By Arianna Nimocks, Meals Volunteer Coordinator
“This is so Latina of us,” I laughed.
And very TNFP, too, I thought.
My mom and I were scraping down the tilt skillet so that every little bit of our Ecuadorian Eggplant Stir-Fry (Arroz con Berenjena) could be used.
Growing up, we never let food go to waste. My mom found creative ways to use everything — salads using leftover vegetables, beans (menestra) cooked with the bits of onion we didn’t use for the main meal, and creamy soups (cremas) using the heavy cream I bought a week ago but only used a tablespoon of. Somehow, we pretty much never threw food away. I think we all understood the time and labor it took to grow food, and we blessed our food knowing it was not necessarily a given.
A few weeks back, the Food Project received a truckload of eggplants, and one of our Instagram posts included a question: “what would you make with all these eggplants?” My mom had replied, “Rice and pan fried eggplant, mixed in as fried rice,” alluding to an Ecuadorian dish called “Arroz con Berenjena.” Our Headquarters Kitchen Manager, Julia, put it on the menu for the following Tuesday. Coincidentally, during a phone call that very Monday, my mom told me that she would have a 5-hour layover in Nashville the next day. There was not a chance I was going to pass up this opportunity to cook the Arroz con Berenjena with her!
So, instead of having a leisurely wait at the airport that Tuesday, I picked my mom up from BNA and brought her back to the Food Project to cook the Arroz con Berenjena with me. If there’s one person who could cook a meal for 400 people during a layover, it’s my mother! I was happy as could be. My mom, who taught me how to cook, was here at one of my favorite places, cooking our home country’s food with me.
As we added handfuls of paprika and cumin to the over 25 gallons of sauteing eggplants, garlic and onions in the tilt skillet, immediately I was back home in our kitchen. Many Ecuadorian meals start with sauteed onions and spices, finish with a sprinkle of cilantro and are served atop rice. This dish at TNFP, though about 100 times larger in quantity than the meals we’d cook at home, was no exception. I smiled as my mom chopped cup-fulls of cilantro and added them to the tilt skillet. “Mmmm,” she said. She loves cilantro.
We typically saw a recipe as a general guideline at home, but always freely swapped ingredients for the ones we had on hand. My mom used staple ingredients we had, bought the vegetables and meats we needed, and added pinches of spices and herbs until it tasted right (delicious, actually). I remember asking my mom for her recipe for Arroz con Berenjena and she laughed, “you know Latin@s, we don’t use recipes!” Because of this, TNFP felt very familiar to me from the start — in a way, we can be very “Latin” in our cooking style. We don’t always know every exact ingredient we will have available for next week’s meal given the assortment of donated food we receive, so we get to be creative in gleaning the best use from what we receive.
Welcoming my mom to a space where I, and many others, have called home, was special. I think cooking has that unique ability to bring people together, and I’m thankful for a place that embraces that so deeply.
