Foreign Food Fridays: The Birth of Foreign Food Fridays

A few months ago as I sat planning meals for the coming week, I realized we were in a food rut. We had been recycling the same tired menu of choices for weeks now and frankly I was bored with all of it. There had to be a new way of doing things out there somewhere. My husband suggested I assign each week night a particular type of cuisine and then I could try some new recipes or plug in the old standards as needed on a rotating basis. That was a good idea so I assigned each day of the week a particular category (for example: Monday is meatless meals, Tuesday is casseroles, Wednesday is chicken night...) and started arranging meals to match.

The meal plan was working, but I was still bored. Meal times were about so much more than just plunking down food for a family of six to me. Dinnertime is when we all come together and reconnect with one another after our day. I wanted my kids to value meal times and learn to slow down a bit and enjoy the food and the atmosphere. I wanted them to try foods they had never even heard of before, or serve them a five course meal one course at a time, or sit on cushions on the floor and eat with our hands like people did in other parts of the world. There are so many different countries with such a huge variety of cuisines we had never tried that an idea began to stir in my head. A friend and I had talked about getting our families together once a month for a Thai food night, but we had never been able to work out our schedules to make it happen so we put the idea on the back burner. I decided to adapt that idea for our family. Why not? Fridays would be a foreign food night.

The excitement bubbled inside me at this new challenge. I could think of dozens of countries I had always been curious about, but I didn’t want to be the only one responsible for choosing the countries whose foods we would try. I grabbed a pile of index cards, some markers and a pretty glass jar and gathered my family around the table. I explained that I wanted each of them to come up with as many countries as they could think of that had food they wanted to try or that they wanted to learn more about. Then I asked them to write the name of each country on separate cards and put them into the glass jar so we could draw a new one out each week. Their eyes lit up and excitement poured out of each one of them as they filled out card after card saying “Oh, and what about ...” or “don’t forget_________! It HAS to be in there!” and “How do you spell Australia?”

When all the cards were filled out and folded they were placed in the jar, I shook them up and asked someone to choose one for the coming Friday’s meal. The first card pulled out was Ireland and we cheered! I immediately sat down at the computer to research what a traditional meal would be like in Ireland. There is a wealth of information on the internet about nearly every country in the world so I had no trouble finding recipes for traditional Irish fare. After a little reading, I had a menu planned. I added the necessary ingredients to my shopping list and prepared myself for the end of the week.

When Friday came, all 4 of my kids took turns eagerly helping with the meal preparations. I remember watching them work together to peel and slice the apples for the cake and smiling to myself. What a fantastic idea this was. That night we danced around to some Irish music I found on iTunes, ate Irish stew, soda bread and Kelly apple cake and all my once choosy children who had snubbed various vegetables on more than one occasion ate every drop of that wonderful, vegetable-laden stew and raved about it to anyone who would listen!

That was the birth of Foreign Food Friday for us. Foreign Food Friday has become a new family tradition. We also found that our once schedule-challenged friends were suddenly able to set aside time to join us for the occasion and we’ve had a wonderful time enjoying each other as we try new and interesting ideas about food and fellowship and explored the world‘s cuisine. I knew this idea was a definite keeper when I suggested we change it from a weekly occurrence to every other week and a loud cry of protest arose from adults as well as kids.

Here are the recipes we used for Irish night: