This video takes place in Borneo. It is shrimp season, so they travel down a river to get some shrimp and then return to their home, which is in a long building divided into apartments. They grill and pan fry the shrimp and enjoy their dinner. After eating they relax on the patio area in front of their apartment and then take a walk through the village.
If you want to get some sense of what they are talking about you'll need to turn on Captions>Auto-translate>English. Much of what you'll get will be gibberish, but you can follow along here and there.
The above video is from a site named Essen Recipes, which would indicate it is coming from Germany. Plus, the bottom captions are in German. Still, when I watched it, I thought it had Slavic touches to the cooking. It turns out I was partially right; in reading the comments the cook is a Ukrainian woman. Still, the dishes she whips up are tasty looking.
Somewhere in Africa, the YouTube video doesn't say where, a village woman cooks a meal of mutton curry and cabbage. The meat is steamed with a small amount of water in a pot, and then the spices to make the curry are added. The cabbage is mixed with vegetables. She then mixes some sort of a flour concoction, it isn't bread, rather it is more of a paste.
She cooks it all over an open fire while around her, her kids who are well behaved, and the chickens occupy themselves. They eat it with their hands.
With July 4th closing in hotdogs, one of the holiday's staples, can't be far off. The above video tours America to find famous regional hotdogs. They are, as long as you don't spend too much time pondering how hotdogs are made, a delicious looking group.
Below is a video showing how to grill hotdogs. From the viewpoint of the cooking complexity scale grilling a hotdog is basically one step away from boiling water, but I suppose to some it is a new culinary adventure, So, in case you need a tutorial, here it is below.
These videos are from Kitwanda "Kiki" Cyrus' YouTube channel. She's originally from Nigeria but has immigrated to Texas. Many of her recipes are fusion dishes mixing Nigerian and American influences. It is all very tasty looking. She is also a photographer, so her videos are nicely presented.
A cheerful English fellow decides to make a 3-course meal with his toaster.
I'll admit that such an ambition never crossed my mind. Then again, I appear
to be lagging far behind in toaster technology compared to him. I only have a
2-slot countertop toaster, while his, which he seems quite fond of, is
considerably more elaborate.
Call me a luddite if you must, but while I guess his meal turns out OK, I
think there are far simpler ways to prepare it. Still, without such culinary
pioneers how can civilization hope to progress? I imagine the fellow who
thought to dry and ground up coffee beans, and then pour hot water over them,
was laughed at by his tribe mates. Being a visionary can be a lonely path.
The above video shows a family in Yunnan, China harvesting, processing and cooking with sugar from the sugarcane. It is obviously a staged cooking show, but it is nicely filmed and put together. If you are a diabetic, you may have a rise in your glucose levels just from watching it, but they do whip-up some tasty looking food and treats.
This video shows a family preparing, cooking and eating hornets in rural Nepal. Like many of these types of videos I suspect it is largely staged. I think the hovel they supposedly live in is actually a set, and they live elsewhere. Still, it an interesting video and certainly an exotic dish.
It has come to my attention that manly-men eat carburetors for breakfast. To my horror I realized my macho cred was lacking because I didn't have a recipe to prepare a breakfast carburetor. So, YouTube to the rescue.
I found this video. He claims he just cleaning carburetors but come on, he's using a fish frier so who does he think he's fooling? Well, I guess it would fool a non-carburetor for breakfast soy boy, but it ain't fooling me. I assume he barbeques it after parboiling it, but he doesn't show that part. It looks delicious.
This is a tour in Tobago which is an island laying of the northern coast of South America. It starts with breakfast and moves through the day, featuring several local chefs and dishes common to the island.
Tipper Pressley cooks a meal of fried corn, cracklin cornbread, fried squash, soup beans, tomatoes, home canned pickles, and fat back. Tipper is from North Carolina and runs a YouTube channel about Appalachia. I've showed some of her cooking videos before.
This a is a Peruvian dish called Lomo Saltado. It is a stir fry of steak, onion, tomatoes, pepper, soy sauce, and French fries served with a side of rice. Sometimes the French fries are also served to the side, but a common preparation includes them in the stir fry so they can absorb the flavor of the juices. Looks wonderful to me.
It comes from an infusion of Chinese techniques into Peruvian cuisine. In the 19th century many well-off Peruvians had Chinese cooks as indentured servants. They introduced stir frying (saltado) and many of the ingredients, including the side of rice, to the dish.
Since she's white I suppose some knuckleheads would accuse Mairia of cultural appropriation for her theft of a burrito recipe. However, to me it looks to me like a tasty example of cultural diffusion.
On a cold day in Azerbaijan a fellow prepares a meal. In the title for the post I joked that it was a block of soup, it is actually a dish known as an aspic or a meat jelly. It is made by, after cooking the ingredients, placing them in a mold and pouring the broth over them which, when cooled, becomes gelatinous.
In the video it comes out looking good. However, as I've mention before, my grandmother was Slovakian and she would make this from time to time and I found it to be ghastly, although some people do like it.
In this video Quang Tran, a popular YouTuber cooks his version of a Navajo meal. He's Canadian, and his parents are Vietnamese, so he got his recipes from the internet. In his comment section, which is blessedly free of cultural appropriation nonsense, the Native Americans appreciate him highlighting their cuisine, and they seem to think he did a good job of it (although they all say his tacos are too crunchy).
At one time I wondered why there weren't more Amerindian restaurants, but then it occurred to me that Mexican food was largely indigenous cuisine, so I guess there are a lot of them. With that in mind, one of the commenters, Phillip Begay, said, "I eat it every day blue cornmeal mush mutton stew coffee. Potato with spam on hot tortillas." While I was surprised at Spam being added to their cuisine, a little later commenter L M added, "This is more contemporary native Americans food. The result of tribes being pushed to subpar reservations and given rations. It’s sorta like our “soul food” being different from African cuisine." There's no denying, the Indian's got boned with the reservation system.
Half of the video is Tran making the meal, and the other half is him eating it. As he eats, he gets tangled up in the proper term for Indians: he calls them American Indians, but quickly corrects to Native Americans (a linguistic contrivance I find to be clumsy -- I much prefer Amerindian if you need to clarify that they're not subcontinent Indians). He then uses the Canadian Aboriginal, with Indigenous and First Nation no doubt floating around in the background.
Speaking of naming, the tribal names themselves are not what they appear. Apparently, most tribal names came from their neighboring tribes. Most tribes called themselves the 'people' and other tribes the 'enemy'. So, when explorers would ask who lived next to them, they would get that tribe's name for the other tribe. From Original Tribal Names of Native North American People we discover that the Navajo actually called themselves Dine'e (The People) and it was the Pueblos who called them the Navajo (planted fields). Still, in this day all of the Navajo in the thread identified themselves as Navajo.
Regardless, the meal looks good, although I'm not too sure about that blue corn mush.
Time to think outside of the box this Thanksgiving (Click image to enlarge)
While inflation has priced Turkey out of the reach of many, that's still no reason not to have a tasty and elegant Thanksgiving feast. Since Flare's aim is to educate as well as elevate, here's a link to Depression-Era Dishes: 9 Budget Recipes That Are Still Good Enough To Eat Today. Certainly, you'll find a budget friendly and yummy dish to make you forget roast turkey, stuffing, cranberries and pumpkin pie. Below is one of their recipes which is sure to get your tastebuds drooling.
Hoover Stew
Ingredients: 16 oz. box of noodles (macaroni is best) 2 cans stewed tomatoes, undrained 1 can corn, undrained 1 can peas or beans (or both!), undrained 1 package sliced hot dogs
Instructions: Cook pasta until it's not quite done, then add sliced hot dogs and canned ingredients. Bring to a boil, then allow to simmer until pasta is done.
Above an Aberjhani grandmother gathers cucumbers and then preserves them. When she's done she prepares a simple lunch. I'm always fascinated by the little details in these types of videos: the designs on the front of her toaster oven, the flowers painted on the side of her pot, the decorative lids she closes the jars with.
Below we have some men doing masonry as she prepares a meal of chicken stew. We end with grilled beef kebab. I wouldn't turn down an offer of a plate of that.
