The International Community Comes To Dinner...

Hello, my name is Dustin.  My wife's name is Marian.  We are cooking addicts.  No, scratch that.  What is beyond addict?  Anyway, I am digressing.  My wife and I have been cooking together for 5 awesome years, and we have managed to acquire quite a collection of cookbooks.  We often flip through our cookbooks Sunday evening, planning our meals for the week.  Despite having a recipe collection that would stretch from Maine to DC, if set down side by side, we have fallen into a cooking rut over the past few months.  Favored recipes have turned dull and boring.  Cooking has become a chore, not the pleasure it should be.

So what could we do?  Well, we examined the situation over (aptly enough) dinner one night.  I made the suggestion that perhaps we could cook one meal from each country in the world as a way to "spice" things up.  At first, I was not serious, but one look at Marian's face told me that I might have hit upon something.  So we started to explore the idea a bit more.  We took a look online, and discovered that others had already embarked on this quest.  So much for being the first :).  What we had also discovered was that many of the "international" recipes that we had, were actually Americanized versions of the original.  If we were going to do this, we wanted to do it right.  That left us trying to find a collection of recipes for our project.  Where to turn?

Recently, I embarked on a new hobby - collecting postcards through the postcrossing project.  Marian and I spoke a bit more on the subject, and Marian suggested that we collect recipes from the international community, and use those to prepare meals from each country.  So we sent out the word- through postcrossing, through our international friends, and other avenues: "Calling all cooks- send us your recipes!".  There is no more authentic source for a country's cuisine than someone who was born and raised in that country.  We have been collecting recipes for a couple of weeks, and we are ready to start cooking!

First up, the first country in alphabetical order- Afghanistan.  We will be cooking this meal on Saturday, but I will post the recipes we will be using a little later this week.  Stay tuned for the recipes, as well as our post-meal critiques.