by Prerana Sharma, June 30, 2018

The spring quarter of 2018 was my last at Kendall College. I spent the past three months working as a pastry intern at Band of Bohemia in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago. I took a week off from work to visit Mexico City. It was a very interesting as I got to experience a cuisine I was very unfamiliar with.

Growing up in India, I wasn’t exposed to a variety of meats, beef in particular. Ever since I began my culinary journey at Kendall College, I have expanded my knowledge about various proteins and have had the opportunity to experience tastes and textures I hadn’t before. While I was in Mexico, I didn’t dine at upscale restaurants. We ate where the locals ate and ordered foods we had never heard of before. On our travels we visited a small traditional restaurant on the highway. Our taxi driver helped us order our food and we got a dish that had cow intestines cooked in a beef broth in tin foil folded on a flat top. The broth was very simple. It only had onions and limes in it apart from the protein. I have never experienced anything like this before and probably wouldn’t have if I wasn’t curious enough to understand how different cultures experience food.