Morgan

Hooray for gearing up to collab on a dinner party with one of my few food science friends out here. Morgan is from California and his family has been in the US for a long time, but if we're breaking it down, he's English, Welsh, German, and Ashkenazi. I first met Morgan virtually when I was still in Madison and had taken up writing for a student association food science blog. We connected when I was working on a post on plant based and alternative proteins, which ultimately led to my first job out here in the Bay.

Morgan's family eats a lot of chips and salsa. To really emphasize that this is a lot of chips and salsa, he includes a story about a time they asked for so many salsa refills, the restaurant just brought a storage container of it from the kitchen for the table. Endearingly, they also left Santa chips and salsa instead of milk and cookies. Accessory to the chips and salsa are of course burritos. Specifically bean cheese and rice (BCR) burritos from Los Panchos - his "ultimate nostalgia food." Apparently enough so that he wrote an essay in college about these burritos and how they remind him of time spent with his dad and brother.

So of course I made little [large] dumpling-sized burritos, and to be able to more confidently call it a dumpling, I made sure to cook the entire burrito bundle together.

Just your basic bean cheese and rice burrito where the rice was crisped up with some extra fat; where the beans were refried and finished with maple sugar because growing up Morgan's mom only permitted maple and honey sweeteners; where the cheese is Oaxacan for some melty zhuzh.

The key component here was the wrapper though - a flour tortilla. Apparently Morgan ate a lot of pecans growing up - anything that had space for or could be topped with nuts: pecans. So I made a pecan (and cilantro) flour tortilla*.

The accompanying "dipping" sauce was naturally an easy roasted tomato salsa. The only thing missing was some pecan corn chips, but adding a bonus side is opening a dangerous door for me with this project.

These guys were seared on each side to give it that nice warm burrito look, and then finished in the oven to finish cooking the tortilla through.

After Morgan's dad died, he and his brother picked up some BCRs and ate them in the kitchen while crying. A wildly relatable scene. I've considered what a "grief cookbook" might look like - generally and personally. On a personal level, I recognize each person's grief cookbook would look different, informed by nostalgia, memories, and stories relating to the dead individual and themselves. But on a broader scale, of course there are cultural food traditions around death and dying. What comes to mind for me are offerings of fruits and favorite dishes during Qingming Festival in China. Or the popular pan de muerto of Dia de los Muertos.

I started googling foods for grief and ended up with mostly how-to articles about what to do if you know someone who knows someone who died. The trends are maybe intuitive - hearty comfort foods, nourishing foods in case nutrition is a concern, pre-prepared or easy to prepare dishes, and recipes using readily available ingredients.

Some bridge one if not all the aforementioned "properties of grief food." Like funeral potatoes of Utah or Amish funeral pie - made from ingredients that are comforting and hearty that are also pantry staples. Others are symbolic like koliva, a sweet wheat based dish prepared for Orthodox funerals, where wheat is "a symbol of both death and everlasting life." There's also mannish water, a Caribbean stew of goat meat, entrails, testicles, and veggies that's eaten in celebration as it also represents reproduction and new life. In fact, several cultures consume foods at funerals that also represent life, like round foods (i.e. eggs, bagels, lentils) that represent the circle of life for sitting shiva. 

Click here if you want to read in more cohesive detail than I can write. Whatever the tradition, I think I'm just pleasantly reminded again that humans will always find ways to use food in similar manners. Like stuffing mixtures of things into carb-based pockets.

Things I would do differently: roll out the tortilla even thinner, not forget the container of salsa before I bring the burrito dumplings to people.

Morgan's complete list:

toasted pecans on pasta in pesto on pizza on salads

Thanksgiving pecan pie

chips and salsa

Los Panchos bean cheese and rice burritos

*Tortilla

1/2c pecan "flour"

3.5c flour

1t salt

1t baking powder

2/3c veg shortening

1.5c hot water

1/2c cilantro, chopped