Mika Ellison: Picture this:
Yumi Tallud: You’ve just gotten back home from a long day of being a college student.
Mika Ellison: Or maybe, you’re twelve years old, and your parents let you stay at home by yourself for the first time.
Yumi Tallud: Either way, you’re at home,
Mika Ellison: You have zero culinary skills,
Yumi Tallud: And you are very hungry.
Mika Ellison: What’s one of the only things you can think to make?
Olatunji Osho-Williams: I guess I was blessed to grow up in a household where I didn’t really have to eat a struggle meal, like out of like, raw necessity. I didn’t really know what one is until I was older. I’d say that there’s like, I guess two definitions. For one, I think the main one is that a struggle meal is like something that you probably eat, like, back to back when there’s like no food in the house, or there isn’t enough money for that food. I couldn’t say that was necessarily my situation. For me, a struggle meal is likely something that I put together when there is food in the house, but it’s like, I’m not necessarily rocking with it. And there aren’t many other options for me to like one order out, or two, make something on my own. So a struggle meal is cost effective, timely. Emphasis on time, it’s quick and easy to make.
Mika Ellison: A comfort meal, or a struggle meal, is what you make at the end of a long week, when ingredients are running low, or when you don’t have the energy to make anything else. For college students, the struggle meal is a familiar one.
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Mika Ellison: Classic college struggle meals include cup ramen and peanut butter sandwiches, or occasionally just bread, but often, in times of need, like School of Comm junior Maria Katsogridakis, we turn to what’s most familiar to us.
Maria Katsogridakis: And for me, that would be Migas, Migas or quesadilla honestly.
which is something that my mom used to make us on like special days on the weekend when we had time for actual breakfast or whatever.
Mika Ellison: Katsogridakis says migas isn’t exactly a struggle meal, but something she makes when she misses home or feels like something special
Maria Katsogridakis: You can make them as simple or as complex as possible at their very core, they’re corn tortillas, cut up, in oil in a pan, until they’re crispy. Basically you’re making your own tortilla chips and then you add an egg and that’s its core. I also add cheese and chorizo, which makes it like that much better.
Yumi Tallud: For School of Comm senior Daijah Guillermo, the struggle meal is less of a struggle and more of a way to remember her roots.
Daijah Guillermo: I’m Dominican and Puerto Rican. Second gen technically, my parents were born and raised in New York, but my grandparents were all born in D.R. and/or Puerto Rico. A lot of our meals, like struggle meals, really are, like, staple meals in our country. So it’s not even like a struggle meal there. That’s just considered normal food. One of the big ones: we love plantains. So we do– my favorite is tostones, which is fried plantains. So we love fried food. So that’s super easy. It’s literally oil, salt and plantains. We also do mangú, which is, like, basically mashed potatoes, but instead of potatoes, we use plantains. So lots of butter, lots of milk, lots of mixing really, really yummy.
Daijah Guillermo: I always remember the first time I learned to make tostones. They always say, like, when you are afraid of the hot oil it’s gonna burn you, but when you, like, show him who’s boss, it’s not gonna burn you. So when I was first learning, I wore, like, literally super long sleeves. I, like, covered myself up to my neck ‘cause I was so terrified of burning myself. And my grandma was like, “That’s nothing!” And mind you, she goes in and she’ll, like, flip it with her hands. Like, I think she has calluses just formed on her hands from how many times, so for her, it doesn’t bother her. I swear she has no nerves in her fingers. But like, she would show me how to, like, flip ‘em. I still use a fork. I’m still a baby. But I think, yeah. It’s definitely something that’s, like, triggered every single time that I– that I make food. I’m like, “Oh my god, this was taught to me.” Like obviously I could look it up, but it’s never gonna be the same.
Yumi Tallud: Finding places to eat your favorite meals in Evanston is hard. Even just buying the ingredients isn’t always feasible. But to Guillermo, that means an untapped market.
Daijah Guillermo: The closest Dominican restaurant I think is in Chicago, and it’s like a 40 minute drive from here. And I told my mom it’s like this tiny little, like, family owned restaurant– like nobody– you could drive past and not even know that it’s there. So it definitely like… There’s days I’m just, like, feening, I’m feening. And my friends and I actually joke because now I love to cook and now it’s like my favorite thing to do, especially Dominican dishes, and they’re like, “Why don’t you– y’know there’s an open market there. People don’t know about Dominican food.” And so my thing now is, like, I make flan when I have time. I’ve been in rehearsal. That’s my favorite thing ever. So I haven’t made it in a long time but like last year, every weekend I was– I was pumping out more flan for my– for my kitchen which was really lovely.
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Nic Lam: I don’t even know what it’s called in Vietnamese or like in English or like barely even Vietnamese where it’s literally like a egg and ground beef patty and it’s like the go to meal if I’m like running, going to school and need something to cook really quickly. Like you toss it to the pan and you can cook it in like, under 10 minutes and that serving portion can probably last, like, two or three meals.
Yumi Tallud: That was Nic Lam. He’s a sophomore in School of Comms who’s pretty serious about his Vietnamese food. Clearly, our struggle meals have played a huge part in our relationships with our cultures. But how about when the meal influences the culture?
Nic Lam: I guess one of the things that I think of is like the historical context of this, or like in like a cultural context of this, in terms of like… I think in America we’re really used to eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in the home and that’s like, or like it’s breakfast and lunch at home and then dinner at a restaurant. In Vietnam, it’s flipped on its head where actually, breakfast and lunch are typically eaten outside the house. And so dinner is eaten at home. And so this dish is weird in that way, because for all intents and purposes, it seems like it should be a breakfast or lunch dish. But given the nature that this is not something that’s cooked at restaurants and it’s only cooked at home, it is actually a dinner dish. So it’s served in family style meals. So it has a like a pretty interesting dynamic in the sense that like, I think the diaspora has changed its context and when it’s eaten just because of how things work. But like, yeah, if you go to Vietnam, you would not see this in a restaurant. You would not see this because everybody in, in Vietnam, you’ll see if you ever go there is like, breakfast and lunch, people are out eating on the streets. Like they like, it’s just like little tables with those, like, little plastic stools and people go sit on the stools or like, even on my trash, like, like milk crates and trash buckets. But yeah, this is not a restaurant food because it’s like, you just make it at home. And so it’s actually a dinner meal, which is really strange to think about, like, an egg pancake essentially being a dinner meat dish. But I think that’s like the kind of neat part of it.
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Yumi Tallud: College can be exhausting, and in so many ways. Students have to learn not only how to cook and feed themselves, but also how to navigate a community that might be completely different from their own. For students that are struggling with being away from the cultures and comforts that they grew up with, Guillermo has some advice.
Daijah Guillermo: I think, and this is– kind of goes without saying. Food is home, and I think people don’t acknowledge that enough. And I think I’d be remiss… to… without saying? To say? Whatever the phrase is… That I think sharing food, even with people who don’t know– know nothing about it, is a form of love, and form of getting to know people. I think every time I cook for other people, I– they learn about me, and I learn about them. So I think, cook for your friends as much as possible, and share as many dishes– I love potlucks. I think everyone should do potlucks with friends. Yeah.
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For WNUR News, I’m Yumi Tallud.
And I’m Mika Ellison.
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