochi  (Traditional candy for Boy's or Girl's day)   Permission to use Buddha and Frog Photographs  granted by Tim Kirchhof, copyright 2009 *Want to make sushi?  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video's value is beyond measure.  Enjoy!

Quote of the Concept

If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty.

Source: (Japanese)