This started out as a comment on Jim's blog

Rachel's comment on Jim's blog is too true.  We have to stop bitching about the lack of availability of ethnic cuisine (like most of us are used to seeing as we all came from multicultural cities) and start making it ourselves!

I've been crying and complaining inside (and out loud to my husband) for so long about the lack of Indian or Thai food here.  It hurts me how long it's been since I ate a delicious chicken tikka masala. 
The problem, however, (as most of you have already blogged about) is also in the availability of ingredients.  The ONLY indian spices I have found here (in the most giant of supermarkets) are saphron, cumin and curry.  No turmeric, the most important ingredient :(  And you can forget about garam masala. 

I did succeed in making a coconut chicken curry last night with fresh roma tomatoes, coconut milk (soooooo good here) and curry powder.  Hot damn was it good.  It was almost like the real thing.

What is awesome is that in having to improvise with the lack of ingredients, we all become much better cooks as a result because we really need to get creative with substitutions!  Did you know that instead of using baking soda (which doesn't exist in Brazil) you can x3 the baking powder for the exact same effect?  Meaning recipe calls for 1 tsp of baking soda so you just add 3 tsp of baking powder.  Voila.
 
Of course, some things you just can't substitute and I know you're all having enormous saudades for this one.  Cheddar Cheese.  Not neon orange imitation cheddar.  I'm taking real Canadian/American cheddar.  Or marble.  Mmmmmmmmmmmmm marble!  Cheese in general suffers a little here.  I used to live on feta and cheddar so I'm outta luck.  I'm starting to appreciate queijo minas though (tastes great when cooked)!

I'd love for us bloggy people to have a giant potluck of our favourite comfort foods.  I think it would be a really interesting spread. :)