Reznet

Chefs prepare to serve at the table featuring sweet corn polenta and sweet potato puree.Reznet Photo by Fleur McAuliffe

Food for Thought

By Denny McAuliffe

SAN DIEGO—Farewell, frybread. Goodbye, Indian tacos. It was nice gnawing you.

Meet the new "modern traditional" Native American food: Sweet corn polenta. Mmmmmm. Herb-encrusted buffalo ribeye. Yum-yum. Mouth-watering cactus salad ...

On Sunday afternoon, en route to the National Indian Gaming Association's Celebration of Native Cultures, featuring Native American food and dance, our party made plans for dinner afterward. We weren't going to eat at the NIGA event, wanting to avoid — for health and waistline reasons — the expected Indian taco/frybread feed.

We didn't go to dinner afterward. We took a long walk, instead. The reason: I overheard someone say, "Have you tried the food? It's out of this world."

Correction: It was out of Indian Country, via the cookbook of Mark Kropczynski, the French-trained executive chef of The US Grant, a downtown hotel owned by the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation.

All the ingredients, Kropczynski explained, came from tribes or Native-owned businesses. For example, the Native wild rice came from the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation in Minnesota, and the buffalo ribeye from Pride of the Little Rockies, a smokehouse on Montana's Fort Belknap Reservation.

Kropczynski said he received a "product list: 'This is what we're going to have for you. Do what we would do' " — "we" as in The US Grant kitchen.

Kropczynski started concocting ideas — and dishes.

Everything was delicious and nutritious. Let me rephrase that. Everything was delicious, and everything was nutritious except the dessert table of — from left to right — spiced chocolate brownies, macaroons, macadamia white chocolate cookies and bread pudding in vanilla bean sauce. But I'm sure we weren't the only ones who filled up on the healthy stuff, leaving little room for dessert.

This is some of what we ate: sautéed wild mushrooms, sweet potato puree, king crab legs and poached shrimp, crab salad, pueblo oven bread, wild greens salad with pine nuts and tomatoes, red pepper hummus, spotted prawns with penna pasta, salmon and — something new for me — cactus and pepper salad.

This is what occurred to me while waddling off the food on a long walk along San Diego Bay that evening: What was prepared by Chef Kropczynski and served by four intern chefs in training from the Navajo Technical College was the new "modern traditional" Native American cuisine.

Frybread symbolizes the bad old days when the U.S. government, after dumping tribes on reservations, dumped skimpy provisions of flour and lard on them, and Native cooks had to figure out what to do with the ingredients. Voila! The result grew into the ingredients of rampant obesity and diabetes in Indian Country.

More food for thought: Just as Indian gaming dollars have lifted tribes' and Native people's economic opportunities and, in so doing, made them healthier in spirit, maybe the new "modern traditional" Native American food, also brought to you by Indian gaming, will make them healthier in body — and shrink those waistlines.

Tribal casinos have helped instill pride and excitement in tribes and their members. There's a noticeable pep in their step here at the NIGA trade show. Here's hoping that step will become lighter footed.

In the meantime, could you please pass the prickly pear vinaigrette?

Denny McAuliffe, Osage, is the project director and founder of reznet. He is a former assistant foreign editor at The Washington Post.

To send Denny McAuliffe a message please click here