While I have a good deal of disdain for the modern North American tendency to mash several trendy cuisines together into one dish (Cajun rigatoni?  Really?) studying regional cuisines is very important.

I sometimes import large swathes of a foreign cuisine (on Burns Night, for instance), but more often I adapt ingenious concepts from foreign cuisines and apply them to the ingredients found in Edmonton.

It was hearing about German Rumtopf that led to our Evans cherry pot.  The dough for Austrian Fleischknödel inspired the little potato dumplings that I now like to eat in broth.  Ukrainian kvasivka selians’ka, a type of sauerkraut soup, showed me how to use the brine leftover in my pickle jars to make pickle soup.