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This is the first in what I plan to be an occasional series about my experiences as I learn about Asian cuisines (particularly Indian, Thai, and Vietnamese) and their ingredients.
Before I get down to it, a little background about me, cooking, and eating. I'm a white US-ian from a working class (and often unemployed-class) background who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Minnesota, a state in the north central part of the US. Minnesota is somewhat unfairly notorious as the home of Bland. The Europeans who settled there were largely Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, German, and Eastern European, with a lot of Irish in some parts of the state. There's still a considerable population of Native Americans, too, who live mostly on geographically isolated reservations or in the larger cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul (technically two cities that blur into one another) and Duluth. Until about the late 1970s there was very little immigration of people from anywhere else, but there's been a lot since then: a group of Hmong refugees who resettled in Minnesota after the Vietnam war were among the first, followed by other southeast Asians, then groups of Somali refugees, and starting around 2000 a big wave of people from Mexico and Latin America. These people still mostly live in Minneapolis/St. Paul, but they're moving out into small towns too, and the whole state is becoming more culturally diverse. In my childhood, however, and especially in rural northern Minnesota where I grew up, this wasn't happening yet.
( click here for more )
Before I get down to it, a little background about me, cooking, and eating. I'm a white US-ian from a working class (and often unemployed-class) background who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Minnesota, a state in the north central part of the US. Minnesota is somewhat unfairly notorious as the home of Bland. The Europeans who settled there were largely Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, German, and Eastern European, with a lot of Irish in some parts of the state. There's still a considerable population of Native Americans, too, who live mostly on geographically isolated reservations or in the larger cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul (technically two cities that blur into one another) and Duluth. Until about the late 1970s there was very little immigration of people from anywhere else, but there's been a lot since then: a group of Hmong refugees who resettled in Minnesota after the Vietnam war were among the first, followed by other southeast Asians, then groups of Somali refugees, and starting around 2000 a big wave of people from Mexico and Latin America. These people still mostly live in Minneapolis/St. Paul, but they're moving out into small towns too, and the whole state is becoming more culturally diverse. In my childhood, however, and especially in rural northern Minnesota where I grew up, this wasn't happening yet.
( click here for more )
