Many of my friends love to try new foods and we live in a place where there are many people of different cultures. We were always sampling what each family was having for dinner when picking up kids from play dates. This was so interesting that we decided to meet monthly to try food from each other's culture. We take turns hosting the lunch and usually leave some of the preparations to be done during the meeting.

The first meeting was at my house and I had trouble deciding what to make. I'm from the US, but I don't usually cook much "normal" American food. What is normal for us anyway? To make the decision even more perplexing, my Turkish friend does not eat pork, my Indian friend does not eat beef, and another American is allergic to shellfish. I decided on quiches, one with ham and one with asparagus, something I'd made before many times.

So, the lunch begins and we're all laughing and getting to know each other better. They're all friends of mine, but didn't necessarily know each other before this. My kitchen is hopping with chopping and mixing and snacking. We're laughing at the difficulty we sometimes have in communicating. Until this point, I really didn't understand what I would contribute to the group (we're all living in the US - why come to try American food?) but apparently I'm useful as a translator from accented-English to English. Among us there was a German, a Korean, a Taiwanese, an Indian, and a Turk, with differing comfort-levels in English, but I could understand them all and facilitate their understanding each other.

Anyway, we used frozen asparagus instead of fresh, since I had some in the freezer and thought it wouldn't make a difference. It did! That quiche just got wetter and wetter. I finally ended up draining off the water and we ate it and the other one which turned out better. The thing I learned from this first gathering was that the food is secondary. We so much enjoyed learning about each other and the different cultures we come from, that the "quiche draining" was funny and not very embarrassing at all. OK, it was a little embarrassing.

I've never lived anywhere but the US, but I've come to understand that people who have moved from their home country tend to have many friends from that country in their new country. It's easier to hang out with people and speak your first language and not deal with cultural differences. Sometimes the people in the new country feel the same way. It's difficult when things get lost in translation or when someone's view of how things should be done varies greatly from your own. We've all found that these barriers are worth breaking down. Knowing these friends has given me so much new knowledge of the world and its people. Thanks, ladies!