After finishing “Expat: Women’s True Tales of Life Abroad” and noticing that most authors had written about food, I was reminded that culinary matters are, indeed, a recurring theme in expat conversations.

Escape Artist Travel Magazine has a good article about expatriate food cravings here.
What foods from your home country have you been craving lately? Have you tried cooking your favourite childhood dishes with ingredients available to you locally?

One could argue that, as a cultural marker, food is as central to daily life as language.
When you live abroad, the question is, how do you recreate the taste of home?

Like any expat, I have learned to substitute ingredients or to make them from scratch, as is the case with crème fraiche, a thinner, less tangy sour cream used quite liberally in French cooking.

I really cannot complain. Vancouver is a gourmand’s paradise that boasts a wonderful variety of restaurants and specialty shops. The only things I have not found here are: 1) a really good North African restaurant and 2) the right combination of lean and fatty meat cuts to make a proper blanquette de veau (veal stew in a white sauce).
Fairly minor grievances, as you can see!

So, what’s cooking this weekend? For all the American expats out there, how easy or challenging will it be to find all the ingredients for your Thanksgiving dinner next week?

Emmanuelle