In 2008, I read an article in the Los Angeles Times about an unemployed writer named Noah Galuten who set out on a mission to eat food from a different country every day for 100 consecutive days. It being 2008, he obviously blogged about the experience (“Man Bites World”), and when he wasn’t eating in restaurants, immigrant strangers invited him into their homes to cook him meals from their countries.
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“I want to cook a dish from every country in the world in alphabetical order!” I thought, inspired by and, let’s face it, a wee bit envious of his experience.
I was also a food blogger. Obviously. But the closest I got to completing this experiment was clipping a recipe for mahjouba, spicy, stuffed Algerian crepes, from Saveur magazine. (It’s still in my recipe binder, untouched.)
Cut to 2019, when I told my best friend about Noah and my long-abandoned project.
“Well, let’s do it!” she said.
We invited a group of friends who love to cook, and on August 15, 2019, Country Club was born! Everyone brought a homecooked Afghani dish, and before we dug in, we went around the table, each person describing the recipe they made.
I made firnee, a cardamom and rosewater custard.
Six years later, Country Club still meets every month (we lost only a few months to the pandemic), and in November we’ll cook Ghana – our first G! There are a lot of countries that start with A, B or C!
We’ve cooked food from countries we’d never heard of – are you familiar with The Comoros and its luxurious national dish, langouste a la vanille (lobster with vanilla sauce)?
Some countries’ cuisines aren’t very well-represented in the U.S., and we have to rely on very amateur-looking blogs to find recipes. We often don’t know what a dish is supposed to look like or taste like, and we can’t always find the ingredients we need. We’ve lost members and added members and made new friends. Before we eat, we always take a video of the group shout-singing the name of the country. We rented a house in Vancouver, B.C., for the weekend when it was time to cook Canada, and we bust open a pinata every time we complete a letter!
When I tell people about the club, they often suggest we write a cookbook, or monetize it in some way, but we just want to enjoy cooking, drinking wine and spending time together. Not to mention that we know next to nothing about these countries’ cuisines! I love knowing that I’ll see this particular group of friends at least once a month.
(If you’d like to see what we’ve cooked, we do have a blog, created just for us, so we can remember what we cooked and have a place to put photos and link recipes. This is the first time it’s been made public!)
I’m writing this as we slowly move into the cold, dark season, when people in the Pacific Northwest can feel isolated, depressed and unmotivated. You may have heard of hygge (pronounced hoo-guh), the Danish concept of creating coziness. Nordic winters are far darker, colder and snowier than in the PNW, but instead of complaining about it, these cultures embrace a wintertime mindset and enjoy the beauty and coziness of the weather by going all-in on baking, reading, knitting, snow sports and having tea and cake with friends on a Sunday afternoon.
Creating monthly social occasions like Country Club is a delicious way to stay connected with community all year long.
Get tickets to Food Fight with Rachel Belle, featuring America’s Test Kitchen hosts Bridget Lancaster and Julia Collins Davison, November 8 at The Neptune Theater in Seattle! Your ticket includes a copy of the America’s Test Kitchen 20th Anniversary TV Show Cookbook.
We’re also offering a special Host Committee VIP Experience that includes:
· Six tickets to the event
· Early entry and the best seats in the house
· A private meet & greet with Rachel, Julia and Bridget
· A complimentary America’s Test Kitchen cookbook
· Complimentary food and drinks
· Your names up on the event slide as Host Committee sponsors
The buy-in is $1,500 (fair-market value of $615), and only five donors will be part of this committee. Most important, Host Committee members make it possible for Cascade PBS to keep delivering the programs you love — like The Nosh and America’s Test Kitchen — to our whole community.
To purchase a VIP experience, contact our Director of Major Giving, Ben Derby, at ben.derby@cascadepbs.org or (206) 443-4849
Are you all caught up on my podcast Your Last Meal? The latest episode features Tilly Ramsay, the only one of Gordon Ramsay’s six children who followed in his food career footsteps! Tilly hosts the cooking show Dish It Out on Amazon Prime. I ask her if her dad yells as much at home as he does on TV and what her experience at cooking school was like — she just graduated!
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Have a food- or drink-related question? (Need a restaurant rec? Have a mystery that needs solving?) Send me a note: rachel.belle@cascadepbs.org
XO
Rachel Belle
