Tag Archives: football

Introducing Euro 2016 food

10 Jun

When World Cup fever struck the house in 2014, I came up with the big idea of cooking something from each of the 32 competing nations.

This led to a month of meals that expanded our food horizons and introduced us to new flavours, ingredients and cuisines. Some have become family favourites – Japanese chicken karaage or Brazilian brigadieros come to mind – while others are less likely to be repeated…

Eventually Colombia claimed the title, its mouthwatering barras de limón seeing off Nigeria’s fiery beef suya.

As before, we’ll start by eating each country’s food on a day that they are competing. (Though unless I correctly predict every team that progresses to the knock-out stage, we’ll end up eating for some countries after the fact.)

We’ll score the dishes as we eat, eventually awarding our own Euro 2016 winner.

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The World Cup food winner for 2014 is…

13 Jul

…Colombia with their unbeatable barras de limón! Group C was the group of death in our tournament – both the Ivory Coast and Greece would have gone through from almost any other group.

The four of us rated each dish or meal out of ten, which I then averaged. If I cooked more than one dish from a particular country, I averaged all the dishes into one score. This tended to give single dessert countries like Colombia an advantage. Portugal’s pasteis de nata outscored the barras de limón – in fact, they earned the only 10 in the tournament – but scored lower overall, due to averaging with the more wholesome caldo verde.

Where two countries tied, I used Facebook likes as a penalty shoot-out. (This allowed Russia to pip Algeria for second place in Group H, and gave Japan the edge over Italy in the second round.)

Still, Colombia was a worthy winner with an impressive 9.8, and Portugal did win a well-deserved third place.

worldcupfooddraw

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Introducing World Cup food 2014

2 Jun

About a month before World Cup 2014 started, Adam became obsessed with collecting Panini stickers of all the competing teams. He engaged Lyra in his pursuit, and I eventually got drawn in as well, helping him maintain his own/swap/need lists for the Facebook trading group, posting envelopes, and feeling a worrying sense of satisfaction when we finally received a Ben Halloran sticker in the post from a man in Monmouth and completed the Australia team.

Our older daughter Nova was completely unmoved by the football fever gripping the rest of the house. Thinking about how to make the World Cup a whole family event, I came up with the idea of cooking something from each of the 32 competing nations over the course of competition.

In the group stage, we will try to eat a country’s food on the day they are competing. I’ve made some predictions about which teams are likely to advance, but no doubt we’ll end up eating some meals dedicated to teams after they’ve gone out.

We’ll be scoring the dishes as we eat, to award our own World Cup winner for 2014…

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