I sit down and watch the news while enjoying my dinner - baked beans straight out of the can.
I get up and through the window wafts the smell of their meal.
Ohmygod it smells so dense and rich and aromatic. How do they eat food that smells so good and stay so thin?
What makes it worse is that they are so uncomfortable talking to anyone. I would love to find out what they are cooking. If I smell something that good from one of the Pakistani or Bangladeshi flats I can ask what they were cooking (and get a taste if there are leftovers) but these girls won’t say boo.
It’s still going on. If I could post the smell I would. Then you would understand.
I know how you feel. My next door neighbours are a youngish Asian couple and their Asian friends, and they sit there and cook all this amazing-smelling food on a little electric grill thing right by the window, with the window open. I have to stand there inhaling it while unlocking my door. It smells so good I could just cry.
I have tried saying hello to them as sometimes they come and go while I’m watering my plants outside or leaving the same time as me, but aside from politely returning my greetings, they’ve never made any attempt to actually talk to me. For all I know I am scaring them with all the bootleg anime and DDR I play on the other side of the wall.
I wish I could at least find out what the little grill/griddle thing is! I can only see them pushing meat around on it with a fork through the window.
Heh… I got some of that when I was living in Germany. I was pretty surprised that my predominantly German and Dutch neighbours would even want to try spicy Indian food!
FWIW, you can easily find most masalas at any Asian grocery. Most of the time, all you need to do is mix together the meat with the spices, and grill away. That’s how I did it, anyway
I ended up forced by hunger into going down the road to the Pakistani restaurant and buying the dhall of the day (yellow split-pea) and a kashmiri naan. I should charge the students.
I lived next door to some Nigerians last year. A middle-aged woman, her two daughters (one in her twenties and one about nine), the older daughter’s three year-old, and frequent visits by the baby’s father.
They were all religious. The older woman was bubbly and friendly, as were her Nigerian friends who’d visit, the nine year old (in a walking frame) was just like her mum (very outgoing), and the three-tear-old was cute and friendly. The visiting father would give me polite nods. But the girl in her twenties… I’ve never seen such shyness and barely concealed fear. If I went there to pick up my son (whom they used to babysit sometimes), and she answered the door, she’d quickly acknowledge me with the briefest flick of a facial gesture, and then half-jog to get my son, who would come to the door alone (she’d be hiding in a back room). Maybe this shyness in young Nigerian women is a cultural thing. I don’t know.
That sounds like it could be yakiniku, which does indeed rock. I haven’t smelled anything delicious coming from my neighbors apartments yet. This is a good thing because even if they are talkative I’m unlikely to understand a word of the explanation.
I bet you (not just Jin but all in the same boat) could just go and ask about the smell in a neutral tone. When the neighbors rush to apologize for bothering you a quick “No, it smells great, I’m just curious what it is!” may get them to spill the beans.
Lots of Nigerian postgrad students in my locality too, and I haven’t seen that the shyness is a cultural thing. Still, it is a pretty big country, so I dunno - perhaps things are different in different states.
Don’tAsk Are your Nigerian neighbours newly moved in? Perhaps they are still settling into the neighbourhood and like to keep themselves to themselves? I hope you can persuade them to divulge the culinary wonderfulness.
hahaha - I have only just realised, you have the MOST unfortunate username for someone who wants to go and ask the nighbours anything. Maybe you could change your name to “please please please tell me all about the lovely food”
(Pointless trivia fact - a Nigerian guy I knew here was pretty stunned and amused to see that one of our Scottish £10 notes has a map of a part of Nigeria as part of its design. I do sort of hope that did something to make up for the shock or encountering hailstones one winter! )
Oh, good. I was expecting to hear that it was because they kept telling you they had ten million dollars stashed away but they couldn’t get to it unless you faxed them your bank account number and…
That is interesting because I used to live next door to a Nigerian guy (oddly named Jose) who was married to an Australian woman and he was very friendly. Mind you his English was so bad that I loaned him my Gypsy Kings Live at the Albert Hall video and he thought it was a gift. I didn’t have the heart to correct him. But obviously our blokiness and the fact they are women has something to do with our communication difficulties. Your account sounds just like my experiences - as I was leaving a few days ago one of the girls was arriving home. I saw her coming and stopped to hold the security gate open. As soon as she saw me, she looked down and walked through the gate without eye contact but almost whispered hello and walked off.
Perhaps it is a NEW Nigerian scam? As in “we have some very wonderful recipes and we are going to cook them all and make you very hungry until you give us your bank account number…”
They have been here for a while now but I just can’t get two words out of them.
It’s funny because I live in a little string of townhouses. Two strings either side of the courtyard really. The back 6 townhouses are me, the Pakistani families, the Bangladeshi families and the Nigerian students. The front 8 are all Aussies.
As far as I know I am the only Aussie who talks to the others - at least I have never seen anyone else do so. The Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis are often out in the courtyard socialising and I will stop and have a chat. All the guys are chattier than their wives (thank God for cricket) but the wives talk to me if they are interested in the topic of conversation. However the Nigerian women simply politely respond to a question and walk off. Other than physically detaining them I see no prospect of getting a recipe.
It would go like this:
“What you were cooking last night smelled wonderful.”
“Thank you.” <walks off toward her front door>
Mind you they seem very happy and seem to have a full social life with lots of (I assume) Nigerian visitors. When their little flat is full of people they have the doors and windows open and people sprawled all over the place, so I am not worried that they suffer from any social isolation.
All food cooked by neighbors smells infinitely better than if you were cooking it yourself.
I don’t know why this is true, but it is. I’ve nearly killed myself over simple grilled chicken or burgers cooked by a neighbor, even though when I’ve done so myself it wasn’t anything that wonderful.
You spend the morning making something quintessentially American, like roast chicken with stuffing, and gravy. Open the door, and fan the smell out into the hallway. Then, you take a large platter of “Leftovers” to your neighbors. Be friendly, and mention your admiration for their cooking.
Be sure not to include corn, or pork in your dish, if you choose something else. A fair number of Nigerians are Islamic, or just don’t eat pork. I don’t know why they won’t eat corn, but that’s fairly common too.
Nigerians love to cook for their friends. You just have to be the initiator. Also, young African women are very often defferential to strangers to a level that confounds Americans. Keep in mind, armed gangs rome the countryside periodically in much of central Africa, and in some places, those are the cops. It changes the way you interact with strangers.
My former neighbor did barbeque ribs ever so often and the smell would drive me insane. No matter how many times I mentioned how good it smelled, he wouldn’t give me the recipe nor did he ever offer me a taste. To be fair, he only cooked the stuff when he had family get-togethers, but still-----
The old trick I heard of for home inspections was to have something nice cooking on the stove to give your house a welcoming feel when prospective buyers walked through - the thing recommended was to have some tomato and basil sauce reducing in a saucepan on a low heat.
