Around the World in 80 Meals

One of our favorite worldschooling-from-home techniques is traveling through the kitchen and dinner table. As COVID-related sequestering wore on and we all needed new inspiration, I embraced the adage about the belly being the surest route to the heart and decided to delve into some exotic travel learning via food. Though ideally I would have a willing helper throughout the process, I confess that so far this project involves mostly me selecting a cuisine, researching at the computer, collecting the ingredients, adapting recipes to fit our vegetarian diet, and preparing a series of representative dishes over the course of weeks or months. I aim for a few dinners per week on the theme—accompanied by relevant music or films when I am at the top of my game.


Conjuring the tropics always appeals to me in cold weather months, so in the first COVID winter I chose Indonesian rijsttafel. Rijsttafel (“rice table” in Dutch) consists of a usually diverse selection of small, delectable dishes that awaken each corner of the palate. Having relished rijsttafel in Amsterdam numerous times, I still marvel that a rijsttafel craze has yet to catch on outside of Indonesia and its former colonizer. Searching for recipes and resources online, I purchased and often return to Eleanor Ford’s book Fire Islands: Recipes from Indonesia, for invaluable guidance from a foreigner who spent years Bali.

Assembling ingredients like pandan leaves, galangal, fresh turmeric and tamarind paste forced me out of my home office to scour my town for the best hole-in-the-wall sources of authentic Asian spices and produce. The kids were curious to sniff, inspect and sample the ingredients and to try their hands at sculpting yellow coconut rice nasi kuning into the traditional cone-shaped tower. Everyone provided feedback as I repeated, honed and simplified a set of dishes. After months of trial and error, we invited neighbors over for a rijsttafel feast. The whole family helped with ginger and turmeric peeling duty, two kids concocted mocktails with exotic juice and syrups, and one looked up some Indonesian words and art to draw a “restaurant” sign for the occasion. Many months later when asked about places she would like to travel, Sashay put Indonesia at the top of her list—"because of the food!” she said.

On another virtual voyage, we went to Iran for a while. Having become enthralled with Persian gol-o morgh rose and bird painting, I quietly posted an exposé in the bathroom with artwork, maps and historical details about Iran and the silk road. “Persia—now that is a place I would like to visit,” my eldest mentioned in passing one evening, to my surprise. Say no more, I thought to myself, as I resolved to learn more about Iran through its food. I began searching out and stockpiling the requisite ingredients—like dried limes (black, shriveled and pungent), barberries (pleasingly tart), rose water (always elated by any excuse to use this divine liquid) and sumac (citrusy powder of dried red berries, where have you been all my life?).

I boned up with resources like Samin Nosrat’s 10 Essential Persian recipes in the New York Times, Persian glazed tofu with jeweled rice from Trashless, and cheerful vegetarian inspiration from Shadi Hasanzade Nemati’s Unicorns in the Kitchen blog. Inspecting the Persian names of my selected recipes arrayed on the kitchen table, Smiley detected the word ‘gol-o’ in one and ‘morgh’ in another and recalled the gol-o morgh art I had shown him a few months ago. “Mama, this yogurt dish must have rose in it; and does this recipe have chicken, because it is called something-bird!”

All three kids are by turns intrigued, disgusted and enchanted by the sights and smells of these new cuisines. After I botched a Persian Dami Gojeh rice dish one evening, they eagerly asked if we could make a dinner table detour back to Bali. Luckily, I always keep ice cream in the freezer as a consolation prize. Whether they like the new flavors or not, I plan to keep up our dinner table travel and related film series and discussions.