(happy music) - [Beryl] Cooking for kids is not always easy, and getting them to eat what you've made can feel like you're approaching the toughest food critic in the world.

- Can you gimme a smile?

- He's so sad.

(chuckles) But when you find a dish that lands, that's worth sharing.

- That's so good.

- Oh wow.

- My name is Beryl, and this show explores how our foods can bring our different cultures together, and this is our Kids' Meals episode.

Today I've paired up two dads, Steve and Christopher, to swap their kids' favorite dishes from their cultures.

Chris's son loves his dad's Cote d'Ivoirian jollof rice, so Steve will make that for his girls.

- [Steve] What you do is you cut off the head.

(Flora shrieks) (Steve laughs menacingly) - [Beryl] And Chris will make Korean kimchi fried rice, a fan favorite in Steve's household.

Yay.

Ezra, are you excited?

- Yeah.

- [Beryl] What's your experience in cooking Korean food?

- None.

How does this smell like?

Does it smell like hot dogs?

(Chris and Beryl laugh) (happy music continues) - I'm so curious as how this is gonna turn out.

It's a weird marriage of Italian tomato sauce and like an East Asian curry.

And I know that that's nowhere near West Africa.

(Beryl laughs) How will the kids react?

Let's watch and see.

Perfect.

(Beryl and Flora laugh) (Beryl growls) (cheerful music) - Dear Steve, my name is Christopher Gbelay, and you are going to make West African jollof rice.

My family and I come from the Ivory Coast, in French it's called Cote d'Ivoire.

My absolute favorite West African dish I like to make for my son is a jollof rice.

- And I'll show you with one pepper, and you can do the other?

Sound good?

So what you do is you cut off the head.

(Flora shrieks) (Steve laughs menacingly) And then you pull its guts out.

(growls) - [Chris] Jollof rice is a well known West African dish.

Two special ingredients to make jollof rice is definitely the tomato paste, as well as the red peppers.

- [Beryl] Have you ever cooked West African food before?

- I have never cooked West African food before.

I've never made any African dish before.

- It's actually quite easy to make, and it's perfect to make this dish with your family.

My son love this rice, because not only that it's super tasty, but he also like helping, so he's very part of the whole process.

It's blending the peppers, just clicking on the machine, they like seeing like all the other vegetables, just like blending it together, he thinks it's very amusing.

- Oh, Penny's here.

Penny, wanna have a sniff?

- Hey Flora, let go.

- It smells good.

- It smells good, right?

- Uh-huh.

- [Beryl] I don't wanna wait, I want to smell it too.

- Hey Beryl, come on.

It's so aromatic, it's so fragrant.

- Ooh.

(upbeat music) - That's delicious.

I'm getting a lot of ginger.

- [Beryl] Yeah, me too.

I like that.

- [ My grandmother taught me this Dish.

While making the dish, the aroma, the smell, as well as just the ambience, remind me of home.

- It does smell really nice.

Yeah, very fragrant.

You know, bay leaf is just one of those things where if you don't have it, something is missing.

- [Beryl] I feel the opposite, I think bay leaves are a scam.

- Oh no, no, no, no, I completely disagree, Beryl.

- [Beryl] Wait, what?

- No, bay leaf really adds so much depth of flavor.

- [Chris] You always have to wash your vegetables before you're using them, (upbeat music continues) and you always, always, always, no matter what, you have to wash your rice, you have to make sure your rice is not murky, and that's one of the secret for a perfect jollof rice.

- I usually cook rice in this machine right here, the rice machine, but today we're cooking it over the stove, so it's something a little different, something that I don't normally do.

So let's look at the next steps.

"In a large pot," actually Penny, what don't you do it for me, the second line.

- "In a large pot, medium-high heat, heat oil.

Once oil hot, add onion, garlic, tomato paste, tomato puree, salt and bay leaves.

- [Chris] I am a hundred percent certain that you and your kid will enjoy making this dish, because not only that it's easy to make, but it's very, very delicious.

- [Flora] You cover it with a lid and stair occasionally for five minutes.

- Okay.

- For five minutes?

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Penny] That's a lot of tomatoes.

- [Chris] The base is usually made with tomato paste, and then you go ahead and you just add all your other ingredients.

- [Steve] Oh wow, this smells really nice.

- [Beryl] How are you feeling about the ratio of tomatoes?

- Right now, I think there's way too many tomatoes.

However, I will trust in the process.

- It's good though.

It's good sauce.

(chuckles) - [Chris] Cook your rice with all the broth of the veggies and the meat that you've cooked.

I really hope this dish inspires you for the next time you get together with your kid and make a dish, and I hope that you actually love this dish as much as myself and my son loves it.

Love, Christopher.

(idle music) - Let's try this.

- [Beryl] (laughs) Look who came up here.

- Oh, hi Koji.

That's delicious.

It's a dish that I feel is pretty simple for a kid to like.

- That's so good.

- Oh wow.

Yeah, I would love to pair this with a chicken dish, I think it'd be absolutely stunning.

Definitely fussed the rice too much, 'cause I wasn't sure if I was doing it right, so I kept opening in the lid, kept stirring it a little bit.

And also, since there was so much tomato base, it burned on the bottom very easily.

I can smell (sniffs) a little bit of burning on the bottom, so I'm gonna save the rice by doing a brain transfer.

So what we ended up doing, we transferred the rice into triage, to rice triage, while we cleaned up all the burnt bits and then put the rice back in.

And I think just all that movement around kind of broke up the rice a little bit, and the starches came out into the liquid a little too much.

- [Beryl] What would you do to make this more like Korean?

- No, but I wouldn't make a Korean, I would leave it exactly as is.

I think that jollof rice has its own background, its own history, its own story.

And I would love to make this again.

I would change it up a little bit next time, for sure, but I think it tastes really good.

- Oh my God.

- Ah.

(Beryl chuckles) (Beryl laughs) Do you approve as a kid?

- Yes.

- Yes.

(upbeat music) - Hi Christopher, I'm Steve, today you're cooking my kimchi fried rice.

I was born in Korea, and I moved here when I was four years old.

We ate Korean food every single day growing up.

Kimchi fried rice is such a basic staple of Korean cuisine, because a lot of Korean families will always have kimchi on hand and rice on hand, and really those are the two only ingredients that you need to make kimchi fried rice.

- All right, so we're gonna be adding spam.

- [Beryl] Do you eat spam a lot?

- I love spam.

Spam is really good.

- [Beryl] He is like, "Gimme some spam."

- [Christopher] Yeah, Bentley's gonna be famous.

(Beryl laughs) - [Steve] If you're going to add a meat, you should cook that first.

I usually go for spam.

I think spam has the right texture.

My kids always ask for things with spam.

- I haven't had this for a while, so.

Okay, Kimchi, - It's right over there, yeah.

- The other component to that is kimchi.

- I love kimchi.

- [Steve] Kimchi is a fermented cabbage.

It can be made spicy or not spicy, but the kimchi that we're using is the classic version that uses hot chili flakes.

I learned how to make this dish and all the Korean food I make from my mom.

I always used to watch her cook when I was young, and I always helped her out in the kitchen.

Can I bring in Ezra?

- [Beryl] Yeah, yeah, get him.

- Ezra.

Show time.

- [Beryl] Yay.

Ezra, are you excited?

(Ezra groans) - My kids like to help me in the kitchen now.

And so it's kind of a generational thing, it's a recipe that we didn't ever write down, it's just something that you sort of freestyle.

- How does it smell like?

- Hot dogs.

- It smell like hot dogs?

(Beryl laughs) - [Steve] No two kimchi fried rices look exactly the same.

- [Christopher] Now we're cooking.

- Somebody did not dice their spam.

- I think that one belongs in my mouth.

(Beryl laughs) (upbeat music) - It's important to taste as you cook.

- My trick in making kimchi fried rice is to fry the kimchi first.

I feel that when you cook it first, it brings out a whole depth of flavor that you don't get if you just mix all the ingredients and cook it all together.

- So I never fried kimchi before.

- [Beryl] Does it taste different?

- It tastes less salty, and it has a little sweetness to it.

- [Steve] You can use fresh rice if you want, but leftover rice does work better, because it's drier.

- How does it smell Like?

- Spaghetti.

- [Christopher] It smell like spaghetti.

- [Steve] This is just the way that I show them parts of my Korean heritage.

I mean, I cook for my kids every day 'cause I have to.

- Crispy bottom ASMR.

(food sizzles) - [Steve] Cooking is my love language, so I put a lot of effort into it, and I want the people that eat it to enjoy it.

- Sorry.

Add two teaspoons of, did I just hit your head with the sesame oil?

- Yes.

(both laugh) - [Beryl] Sorry.

- I think you're gonna love this dish, because it is the essence of Korean food in one bowl.

This is a great family meal, it's super easy to make.

it's delicious to eat, I hope you and your kid love it.

Love, Steve.

- It smells so good.

(idle music) It's just so good.

This tastes super delicious, it has this like smokiness to it, a slight kick from the kimchi.

Did I say sweetness already?

No, it has like a little sweetness to it, I guess.

I guess caramelizing the kimchi.

I love kimchi, because my step mommy is Hawaiian, so she introduced this.

We always have like a big tub on the fridge, lunchtime, snack time, we'd just like, go ahead, just get a big fork and just like eat the kimchi.

I usually use the cubed bullion.

This one was like, so I feel it has like more flavor to it, it is like so smooth as well, it blends well with the food.

- I like this.

It's super different.

Yeah, wait, I also want to taste this.

Oh, it's salty actually.

Has this inspired you at all to absolutely kind of look into Korean food?

- Absolutely.

Like literally I wanna go online and be like, or maybe text Steve and be like, "What do you have?

What can I make next?"

And I think that my son too will definitely enjoy this.

- I'm excited.

- Cheers.

- Cheers.

I wanna eat this every day for the rest of my life.

Perfection.

- Steve, need more recipes like this.

- [Beryl] (laughs) Yeah.

(upbeat music) - I hope you enjoyed this episode of "Pan Pals."

Let me know in the comments, what was your favorite dish when you were a kid?

Mine was meatloaf.

And if you like home cooking, you should check out the latest season of "The Great American recipe."

The show features eight talented home cooks in a competition that celebrates the diversity and flavors of foods across the us.

You can watch the first episode here on the PBS Food YouTube channel, and check out the rest of the season every week on the PBS app, and your local PBS station.

Check it out in the links in the description.

(idle flute music)