It’s the start of the holiday season in America and it’s around this time that Peace Corps Volunteers can start really craving the flavors of home. We asked our staff writers to tell us what they’re craving and if they’ve been able to share those tastes with their Thai community.
Mack Devoto, 135 YinD
Cooking, as many say, is a labor of love. Something that typically takes time, energy, and an immense amount of effort (if you’re not particularly talented, like me). However, even those challenged in the cooking arena (again, me) have those few comfort meals that they know how to cook shockingly well. For me, I keep a few on rotation back home: very casual roasted potatoes and Brussels sprouts with rice and chicken or perhaps salmon, a vodka pasta with chicken, and maybe a sweet potato taco if I’m feeling wild. Outside these simple dishes, there is exactly ONE fancy dish whose recipe I have ingrained in my head – a creamy parmesan garlic mushroom risotto. Growing up, my mom’s favorite meal request from my dad was a mushroom risotto. You see, my mom likes to cook, and she’s a great cook, but she’s like me – or, I suppose, I am like her. She has a few recipes she gets comfortable with and sticks to those for a while until she gets bored and then randomly decides that she is sick of it and experiments. The woman loved a chicken enchilada for approximately six months one year when I was in elementary school. I am my mother’s daughter (proudly, I might add). My dad, on the other hand, is one of those naturally gifted people in the kitchen. He can easily follow a recipe or will measure from the heart and add ingredients not included, somehow making the dish even more enjoyable. It is frustratingly delicious. Anyway, for any special event regarding my mom, or by request, my dad would cook his household-famous mushroom risotto. As a kid, I didn’t get it. Ew, mushrooms. As I grew up, and actually acquired real taste buds, it slowly became one of my favorite dishes. One that I would end up adopting.
In my junior year at university, I studied abroad in northern Spain. I lived with two other study abroad students. Hope, Makena, and I soon became fairly inseparable, along with our friend Gabi – who would become our honorary roommate. Hope and Makena are both from Nairobi, Kenya; Gabi from Puerto Rico; and I from the States. One day I was in the mood for comfort so I made my dad’s garlic parmesan risotto – sans mushroom because I could not afford to purchase three different kinds of mushroom at the time. This was my roommates’ first time tasting something I cooked and also one of my first times cooking the risotto – which is notorious for its finicky behavior and needs to be constantly tended to. After many minutes and many glasses of wine, the risotto was finally finished, and we all sat together at the quaint table in the living room. I was beyond anxious to be sharing something I had cooked, especially since it was Hope and Makena’s first time ever eating a risotto. I felt so vulnerable since I was usually the only one trying my cooking. Shockingly, they all loved it! Thus, bi-weekly risotto nights started. For the rest of our semester together, in that little Spanish apartment, I made a garlic parmesan risotto (occasionally adding mushrooms) for the four of us. Eventually, I would invite our friend Jordan over and he would enjoy risotto night with us, making it five regular attendees. Between the meal, the wine, and the laughter; risotto nights are my fondest memories of that period of my life.
Upon my return to the States, risotto played less of a role in my cooking routine. However, for the occasional special event, the risotto would be brought out. For Valentine’s Day with my partner I made a risotto. For days when extra comfort was needed, a mushroom risotto could cure any ailment. Since being in Thailand, I’ve realized how much I wish that I could cook a risotto as a way to show love and appreciation. There are a few issues with this, of course. I have searched up and down for the correct ingredients for a risotto and have not been successful. Additionally, when said ingredients have been available, they have been horribly expensive. On a volunteer’s salary… making a risotto is a bit of an investment. Lastly, my Thai friends and family tend to not venture outside of Thai flavors, which makes me wonder if they would enjoy risotto, at all. Despite all of these potential obstacles, a large part of me still wishes to carry on the tradition of sharing many laughs and smiles over a lovely risotto, even if it does take an obscene amount of attention. I believe that the labor of love is the best part of risotto. How sweet and beautiful is it for someone to spend so much effort and time to try and make something delicious to share with you!
Bradford Reszel, 134 TESS
While I miss plenty of different foods and drinks from home, the ones that I most often crave are sandwiches and Dr. Pepper. Thailand has sandwiches of some sorts, and I’ve made my own using what’s available, but I would love to show my friends and students a full-sized American sandwich shop-style sandwich with all the toppings. Similarly, I enjoy the soda selection both familiar and new here but definitely miss the 23-flavor goodness of the doctor.
Cloé Fortier-King, 134 YinD
Home can mean so many things. Sometimes it’s a physical space, art on walls, faint sounds of the radio, a silky cat. Or it’s found in the laughter of a loved one, the hazy light of Sunday morning under covers, the crush of the sea. Home is infinite; it transforms and expands to make room for us to belong to a hundred different people and places in a hundred different ways. Being away from one home has given me the ability to see glimpses of new ones everywhere. This is expressed beautifully in food. Cooking alongside others and gathering to share a meal feels akin to religion. It’s a ritual, a love language, an olive branch, and yes, even a home. I feel so lucky that sharing food is a central tenet in Thai culture and that the people in my community have been excited about preparing and tasting foreign food. A couple of my favorite dishes to share are French toast, tacos, and pasta. Supplies can be found in major cities and my friends and coworkers here are always excited to share a taste of home.
Morgan Shupsky, 134 YinD
When Thai people ask me about American food, the big three they tend to bring up are: bread, hamburgers, and spaghetti. Sometimes pizza is thrown in there. So when my coworkers at the SAO (local government office) got more comfortable with me, they inevitably started asking me which one of these “American” foods I was going to make for them. At home I ate my mom’s spaghetti at least once a week and my parents had been wanting to make some kind of contribution to the community that was hosting me so, perfect solution, they mailed me her spaghetti ingredients!
After several weeks of asking at the SAO when they wanted to have dinner, collecting all the fresh ingredients, and chopping up tons of tomatoes, I finished the biggest pot of sauce I’ve ever made and showed up to work ready to invite everyone to come eat some “American” spaghetti. Remember, these are the same people who had been asking me nearly every week when I’d cook for them and telling me they wanted to eat foreign food “soooo badly”. If you haven’t guessed it already – their responses were subpar. My counterpart actually said, “I don’t want to eat foreign food, can you make Thai food?” The result of all of this effort was me freezing and eating spaghetti for the following two weeks. Which actually was a pretty ideal outcome for me.
Kayla Kawalec, 134 YinD
My dad is a chef and I grew up picky. This means that I spent much of my childhood not appreciating the food wealth that I had at home and much of my adulthood trying to make up for lost time. I was given the perfect opportunity when I was evacuated from my first Peace Corps service and my sister graduated college smack-dab in the middle of a pandemic. My dad, sister and I were unexpectedly living under the same roof for the first time in years during Covid, a situation familiar to many. We were cramped, anxious, and had our share of rows, but the one thing that never failed to bring us together was sharing a kitchen again. Like Mack, I am outspokenly of the “cooking is labor” variety. While my dad and sister can whip up a curry, stir-fry, soup, or roast without struggle, struggle defines my cooking style. In this way, I, also like Mack, am my mother’s daughter.
There was so much joy and childhood nostalgia cooking with my dad and sister in that tiny kitchen in 2020. I think back on that time often now, four years later, in my own tiny kitchen in my Thai home. While I don’t crave much in Thailand, I do miss cooking with my family. I call them to lament when I burn rice in a rice cooker, somehow, or celebrate when I succeed in making crispy homemade granola in a wok, somehow. I’m grateful for my coworkers and many Thai mothers who have, with some reservations and under great supervision, cooked with me here. But I can’t wait for the day when I’m able to bring those dishes back home and cook them with my family.
Sticky Rice 
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