Neighbours are kitchen’s best ingredients
My Instagram feed is basically food, I confess. And that’s the place where I find most of the people I reach out to write these articles. Not that I don’t want to pursuit people from “real life” — I actually do and is something I look forward to do more — but Instagram has also been a great sort of window shopping when it comes to home cooking.
I found Sarah Eden’s through Joana Valente, my latest guest for The Sourdough Series. She lives in South London and has a blog called Grocery Stories that she describes has being about food and communities. She does often refers to a lot of people when telling me about her food achievements, attempts, or routines, and you can tell she is quite connected with her surroundings, with sharp routines regarding local shopping. In fact, it was her work experience as a teenager in a Lebanese family store named Barbur World Foods that inspired her to create the Grocery Stories.
“I began to get a sense of the wider Middle East and Levant through food. I also came to love food from those regions, probably more than that of any other cuisine”. Since her brother is half Iranian, she luckily got to eat some excellent Persian food growing up. She outlines tadiq or loobia and also some “sandy-textured biscuits that were perfumed with what I only realised was rose water after breaking a bottle of it in Barbur World Foods”.
While growing up, cooking was done in large portions and without great variation. Her mom “made big batches of enchiladas, chicken cacciatore, and cream of mushroom casserole that she could freeze and we could eat all week. This food was satisfying and what my mom could afford — both time- and money-wise at the time”. However, baked goods were the exception. “Every Christmas my mom pulled the Betty Crocker Cooky Book down from the cupboard and we’d make candy cane cookies, Mexican wedding cookies, and my favourite lemon-almond biscotti, half dipped in dark chocolate. Throughout the year, after school, swimming lessons, or French class, my dad and I would go for a baked good of some sort — at the café in Powell’s Books a shortbread circle, half covered in chocolate, at the tragically defunct Goldberg’s a bagel or brownie, and at Grand Central Bakery a jammer”.
Very early did she dive into home bread making with her dad, inspired by “a monk who had a show on public television in Oregon. He was a big guy, laughing and kneading bread in his black robes”. Eating a lot of bread and baked goods were a nice research field towards what she (dis)likes the most. When she moved away from home, cooking herself was the only way she could have her mom’s goodies. And so she did it, and it was also when she started to cook for other people. Although she manages technical projects in higher education, “most people at work would be able to tell you which of my baked goods they like the best before they could say what exactly I do”.
Just like me, she finds “the pristine photos that are a part of so much of the cookbook and food blogging landscape laughable against the reality of our efforts”. This led her to create, along with a friend, a blog called Shitty Photos of Ok Food, a fun way to ensure both would hang out and cook regularly and spread the word about mediocrities and failures. Ultimately, Sarah looks for “food that tastes good and makes me — and the people I’m sharing it with — feel good”. She relies on greengrocers, cooks, bakers, and farmers to understand what’s best to eat and why. She sure has taken some of their friends advice to the kitchen. “Adding something toasted — breadcrumbs, croutons, nuts, seeds, dates — almost always improves a meal. If dates sound like a wildcard on that list, my friend Youssef swears by eggs with toasted dates. He’s a sensible guy”.
She once tried to recreate a greengrocer’s favourite pasta dish — penne with a garlic and yoghurt sauce and toasted olives. “The yoghurt sauce kept curdling until my friend Hiten gave me the tip to only add the yoghurt at the very end and not when the pan is on the heat. Doing is this way means the pasta heats the yoghurt and the sauce won’t split”. Her cooking therefore is based on what people around her have to offer that she can transform in the kitchen with dedication, and then share with people, building a lovely food chain.
