The Merriest World

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

J.R.R Tolkien

Preach, brother. Growing up, we ate dinner (and in fact most meals) as a family. Even in the days of football practice, piano lessons and club meetings, we waited until everyone could sit around the table together. In college, it was the same. This time I chose my family (or rather, my family chose me…thank you Kappa Delta), and we loved the sound of our house mother ringing that dinner bell that signaled a deep fried, smothered in butter, home cooked meal for upwards of 100 sisters each night. They’ll always be some of the happiest times in my memory.

Moving into “the real world” brought new goals and adopted family. I lived and worked in New Orleans, the food capitol of the world, probably. There’s no such thing as a bad restaurant in that town—it simply wouldn’t survive. My roommates and I quickly realized that eating out every night would result in three very large, very poor twentysomethings, so we decided that we’d take turns cooking and sharing meals on week nights.

I’m more grateful than ever that we did so not only for financial and waistline preservation purposes, but because now--living in Prague—cooking and grocery shopping is a constant challenge/learning experience. I’m so happy to have laid the groundwork for our culinary endeavors in a place where recipes are not written in what is quite possibly the most unreasonable language in the world and temperatures were in Fahrenheit.

Cooking is just as important (if not more) here in Europe. The purpose of shared meals is manifold; it helps us understand one another, it teaches us about different lifestyles and cultures, and as Tolkien said, it makes us much merrier indeed.

My friends and I have a running list of the things we cook and a list of ingredients (in English and Czech, hallelujah) that we need to recreate the meal. We live life a little more simply here—we miss lots of typical American ingredients (peanut butter, cilantro, chicken broth and Tony’s just to name a few), we don’t have crockpots and some of my friends even lack ovens. Hello and welcome to our real life Iron Chef challenge.