Cooking classes share classic recipes as part of Welcome Neighbor’s Supper Club program
By Kurt Greenbaum
Is it time to put aside your usual evening dinner time dishes? Perhaps you’d like to try your hand at a Moroccan chicken tagine with preserved lemon and olives? Or an Indian biryani?
Or maybe you’d like a carrot salad with a sumptuous Moroccan marinade? For dessert, you could top it all off with an Afghan firni—a creamy rice pudding—with cardamom, almonds, whole milk and ground pistachios?
It’s all within reach if you sign up for cooking classes through Welcome Neighbor STL. The classes are part of a suite of supper club programs that Welcome Neighbor provides, all under the careful tutelage of Zohra Zaimi.
“Our supper club program helps immigrant and refugee families, especially ladies, to become a little bit independent,” Zaimi said. “I mean truly independent, especially financially independent.”
Classes accommodate 15 students and run for two hours. When the class is offered, Zaimi and her teachers run two sessions, one from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and a second from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Classes cost $50 a person and participants learn to make two dishes.
The next class will be offered Oct. 19. Sign up for the 11 a.m. session here or for the 1:30 p.m. session here. This time around, the class will focus on two Afghan vegetarian dishes:
- Ashak: Fresh pasta filled with scallions, leeks and cilantro, served with yogurt-garlic sauce. seasoned with coriander, turmeric and cayenne pepper, sprinkled with mint.
- Kabuli Polaw: Basmati rice cooked with onion, saffron, black pepper, cardamom, coriander and cumin. Topped with raisins, nuts and julienned carrots.
Zaimi herself is an immigrant from Morocco who has been involved with Welcome Neighbor STL since 2017, initially as a volunteer, then a chef, and now as the supper club program lead. She started soon after joining her husband in the United States in 2016. She’s been a U.S. citizen since 2019.
Welcome Neighbor ran its first cooking class in May 2020—running it virtually during the pandemic—featuring Syrian women making specialties. The in-person classes now operate at a shared kitchen at 408 N. Sarah St. in midtown, St. Louis.
Since 2016, the Welcome Neighbor supper club programs have raised approximately $500,000, with 90% of the income going directly to the chefs who stage the events. .In addition to the cooking classes, the supper club program includes:
- Serve Safe classes teach immigrants and refugee families, primarily women, how to obtain the necessary certifications to legally cook commercially in Missouri.
- Small catering events that give participants experience in cooking for larger groups and interacting with people from diverse cultures.
- The unhoused meal program, funded by donations, provides meals every other Friday to unhoused people at various shelters. Chefs are not paid for their work, but the program covers the cost of groceries and provides a means for the program to give back to the community at large.
“The most important thing about the cooking classes is meeting people and doing something together, sitting and eating food together and talking about culture,” Zaimi said. “We have chefs from Syria, from Afghanistan, from Iraq, from India, from Africa. You know the ingredients are different, the cultures are different, and the people are so excited to know about other cultures.”
