You can’t always bring back fridge magnets; your friends’ refrigerator doors will fall off soon! Instead of key chains, postcards and different useless gadgets, we challenge you to bring your friends a foreign recipe from your next trip. So if you’ve been to Zanzibar recently, invite your friends over for dinner, cook some local dishes, show them your pictures and tell your stories.
How to do it:
1. Find a local
Who’ll teach you to prepare a better tiramisu than a 55-year-old Italian lady who’s been serving it as a dessert every Sunday of her adult life? If you know someone, or know someone who knows someone abroad, make sure you get a dinner invitation. Or, better yet, ask to go over earlier with a bottle of wine and offer to help with the cooking. This way you’ll get a first-hand glimpse of all the secrets that often remain unexplained in online recipes.
2. Find a local snack bar
If step one is not applicable, look for a local snack bar. Not a restaurant. These unpretentious food bars are a source of the most authentic recipes that locals probably learned from their grannies. If you can’t guess what’s in your dish, express your admiration to the cook and ask to have the ingredients of the meal written down. No need to understand everything; you can translate the recipe later.
3. Join a cooking class
Almost every destination around the world will offer some sort of finger-licking good cooking classes. Put on your chef’s hat and master some local recipes like a pro!
4. Shop away
If any of the ingredients you’ll need are difficult to find in your home country, don’t forget to drop by the local market and buy those special ingredients before you leave.
5. Cook
Here comes the sweetest part: when you get back, invite your friends over for dinner and cook the recipes you brought back with you. It’s the perfect occasion to see each another, have a bite together and share some interesting stories about hunting foreign delicacies. If dinner doesn’t work out the first time, fear not – your culinary failure will just be another story to tell!
How to make it better:
If you and your friends have traveled significant distances together, why not gather from time to time to enjoy a themed dinner and look back on funny pictures from your trips? The time spent going through old photos and reminiscing about the stories behind them will be refreshing. You can also have a themed dinner devoted to a destination you haven’t yet been to but would very much like to visit (Polynesia, anyone?). Just google it!
Read more:
How to organize a surprise (birthday) trip in less than 30 minutes
7 things mindful travelers do differently
Stop buying souvenirs: 6 better alternatives to bring home instead
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