Traveling at Home: Food and Film!

My endless quest to peek into other cultures prompted Andrew and me to start a new, semi-regular event. Once a month(ish), we have a “Foreign Food and Film” night. It’s a simple premise: we pick a foreign country; find a recipe for something common there that doesn’t look too tricky (my cooking skills are questionable); pick a movie from the country; and friends bring drinks, appetizers, or desserts that fit the theme.

So far we’ve done Indian, Italian, and Japanese. We cheated the first time and ordered takeout from an Indian restaurant in town (Nasha) and picked a Bollywood movie from Netflix pretty much at random (Hasee Toh Phasee). For Italy we made a Caprese salad and few different types of pizza; friends brought bruschetta, wine, and cannoli; and we watched Cinema Paradiso. For Japan we made ramen; Andrew bought some sushi; friends brought sake, Japanese beer, daifuku, and matcha ice cream; and we watched Howl'sMoving Castle.

I don’t know if we managed to order all the wrong food from Nasha, but we were not impressed at all. Everyone else I know who’s been there raves about the food, so I don’t want to dissuade people from trying it, but I won’t be giving them another chance…unless someone else is buying. Hasee Toh Phasee was silly and adorable, and I really liked it. It was the first Bollywood movie I’d ever seen, and, if they’re all like this one, I found my new favorite genre: goofy romantic comedy with elaborate song-and-dance numbers.

Despite starting a fire in the oven on Italian night, our pizzas were really tasty. We used Trader Joe’s pre-made crust (wheat and garlic, obviously the garlic was better), and my favorite combination was with pesto, mozzarella, kale, and garlic (based off this recipe but y’all know I did not make my own pesto). Cinema Paradiso was long but lovely. Plus if you don’t get too hung up on how a man can go decades without visiting his mother who lives just a few hours away, there’s a metaphor about leaving home to follow the adult path on which your childhood influences set you.

Moving to Japan, I was surprisingly impressed with how well the ramen turned out. We tweaked this recipe quite a bit by subbing fake sausage for the pork, using veggie stock instead of chicken stock, omitting fish sauce and Chinese five spice, using higher-quality noodles, and roasting Brussels sprouts instead of acorn squash. Full disclosure, Andrew and I did a test run with my mom and sister, and it was not so great the first time. But we learned some very important lessons (e.g., fresh noodles need to be pre-cooked before adding them to soup) and the second batch was pretty darn tasty. The recipe is more work than I’d put in for a normal meal, but it’s worth it for a special dinner. And Howl’s Moving Castle was a fantastic, charming, weird-at-times animated movie that made me want to watch all of Miyazaki’s movies!

I’m thinking about going to Argentina for the next installment, but I’m open to suggestions!

UPDATE: My friend Jason just introduced me to this blog. I think she's going to be great inspiration! http://globaltableadventure.com/countries-ive-cooked