(Herb-Roasted Pork Tenderloin) CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Not a great photo! Getting used to a new phone camera! The pork was much juicier than it looks in this photo! I really wanted to make chicken Kiev for this one because it is delicious but, one of my rules with this project, is the meal must be something I have not eaten before and I have eaten chicken Kiev before. And I’d do it again. Because it really is delicious. I found a few recipes that sounded interesting but, with beef prices at an all-time-high (and they just keep climbing), I am looking into pork or chicken options these days. I’m not opposed to meat-free meals but they must be traditional, and something the average citizen has probably eaten. Anyway, pork tenderloin was cheap and I already had the remaining ingredients so Buzhenina won out over everything else. Prep for this meal as easy! Rub the tenderloin with seasoning, garlic, and oil and let it sit in the fridge for a few hours. Sear the outside of the tenderloin and then wrap it in foil and cook it in the oven for about an hour. How was it? Really good! If you like roasted pork in any form, you’d like this. It’s flavorful and juicy and just all around good. I served it with mashed potatoes, gravy, and green beans and it was a perfect meal for a cold and rainy day. My husband actually tried it and ended up having two servings! He very very rarely tries anything from my International Meals project because they either use chicken, which he doesn’t like, or he thinks they’re “too weird” for him.  Beef and potatoes are tasty, and my husband would love to eat them for dinner every single day for the rest of his life but I can't, I need variety! Would I make it again? Yes! It’s not complicated, just takes a little time, and it can be added to the meal rotation of things my husband and I will both eat.  Yay!

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED (It is on page 5.) To my surprise, Uganda had several recipes I was interested in and it was fairly easy to find something that I wanted to make. Beef prices are somewhat insane here so I’ve been leaning toward pork or chicken recently and that steered me in the direction of kikalayi (chick-uh-lie-ee) which is essentially, a pork and cabbage stew. It also uses onions and garlic and other veggies but the veggies vary depending on what recipe you read. The cooking techniques also vary a little bit. I think it probably boils down to how much time you have and what veggies you have on hand. You need a cut of pork with some fat on it but it should be less fatty than pork belly. The recipe calls for 2 pounds of pork but that was way too much for me so I used around a pound of pork shoulder steaks and halved the remaining ingredients. I used cabbage, onions, green pepper, tomatoes, garlic, and a carrot for the veggie portion of the stew. Using a pre-shredded coleslaw mix (minus the dressing) might have made things easier and taken less time but I’m not sure how much one would use. Potatoes were suggested as an optional ingredient and I had one that I needed to use up, so I added it to the stew. Salt, pepper, and a little curry powder make up the seasonings so I didn’t need to order anything special for the kikalayi. The cooking process is time-consuming. The pork fat must be separated from the meat because it needs to be rendered down for a while, before you get to cooking the meat itself. After that, once you have added the remaining ingredients, it needs to simmer for around an hour, and most of the liquid must be cooked off. I wasn’t standing at the stove for hours but it did take a little longer than the recipe led me to believe and it wasn’t really something I could leave unattended for too long. It needs to be stirred, regularly. In my research, the kikalyi was served in a variety of ways. It can be served on its own, as a stew, sometimes topped with sliced avocado or tomatoes or cucumbers. I also saw it served with rice or with flatbread. I opted to eat it as a stew since I used potatoes and didn’t want to add another carb to the plate but cooked up some rice, just in case. How did it turn out? It was really good! I enjoyed it more over rice than on its own but, either way, it was tasty. The pork was so incredibly tender, it nearly melted in my mouth. The seasonings were just right, not too bland, and not too spicy. All in all, a satisfying and tasty meal! And I will happily eat the leftovers. Would I make it again? Yes! I get on a cabbage kick every now and then and this is a perfect addition to my cabbage collection, which is not really a collection, I just make smothered cabbage in the crockpot and vary the things I throw in with it.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED (Please excuse the dark photo, I thought the sunlight streaming in through the window behind me and the light over the stove would be adequate. They were not. Also there was a lot of steam because the curry was piping hot!) I knew Tuvalu would be a challenging country for me because it is a small island nation and small island nations are always a challenge. They tend to eat a lot of fresh seafood and use local fruits and vegetables that I cannot access in my tiny little town in the middle of the desert. These limitations left me with ONE recipe option for Tuvalu and I had to make it with frozen tuna steaks because our grocery store doesn’t seem to carry “fresh” tuna steaks. You work with what you’ve got! This was really easy to prepare. It involved minimal chopping, measuring out curry powder, and opening a can of coconut milk. It was also a quick meal; it took less than a half hour to cook! How’d it turn out? It was fine. There’s nothing objectionable or off-putting about it, it was just fine and that is probably due to a choice I made! The recipe calls for spicy red peppers but I couldn’t find those at the grocery store and went with one large Serrano pepper and that was inadequate. Two Serranos would have been better! The chopped-up tuna steak didn’t really add a lot in the way of flavor; it was more of a texture. I don’t know if that’s because it was frozen and not fresh or if the curry just cancelled it out. Would I make it again? No. There’s nothing wrong with the recipe and, if you like tuna steaks and you like curry, you’d probably enjoy it! BUT my husband hates the smell of fish and the smell of curry so I had to make this while he was not home. And I had to take odor control steps afterward so he wasn’t smacked in the face with the aroma of tuna curry when he came home from work. The tuna had zero fishy smell, to me anyway, but there was still curry in the air. Out of consideration for him and because airing the house out so he can’t detect it is a PITA, I won’t make it again.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Turkmenistan is a desert country in Central Asia that I really only knew two things about prior to this project. It is home to one of the most beautiful breeds of horses in the world, the Akhal-Teke . It is also the home of the Darvaza gas crater, AKA the Door to Hell or Gates of Hell . The more I delved into Turkmenistan that more interesting it got and not necessarily in a good way. But all that mess is for someone else to explain, I’m here for the food. (BTW, the second Sunday in August, is National Melon Day in Turkmenistan. They are very proud of their melons.) Despite being one of Turkmenistan’s national dishes, Ichlekli does not contain any melons. I saw it referred to, several times, as their version of Shepherd’s Pie. I didn’t have to order anything special or exotic to make Ichlekli. It is traditionally made with lamb but beef is also acceptable and what I used. It does not used mashed potatoes, instead, the crust is made from a simple dough of flour, water, salt, and butter. The filling is ground meat, onions, bell pepper, tomato, salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper. The most difficult part of preparing it was rolling out the dough because I don’t have a lot of counterspace to work with and I always make a mess when using flour. Everything else was either chopping or combining ingredients. I did make one adjustment. I reduced the amount of water used in the filling because the tomato I used was one of the juiciest tomatoes I’d ever encountered in my life and I just dumped it (after dicing it) and all its juice into the filling mixture. How did it turn out? A huge, lop-sided, strange-looking, and better-tasting-than-I-expected meat pie. I was worried that this would be bland and flavorless but it wasn’t! The beef and veggies combine to create a nice subtle flavor that would be a good thing to make for someone who doesn’t like heavily seasoned food. Or can’t eat spicy food. I actually really enjoyed it, it has a nice comfort food feel to it and the leftovers will get eaten, though I might have to freeze some because it was larger than I anticipated. Would I make it again? Probably not but that’s just because I don’t enjoy rolling out dough and making a floury mess of my kitchen. If someone made it for me, I’d happily eat it again. :) It tastes much better than the way I made it look!

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED I knew nothing about Turkish cuisine prior to this project and ended up with a nice list of things to try in the future! Or right now, starting with Tuvak sote! Tuvak sote is a chicken stew made with chicken (of course), onion, peppers, tomatoes, tomato paste, parsley, and acı biber salçası (hot red pepper paste) which I had to order from Amazon. The prep-work just involves washing veggies and chopping stuff up. Easy! I did have to substitute a couple of peppers with green and red bell peppers because I was unable to figure out how to get fresh peppers from Türkiye. I also didn’t try that hard because the recipe included substitution suggestions. The cooking process is also pretty easy. Brown the chicken. Sauté the veggies. Stir everything together and let simmer for a bit. Serve over rice (I used basmati rice). I feel like I usually write a lot more about recipe prep and the cooking process for these things but this one was really pretty simple! Sometimes, simple is best because this completely wowed me! It was so fresh tasting and packed with flavor!  The acı biber salçası added a bit of heat but it didn’t overwhelm the other flavors in the stew. It was a revelation and I can’t wait to find other ways to use it while cooking. I might sneak some in spaghetti sauce or pizza sauce just to see what happens. Or to amp up a stir-fry. But back to the Tuvak Sote, I think it ranks in the Top 10 International Meals I’ve made. And I will definitely make it again. I loved it!

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED When I found this recipe I pronounced it lab-lob-ee. When my husband saw the name, he pronounced it Luh-Blobby. AI says it’s leh-bleb-ee. Howtopronounce.com says lab-luh-bye is an option. I have found YouTube videos that pronounce it every which way so I don’t know what is the correct pronunciation! Should it ever come up in verbal conversation, I’m just gonna call it chickpea stew and spare others a cringeworthy pronunciation. Anyway, Tunisia is a country in North Africa, between Algeria and Libya and leans toward Arabic and Mediterranean flavor profiles (with some Berber influence). I have a nice little list of things I’d like to make but opted for this one because it was not terribly labor intensive and I could acquire the ingredients easily. It also sounded like a nice, meatless, Fall meal. I did see several mentions of this being served as a breakfast meal in Tunisia. So, I guess I made Tunisian breakfast for dinner? The most labor-intensive parts of preparing lablabi are cleaning and chopping up parsley, dicing an onion, and mincing some garlic. I bought a loaf of French bread from the grocery store and ripped it up with my hands. Super easy. And, in the recipe I used, the chickpeas are canned. The only ingredient I couldn’t get locally was harissa paste but I had some on hand from a previous recipe, yay! The cooking process is relatively easy. The bread gets toasted under the broiler, or in a toaster oven, if you have one. The chickpeas simmer in a pot while you sauté the veggies in a separate pan. The veggies and seasonings are added to the chickpeas. The toasted bread is put into the bottom of a bowl and the chickpea “stew” is ladled over it. The bowl is then garnished with lemon wedges, parsley, green onions, olive oil, and more harissa paste. I did come across some recipes where it is topped with a poached egg or a hard-boiled egg. I’m sure they would be a really nice addition! How was it? Delicious! Harissa paste is a bit spicy so it had a bit of a kick, that I enjoyed. The bread added an interesting layer of texture and flavor. The lemon really amped up all of the other flavors. I always forget how well it does that. I need to use fresh lemon juice more often. I garnished with only parsley and green onions. More harissa paste might have made it too spicy for me and I really didn’t think it needed more lemon or oil. Would I make it again? If I regularly had harissa paste in the house, yes! Maybe I should start keeping it on hand at all times because I’ve enjoyed every meal I’ve made with it. Lablabi would be a great way to use up bread and canned chickpeas can stay in the pantry for a while. I think I will end up making this again. And I will happily eat the leftovers!

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED So, it has been a little while since my last International Meal.   In short, an old health issue came back with a vengeance and I needed time and energy to deal with that. It is dealt with, once and for all, and I’m back on track! Yay! Geera Pork is highly-seasoned pork belly chopped up into bite-sized pieces and cooked low and slow on the stovetop for a while. If you do not like cumin and/or cilantro, this is absolutely not the meal for you! I love both so it's a win/win for me! This one was a lot of work. Aside from chopping up the pork belly, you’ll need to dice an onion and the spicy pepper(s) of your choice (I used Serranos). You’ll need to mince 4 Tablespoons of garlic though you could just use jarlic and save some effort.   I usually feel compelled to add more garlic than recipes call for but, in this case, 4 tablespoons seemed plenty.  You’ll need to wash and chop up some cilantro too. And roast some cumin seeds and then grind them up in a mortar and pestle to make roasted cumin powder. Thankfully, the roasted cumin seeds ground up very easily and that step wasn’t as labor intensive as I’d expected. It also calls for something called “Green Seasoning” which I ordered from Amazon and did not make from scratch. * The pork must marinate for a period of time ranging from 30 minutes to overnight. I put it in the marinade early in the morning and let it sit in the fridge until I was ready to start cooking the meal (close to 8 hours). The actual cooking process isn’t difficult but it takes some time to get the pork belly to brown up and for the fat to render down. The recipe calls for 2 pounds of pork but I found it difficult to fit that much chopped up pork into a standard sized frying pan without it being overcrowded. The overcrowding led to it taking longer to brown. Unless you’re making this for a group of people, I’d cut the recipe in half. Anyway, it is mostly sautéing things, then letting them cook down for a bit, then adding the final seasoning and stirring. Was it worth all that effort and time? Maybe?  It was jam-packed with delicious flavor and enjoyable, to an extent. Most sites said that it is usually a food served at the bar and eaten off toothpicks, while drinking with friends, but it could also be served with rice as a meal, which is what I did. The pork belly is just too rich and fatty for a meal, for me anyway. A few bites of it at the bar would be amazing. A plate of it with rice? TOO MUCH. I’m not sure how I’m going to finish off the leftovers. Maybe chop it up even more and heat it up with diced onions, throw it in a taco shell or tortilla, and top it off some fresh lime juice? The acidity from the lime juice would definitely help. The flavor gets a 10 out of 10 and I really want to experiment with the Green Seasoning because it is absolutely delicious. Maybe something with chicken thighs... * Green Seasoning is a Caribbean seasoning blend made from puréed fresh herbs (like thyme and cilantro), ginger, garlic, onions, and hot peppers.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Tonga is a small island nation in the South Pacific Ocean and island nations are challenging for me. I live in the middle of nowhere the desert with no access to fresh fish and with someone who is extremely grossed out by the aroma of fish. I also can’t acquire many of the fruits and vegetables native to the islands which adds another level of difficulty. I would love to try dishes that are more authentic and give the nation’s cuisine a chance to shine but, unfortunately, that’s not always possible in my house/geographic location. So, I work with I’ve got! Lu Pulu is made up of canned corned beef with coconut milk, tomatoes, onions, and, in my case, spinach. The recipe calls for taro leaves but I couldn’t figure out how to get my hands on those. It suggested large spinach leaves as a substitute but the local store only had baby spinach so I rolled with that. I ordered a specific brand of New Zealand corned beef (Palm) because several sites insisted that it was THE canned corned beef to use in Lu Pulu. Honestly, I did not feel optimistic about this dish. There isn’t any one ingredient in it that I dislike, I just wasn’t sure about them all together in one dish. How did it turn out? Spectacularly unphotogenic but not bad at all! It basically tasted like corned beef with a creamy sauce and spinach. I’m sure it turns out differently if cooked in taro leaves or large spinach leaves but, I suspect, the sauce will taste the same. I was hot and didn’t feel like eating additional carbs so I didn’t eat it with anything on the side. If you need carbs, I feel like it would go with some kind of potato. Would I make it again? I don’t know. It was very easy to make and it wasn’t bad but I don’t know that I’d crave it. I do still have another can of Palm corned beef so I probably will make it one more time but, after that, I don’t think I will.

CLICK HERE FOR THE CHICKEN RECIPE CLICK HERE FOR THE DJENKOUME RECIPE Togo is a small country in West Africa that I didn’t really know a great deal about so I wasn’t sure what to expect when it came to Togolese food. I found a few recipes but, given our warm weather, grilled chicken sounded pretty good to me! Djenkoumé (recipe linked in comments) was suggested as a side to go with it so I decided to give that a try too. Most of the ingredients for the chicken were easy to find but I did have to order red palm oil online. It adds a mild earthiness and sweetness to whatever you cook in it but, with the amount of garlic and ginger in this recipe, it wasn’t all that noticeable to me. I ended up using two different methods to cook the chicken. I started on the grill but the chicken caught on fire, still unsure if that was the result of user error or a grill issue. After that, I decided to cook up the rest in the air fryer. The djenkoumé was easy to make. It is basically just stirring things and letting them simmer for a bit. I ate the chicken and djenkoumé with chopped up tomato, cooked onion slices, and a dipping sauce made from the tomatoEs, garlic, ginger, and spices from the early steps in the djenkoumé process. (It was recommended on one of the sites I visited.) And I really enjoyed the entire meal! The chicken came out of the air fryer with crispy skin and tender juicy meat. The djenkoumé, paired with the dipping sauce, was incredibly flavorful. The cut-up tomatoes added a lovely brightness and freshness to the whole meal. All in all, it was a really nice meal! Would I make it again? Yes! It isn’t difficult to make (as long as your food doesn’t catch on fire) and it made a great dinner for a warm day.

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED I have to confess, I’d never heard of Timor-Leste until now. It’s a small country that shares the same island mass as Indonesia which means it also shares pretty much the same cuisine. I couldn’t find any single recipe that was completely unique to Timor-Leste that I could also get the ingredients to make. Chicken meatballs and chicken meatball soup kept popping up for both Indonesia and Timor-Leste and I could find all of the ingredients locally, yay! There’s a lot of prep involved in making this meal, it isn’t something you can throw together quickly. The meatballs must be made separately and, because the ground chicken mixture is very soft, it needs to be chilled in the fridge for awhile before cooking them. (Being cold helps them maintain their shape.) They aren’t difficult to make; you just need ample time for them to chill. (I let them chill for 2 hours.) The soup itself needs Bok choy, tofu, scallions (or green onions), cilantro, shallot flakes, and fried minced garlic, and a few seasonings. So, you need to clean and chop the Bok choy, scallions, and cilantro at some point before the soup is ready. I do not enjoy cleaning Bok choy, I think I might hate cleaning it more than I hate cleaning leeks. Maybe we just get especially dirty and limp Bok choy? Cleaning scallions and cilantro isn’t difficult, just a little time-consuming. Pressing the tofu was easy. I put it on towels and then laid a cutting board over it and put my cast iron Dutch Oven on top of the cutting board and gave it some time. I changed the towels a few times but it really didn’t need much help. The shallot and minced garlic need to be fried as they’re used as a crispy topping sprinkled over the soup. Over the course of this project, I have learned how to fry them for this use so that was relatively easy, but was another step in getting to the final product that required chopping, frying, and dirtying more dishes. Once you have everything cleaned, chopped, and prepped, you throw it all in a pot and let it simmer for a bit. And then top your bowl of soup with scallions, cilantro, fried shallot bits, and fried minced garlic. The linked recipe suggests eating it with steamed rice or adding in some noodles. I was in the mood for rice so I cooked up some jasmine rice to go with it. I had a few issues with this meal but, primarily, it was texturally unappealing to me. I found the meatballs and tofu too soft and mushy. I like meatballs in soup to still have a bit of firmness to them and, when they don’t, I don’t enjoy them. I have texture issues with tofu and soup is not the right place for me to overcome those issues. The broth was bland even though I spiced it up beyond what the recipe called for and, of course, upped the garlic. The accompaniments (shallots, garlic, etc.) helped but not enough. I finished a bowl and that was it for me. I will not finish the leftovers and I will not make this again. I don’t think it is a bad recipe, I think it just doesn’t work with my pickiness regarding food textures.

(Gai pad Gratiem) CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED This might have been the easiest recipe decision of this entire project. I found several recipes from Thailand that sounded good but this one was the winner because garlic is one of the great loves of my life. I have tried many variations of garlic pepper chicken stir fry but never a Thai recipe for it.  I had all of the ingredients on hand, except Golden Mountain sauce. The recipe says you can use soy sauce, if you don’t have Golden Mountain sauce, but I really wanted to make it as true to the recipe as possible. Golden Mountain sauce is a bit saltier and sweeter than regular soy sauce and incredibly delicious but not something you would want to use in large quantities. The prep work is minimal. Make the sauce, cut up the chicken, chop up the garlic and cilantro. The trickiest part of the cooking process was frying the chopped garlic. I’d never done that before so I had to keep a close eye on it and be very mindful of the heat level of the pan so I didn’t burn it. It turned out great! The rest is fairly standard stir fry cooking. I ate it over jasmine rice with a side of steamed vegetables that I sprinkled a little bit of the fried garlic over. And I absolutely love love LOVED it! This is probably in the top 5 of the international recipes I made. This one knocked my socks off. So much flavor! So good! Would I make it again?  YES!!!!!

CLICK HERE FOR THE RECIPE I USED Tanzania was a pleasant surprise for me. I went in expecting that I’d find recipes for groundnut stews or some sort of dried beef with a corn-based side because those seem to be common meals throughout Africa but, instead, I found a wide variety of foods. It was easy to find information on Tanzania but I had “Africa” by Toto stuck in my head for days because the Serengeti and Mount Kilimanjaro are located there and were mentioned frequently in my research. (And now it is back in my head again…) I chose this chicken stew because I was in the mood for chicken and it is loaded with veggies (canned tomatoes, carrots, peas, onions, and bell peppers) which was also appealing to me. All of the ingredients were easy to acquire or I already had on hand. (My spice cupboard is overflowing!) This isn’t difficult to make but there is a fair amount of chopping involved. When the chopping is done, you put the things in a pan, in a specific order, and then let it all simmer until the potatoes are cooked through. The result is a chicken stew that tastes fresh and bright and lovely. It is not spicy, but I’m sure you could make it spicy by adding some Serrano peppers (or your preferred pepper). It is definitely tomato-forward but the coconut cream takes the edge off the acidity of the tomatoes and adds a depth that rounds everything out really well. I ate it over rice, rather than by itself in a bowl and it was SO good! It would also be great with some kind of flatbread, if rice is not your thing. Would I make it again? Yes! But I’d use thighs next time around to keep the chicken from drying out when reheated.