Approximation Cooking

Because food is such an integral part of culture and community, the answer to the question "what's for dinner?" can be quite different around the world.  Since most of my home cooking is just for myself, I can easily adapt my meals to fit ingredients here and my personal preferences.  Usually, since my kitchen is so small, and cooking for one still can seem like a bit of an energy waster, my meals are really simple, and I tend to rotate the same three things around until I get sick enough of one to replace it with something else.  I do have amazing culinary experiences here though for sure, eating out with friends at various restaurants, or enjoying home cooking in slightly larger apartments usually from countries quite different from my own.

This is all fine and good until I am responsible for cooking for a group of people, which happens with my young adults group from church here every other week.  While living in New York a group of us got together weekly for dinners, so we all had a pretty good size catalog of recipes we knew we could whip up quickly for 6-8 people, and if not, finding a new recipe was fairly easy and fun.  Here though, I end up trying to make what we now call our "Austrian Approximation Dinners", where I generally take a recipe I already know from back home and try my best to find enough approximate ingredients to make it work.  Quite a few of the people in this group are also American, so for some of us this is our opportunity to have a bit of a taste of home that we might not otherwise get (there have been imported McCormick taco seasoning packets involved on several occasions).

This past Wednesday I tried my best to recreate a recipe we make at home that I thought could be fairly well approximated here...should involve spicy sausage and pico de gallo...but bratwurst and tomatoes worked just fine.  The shopping process for this takes me forever...finding the right spices, deciding what can be substituted and what is really necessary.

Shiri and Maya chopping sweet potatoes

Ruth expertly overseeing the polenta

And the final product...creamy polenta on the bottom...a hash of sweet potatoes, cabbage and onions with some bratwurst pieces, then fresh avocado, tomato and cilantro on top.

And everybody enjoyed it!

I do have a friend who has kindly offered to teach me how to cook some good Austrian staples, and hopefully then I will be able to start using some of these delicious local ingredients for their actual intended purpose.  For now though, I do love having the opportunity to cook for a group even if it's just a few times a month, and approximate this taste of home abroad!