glass_icarus | Potluck #1

Welcome to the first edition of Potluck!

A note on the carnival: Potluck was inspired by a round of internet conversations about food, shame, and culture/ethnicity, including but not limited to

deepad's Doodh se Dhuli,

vi's gross, weird, inedible, and

troisroyaumes's Seven things. It is intended to be a carnival for multicultural and intersectional discussions of food, including but not limited to food discussions intersecting with disability, gender, sexuality, fat, animal rights, and cultural and racial issues. This is not to say that we have or will cover all of these intersections in a single carnival; Potluck is simply a room in which we can talk about them- or so

yiduiqie and I hope!

Since we are sort of in the middle of a stretch of fall/winter celebrations, the theme for this edition was holidays:

oyceter writes about New Year away, among other holidays:

Late January and early February is always a bad time for me in the US. I never mind spending Thanksgiving or Christmas with friends or away from home, and half the time I don't do much for Christmas anyway. But New Year is different.

starlurker talks about Canadian Thanksgiving in Potluck post:

Thanksgiving was a foreign concept to me as a child, and adding the term Canadian before it did nothing to illuminate the concept. Growing up in Manila, my awareness of Thanksgiving was limited to US media sources, so my idea of the holiday involved the following traditions:

1) Something about pilgrims and something about Indians
2) Everyone needed a large basket of fruit to put on the middle of the table
3) Thanksgiving and Christmas were the only times people from the States wanted to be with their families
4) Pumpkin pie
5) A large, golden brown and perfectly cooked turkey that the mom/grandmother/mother-in-law spent the whole day making, or b) a charred, inedible carcass, usually deposited with great anger on the table because people were so ungrateful; or c) an uncooked bird, because shenanigans got in the way of the turkey preparation.

lovepeaceohana discusses family traditions and cultural expectations in pretend this is a clever title:

My mama, in the kitchen, poring over the recipe journal written in her own hand, copying ingredients and amounts onto a separate sheet of paper. "Do you think we should try siopao this time?" she asks, and I shrug my shoulders.

It could be any one of the number of occasions for which my mama bust out the recipe journal - our annual Thanksgiving party, our annual Christmas party, our annual Fourth of July party; my birthday, my brother's birthday. She loved to play hostess and nearly always served some of her mother's recipes to our guests. Staples included what I've since come to think of as The Big Three: lumpia, pancit canton, and adobo.

ey talks about comfort food in potluck: mental illness + holidays:

I’ve talked before about the importance of a tea ritual for me in handling anxiety attacks. This time, I want to take a look at comfort food. Holidays often come with a ritual sacrifice — as the character Anya in Buffy the Vampire Slayer says of Thanksgiving, “To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It’s a ritual sacrifice. With pie.”

vi has a brief comic about Lunar New Year stuff and nonsense.

I have also included several non-thematic posts:

eccentricyoruba writes about jollof rice in Foood!:

Jollof rice is usually the first dish that comes to mind when one thinks of popular West African dishes. Though cooked differently depending on which country you're in, the must have ingredients are; tomatoes, tomato paste, Maggi cubes, onions, scotch bonnet chillies (what I call atarodo) and of course, rice. These are the standard jollof rice ingredients and usually give a plain but tasty dish. Argument ensues when the question "Which country does jollof rice come from?" is asked. Time for another anecdote; once my friends and I decided to have an international dinner*. My Caribbean friend got really excited when I said I was going to make jollof rice. 'What of the plantains?' she asked and when I replied that I had none, she went on to say that fried plantains were a necessary accompaniment for jollof rice. How did she know about jollof rice and plantains? Well, apparently in the college she went to in London, Nigerians and Ghanaians always used to argue about who had invented jollof rice, to her amusement.

oyceter writes about learning to cook Chinese food in Cooking: I can haz it:

I enjoy cooking, but it may be one of those things I enjoy more when I have a lot of spare time; when I get a job again, we'll see how much I keep doing it! But so far, I feel like I've been learning how to cook all over again in the past few months. On the plus side, I think I've actually gotten to the point when I can kind of stare at the fridge and throw things together, which was my target way back when.

The really big difference, though, is that I've finally learned how to cook Chinese food.

I tried when I first started to cook, but I didn't trust most English cook books, and despite watching hours and hours of Good Eats, I had zero knowledge of the basics of Chinese cooking. As such, I could make around 3 dishes, and they all didn't taste very good. I eventually ended up mostly making vegetarian and Mediterranean inspired food when I took up cooking in 2005, largely due to the recipes my flist was posting.

marina picspams her trip to Odessa in kizil and rachki and schmaltz:

So, this is the foodspam of my trip to Odessa last fall. Unlike my other travels, I knew I would never do a travel-log/summary/picspams/whatever of the trip because so much of it is personal and complicated and impossible to recount in a fun travel diary way, not to mention things like "and this is the house where my dad went to school when he was little" isn't something most people would find super fascinating.

kaz writes about cooking while low on spoons in o food:

Two days ago, I was watching clips of Nigella Lawson on YouTube after irrationalpoint discovered I didn't know who she was. If you are also in this boat, Wikipedia knows everything as usual. (short story: she's done multiple cooking shows and published cooking books.) We were watching the recipe - chicken teriyaki - with interest, with occasional aside discussion of feminist critiques of the show and what we think of them. Then comes Nigella's remark: "Now this is what I call an easy weekday treat".

We look at each other and burst out laughing.

Both of us had been thinking "hey, this looks like something special I could try if I'm feeling really well and energetic."

This concludes the first edition of Potluck. Thank you so much to everyone who participated! We would love to hear your feedback, and suggestions for future themes and volunteers for future hosts are very much welcome.

yiduiqie will be hosting the next edition of Potluck, so keep an eye out for the announcement post!