The food! Oh, the food!

We are a family of food snobs; my intention here is not to give you the impression of arrogance, but rather illustrate our genuine interest in food. We love exploring new foods, cooking with strange ingredients, from scratch, and I mean really scratch, as in make your own curry powder by use of a spice grinder scratch. I have talked about this a little before. By living in other countries and through our travels, we have tried, explored and learned to cook some great dishes from every corner of the world. Recently, as you might figure, we’ve been eating and cooking quite a bit of Lebanese and Mediterranean food. The ingredients for this kind of food are cheaper than other ingredients in Lebanon. It’s often easy and quite tasty, and so, I enjoy Mediterranean food. Restaurants and grocery stores in Beirut are certainly a step up from Cairo, however you can’t usually decide on making something and then go out and buy the ingredients – there’s always going to be something missing or that is imported and way too expensive. Coming to the US is always fun too, and we eat things in Indiana while visiting family there, that we can’t enjoy in the Middle East, but we don’t make very complicated food since it’s not our kitchen.

Atlanta, we have discovered however, is playing in a whole different league entirely. Oh my, oh boy! The farmers markets that we have explored so far, carry ingredients for most dishes that we could ever come up with. There’s everything from Swedish pickled herring and Italian specialty cheeses, to any spice imaginable and kimchi by the bucket. The first time we entered the De Kalb International Farmers Market we walked through the doors and just gasped. After a few minutes of running around like a kid on Christmas morning, exclaiming, “Look at THIS!” and “Oh, honey, check this out!” Courtney said, “I think I’m going to have to go sit in the car for a while and calm down. It’s too much.”

Culinarily speaking, this is going to be a great year.

Cooking meals from scratch

My husband and I like food, and we enjoy cooking and baking very much. We explore grocery stores anywhere we go. Last summer we spent quite some time in Italy, and had a lot of fun cooking meals in the evenings with ingredients we had picked up in the local grocery store. 11 years in Belgium and six years in the Middle East, plus a lot of meals with friends from all over the world have made us develop our knowledge and expand our cooking; we make an awesome chicken Thai soup, amazing homemade ravioli, fabulous mole poblano, very tasty hummus and perfect Swedish gravlax.

Although my husband grew up here, and although we’ve spent quite some time visiting the US over the past 20 years, we both feel like complete strangers in the grocery stores here in the US. Exploring food here is as exciting as anywhere, and we are very much looking forward to a year filled with fun cooking. As far as we can tell, Americans eat and cook quite differently from people in Europe or the Middle East. There seems to be a lot more snack food available, baked goods, and a larger variety of soda and breakfast cereal. In general, I find that there is much more readymade food in the grocery store than anywhere else, and/or prepackaged meals and snacks. Instead of making pasta sauce from scratch, people seem to buy readymade pasta sauce in a jar, for example, or instead of buying lunchmeat and crackers and serving this to a child, parents buy something called Lunchables.

The other day my husband wanted to make home made pizza, but we couldn’t find the special pizza flour we buy in Lebanon. Looking around, we noticed though that you could buy fresh pizza dough in the deli section, frozen pizza crust in the frozen section, and cans with pizza dough (made by Pillsbury, I think) – the kind that pops open when you peel off the label and push down in the middle. How convenient. Not only would this save time and dishes, but the readymade pizza crusts where quite cheap too.

"Embrace the culture, honey!” I said encouraging, “If you want to survive here, you have to adapt. Blend in and do what the natives do." I picked up a can.

Husband: "I will NOT buy pizza dough in a can. You hear me? Never! If I so have to buy extra gluten to *make* the perfect pizza flour, I will." He put the can back.

We bought bread flour and gluten to make the special pizza flour, yeast and olive oil. Perhaps it was a bit more work to make the crust ourselves but oh – the pizza was very tasty!