Alawia
What I cook in my house is Sudanese food. It’s very hard to get some of the ingredients. I bring a lot of spices from Sudan. Every two years I go back. I bring a lot of it from Sudan and I put it in the freezer so it doesn’t lose the smell. There are a couple of stores in D.C. and New York and sometimes if you go there you get stuff from there.

The main bread from Sudan is actually something made out of sourdough. You don’t bake it in an oven; you cook it in a skillet. It’s very thin and it requires certain skills. My daughters are just learning to do it. You spread it, and then with stuff, like very thin pieces of the dates, coming out of the dates. Because dates there also are the center of their lives. Date leaves and you spread it and make a sheet out of it. Have you seen the baklava sheets? It’s same but a bit thicker and sour. They make stews. Maybe, a pound, a pound and a half, with a lot of vegetables, tomato sauce and onions and they put it in a big plate. They layer it together, the stew and the bread and they all eat together. Usually, you’ll have a side dish made of eggplant or something. And salad. With every meal there is a salad. For five or six of us, we’ll sit like that and there will be a table in the middle of the dining table, that’s typical. And they have this big tray – a round tray usually – and inside this tray you have these different plates and you all eat together.

Alma
I wanted to go to college. One day my Mom came home and said, “Alma, you know what? You’re going to live by yourself now. You should learn something to cook.” I was 20 years old and I really need to learn something. And she teach me. She taught me how to make pitas and other Bosnian food. It was funny. When I went to college, I lived with my roommate, we went to high school together. In the first week, one day we came home and our fridge was totally empty. There was something to cook but nothing to eat right away. I called my mother and said, "I have that, that, and that, what am I gonna make it?" And she said, "Make this." She teach me over the phone.

Belgica
I try to cook the food from my country, but my kids won’t eat it.  Sometimes I end up eating every day for three days the same thing.  I do cry sometimes when I have to eat it myself and they request some American things or they bring from outside.  I’m going through very kind of painful thing with my kids.

Fannaram
When I came I brought the spices, because I know I will not have it here. But they said, “You can have everything in New York. There is an African market and you can have it there.” But I brought it. I don’t know that you can have it here. I cook everything, American and African. We eat everything here. But sometimes, me personally, I cannot eat like Americans, every American food. So, sometimes if I go somewhere there is American food – it’s not because it’s not good, I even cannot try it to see if it’s good or not sometimes. I don’t know why.

Senel
Tomato paste is one of the main ingredients that we use in our cooking. I would buy Heinz tomato paste, or Hunts here. They would not come out as red as the Turkish tomato paste. So we would end up putting a whole can of it and still the color would not be the same...the color’s not there. The flavor was not there either. But when we went to Boston it became easy. We found Armenian store. They brought stuff from Turkey – tomato paste and everything else. Then, when we went to Houston, there was another store, Middle Eastern store I think they were, that brought international food. They had plenty of stuff from Turkey. And here we go to Patterson, New Jersey every three months to stock up. There’s a Turkish restaurant, so we go and eat. It’s kind of fun. We buy groceries for $400-$500 and then come back.

We primarily cook Turkish food, but at the same time we cook Spanish or Vietnamese. It’s part of our acculturation here. We cook a lot of vegetables. Everything we have needs to have vegetables. So when we go to a restaurant and see people eating this huge steak, we can’t believe people eat this steak alone. We never do that in Turkey. If we have steak you can make four meals. Vegetables are very important. Rice, beans they eat. Then there’s cracked wheat, you can cook it like rice and eat it like pulav.

There’s a Kurdish dish everywhere in Turkey. Some people call it Turkish/Kurdish pizzas. Armenians call it Armenian pizza. It originated from a Kurdish region east of Turkey. It’s kind of like, you roll out the dough and then prepare a mixture that you put on top. It’s made of parsley, tomatoes, green peppers and ground beans and spices and tomato paste. You spread it on and put it in the oven. It turns out really tasty and then you put some lemon juice on it and you eat. My husband loves that. I do too. So we will make it every three months, because it takes me six hours to make it. I have to make the dough on my own. And then he usually prepares the inside. By the time that you roll it out, put the meat on and then wait for it to be cooked, and then prepare another one, another one, another one, it takes a while.

Ho-Thanh
And I remember when I went to my Aunt’s house, summer time a lot of times, I went to my Aunt’s house where my grandmother live with.  She cook for me a really good fish and I miss that.  She pass away already and I never forget her by the fish she cooked.

It was the clam, no, crab soup – the crab soup they cook with tomatoes and noodles and it’s really good, that’s one thing. We try to make it over here and it doesn’t taste the same. And the dessert, I love banana covered with sweet rice and coconut. Oh, I love that! They don’t make it good over here either. I miss it.

Sara
First of all the climate in Ecuador is just perfect. The equator line passes right through the middle of this poor little country. This is the reason why the temperature only reaches the 70 or 80 degrees. Second the food is completely different. In Ecuador for breakfast we have black coffee with a piece of fry green banana, for lunch rice and beans, and for dinner rice with fry eggs and piece of steak. It takes a long time to prepare these meals but in the majority of the cases mothers are always home to have everything ready for you. However, in the United States life is more fast-pace. Mothers are never home because they are working, as a result we have cereal for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, and Hamburger Helper for dinner. The life in Ecuador is slow-pace. Families are very close. When the kids get married they bring their husband or wife to live with their parent.

Susan
Even though my mother didn’t expressively say it, she was very interested in natural foods. We never bought much; everything was made from scratch. This is what I remember. The food just had a very pure taste. She knows her vegetables and knows how to pick good things – good fresh ingredients. And that’s what I learned from her: it’s always better to make it yourself…even when she was in her 80’s, she would be still making soup every day. It was important to her. She would wake up planning what was she going to eat that day. What was she going to make for lunch, what she would make for dinner… She and my Dad would talk about it and maybe go shopping to get these ingredients, but it was the most important part of her day.

Sokunvery
My sponsors, my parents told me this, they would try to make Asian food for us sometimes and they would make rice… they would make it until it’s burned, the bottom. But they would make it burned a lot. They think because we come from a war-torn country they think we love this stuff. The hard, you know the rice. …And they gave it to my parents. When they told me the story, it was really funny because it seemed they were back in the war again!

Tirzah
Actually, I learned to cook in college and I was cooking more American foods. I think, though, when I got my first apartment in Chicago, obviously I was much older, and that’s when I started experimenting. I was talking to my Dad and he was saying, “You’re a Bahamian gal, you should know how to cook at least one good pot of peas and rice,” because that was like something that we had every day. It was a staple. And my Dad was not into leftovers, so either you ate that pot or you throw that out because we’re getting a fresh pot the next day. So when I was in my 20’s then I started experimenting more. I was thinking this is part of my identity. There’s got to be something that separates me from the regular person. And since I don’t have the accent, maybe I need to catch on to the food. So I started experimenting with frying fish.

Evelyn
Well, the first thing when you arrive here, you don’t know nobody. And so you cannot have some food that you want because you don’t know where to get it. And I never cook at home because my Mom, she cooked for me, for us and all the children, you know? And so I never learned how to cook. Even my husband said to me: “Even water you burn it!” So I start learning how to cook. I keep on experimenting things. Then we used to go to New York and buy the stuff I need to cook, because they didn’t have oriental store here during that time in Harrisburg. They had no Chinese restaurant. So I didn’t know where to go to get that food. I go to the grocery story but then I didn’t know what to cook. That’s the problem. So, then I get to know some people that I became friends to them. I think there were only three of us Filipino families. Because my husband was working at the Army Depot and there were family there too, I think three of them. And ask them how to do this, how to cook this. And now I feed six boys, so you have to learn how to cook!

Djenabou
If you have somebody who die from your family, you’re going to cook, keep to the food and give it to somebody. I’m going to give it to somebody and that person will give to somebody, something. And eat my food and cook food and give it too. It’s going to be like this. They say it’s going to make them happy where they are. And sometimes they say they going to be hungry. But if you give it to somebody, they will be full. … In here I do it, too. Like milk, if you give it to somebody. If you pray on the milk and you give it somebody every Friday. We do it every Friday.

Belgica
The food my mother didn’t change a lot, she still kept cooking Ecuadorian food. But the taste was not the same. Because I went and saw everything was very big. Tomatoes were very big and peppers were very big. You know, everything was big. And they shine it, they were shiny. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, how wonderful! It’s so good.” Then when I taste it, I thought, “Is this tomato for real?” Because is that in my country, chemicals are very expensive to put in the ground. Which is better, so the farmers stick to organic food – what we call organic food. And the market is always fresh. You go to the market and you buy and it’s so delicious – everything – the greens, fruits, grains and everything. But here that was one thing I was--I wanted to buy and bought many things with my mother. But my mother kept telling me that “Okay, we will try, but the taste is not the same.” That was one different thing.

Rosemary
Cooking was very, very significant in a child’s life, especially a female child. A girl had to learn how to cook the traditional meals. Because these are meals that you can’t just – there are no recipes. Most Africans don’t use recipes. You learn your cooking from your mother. Every ethnic group has a different way of cooking certain things.

Ho-Thanh
Talking about the rice cooking. The first meal I have, my sponsor, the church and my sponsor, bought us a box, a big box of minute-rice. And tell us that this is the rice you can cook it and eat it. And the directions is in English. Nobody showed me how to do it before. I never cooked before with that way. We just used that: We rinsed the rice off, then we put the rice in the pot and we put the water in there – cold water in there and we measuring one knuckle on my finger. That’s how I learned when we cook rice in my country. Regardless minute-rice is different between minute-rice and long rice. Then by the time, like half an hour, forty-five minutes when the rice done, we put it up in the bowl to serve to eat dinner, it’s just like soup! We sit there and cry. Six of us sit there and cry. Because we have the meat there but we have no rice! And rice is just like potatoes and that’s one of the funny things. Right now we’re looking back the last 28 years, the first meal we have, I’m laughing now. But that time it wasn’t funny. That time was sad, it was really sad. Now I know how the minute-rice cooked!

Djenabou
In Africa, like my country, if you don’t have a lot of money, you will never eat meat. They eat meat only in Ramadan. Some people. Someone can have two to three times a year. They buy meat for all the family and they cook a lot and everybody eat together.

Rosemary
I cook African food. I cook it the way – not exactly the way – improvised, but when you come to my home you will always find some African food. I don’t particularly – I’m not really crazy about American food because I didn’t grow up eating it. For instance, I don’t really like macaroni-and-cheese and people love that. I don’t like real cheese – people love that. I don’t even like shrimp. My kids love it. Okay, it’s a delicacy – it’s expensive and people love it. But there are some things that I really don’t appeal to me. Sometimes food is acquired. The taste is acquired. One reason why I like African food is it’s natural. It’s not processed, not from a can, not from boxes, it’s natural.