Italinica Food

Being here in Nicaragua has already changed the way I cook. My host brother asked me if I wanted to cook lunch the other day, and I excitedly accepted. Since he is not working right now, he's been doing household chores, which often means that I am lazing about in my hammock studying while he is cleaning and cooking. Although this was an entertaining big old F- YOU to the machismo of many households, I was starting to feel bad for being rather lazy.

I decided to cook some pasta, since that is vaguely representative of American cooking and my vaguely Italian ethnic heritage. After having delicious Italian food in Matagalpa the other day,  I knew it was pretty feasible to make with local ingredients. I had planned to make a tomato sauce, loaded with garlic and basil, but we didn't have much garlic, and I realized everyone would probably not find the sauce filling enough without meat, so I decided to add a little ground meat. And then I added more salt than I would have, guessing that everyone would find it not salty enough were I to follow my instincts. And added a lime, because it was there, and who doesn't like limes? And caved and made a side of guineo cuadrado, a bland banana relative, that I'm completely not fond of because more food was culturally called for.  By the time I was done, I was left with a dish that wasn't really Italian, but wasn't really Nica either.

However, I drew the line on two things. I refused to overboil the pasta and al-dente it stayed. And when my host brother asked if I was going to make rice to accompany the pasta, I refused to carbo load things further, and explained that we eat don't eat the two together. It was sort of awkward, but the food was good. At least I thought so.

We were talking about the challenges of defining what is American the other day at Reconnect. Because America is made up of so many different things, it's hard to describe satisfactorily what  "typical American dish" or "typical American music" is. But I think something that perhaps is a uniquely American experience is that many Americans have, at some point, tried a food that was something they were not familiar with, in terms of ingredients, flavors, or maybe even how it is supposed to be eaten. Being confronted with foreign food isn't necessarily as common an experience for people from other cultures. Guess I'll be facilitating a lot of those exchanges in the next two years. Sounds delicious.