There are foods that I remember....

It may not be apparent, but I love to cook. And to be even more specific, I love to bake. Love it. There was a point in time where I thought about becoming a baker or a chef. Baking appealed to me more since it didn't necessarily mean late nights, but in the end I did not pursue that track.

Living on the east coast gave me exposure to a lot of cuisines and foods that I never knew existed while growing up in the Midwest. On top of that, there are so many places to buy different/gourmet/unusual/ethnic foods (and I mean grocers, not restaurants) that any time you need something, you can find it relatively easily.

And on top of that, I worked in Manhattan for most of the time that we lived out east, and the stores in Manhattan had anything you could think of. You need thai chiles? Got 'em. British candies? Yep, got those. Panettone? Of course! Alligator? Got it, too.

You get so used to having Asian/Indian markets around you chock full of great, cheap produce and spices and other things that you forget the rest of the country isn't quite the same.

Recently I moved back to the Midwest with my family. We wanted to be closer to our extended family so our little girl had a chance to know her cousins and so on. Little did I know that I was stabbing my culinary life right through the heart.

We lived out east for ten years. That was ten years of diet changes. I had no idea how drastically different my diet was from the typical Midwest diet. All of a sudden, there were a lot of things we couldn't find in the grocery store. And it wasn't that we just couldn't find them, there were no alternative to check to see if someone/some place else would have them.

So what am I talking about? Well, here's a link to a Flickr set of some things we've not found locally:

A lot of these things we have to drive more than two hours from where we live to be able to get them. Some of them (e.g., the tea) we have to order online. There are some things that we could not find when we first moved here (e.g., rice paper, which a lot of stores now carry) that have shown up in stores. But there are still some things that we have not found in the Midwest (e.g., capers packed in salt, rose petal jelly, Walker's crisps, Aero bars, Mars bars, Hob Nobs, Ribena, etc.) at all. We'll have to look online for these things. (can you tell that we're suffering from a little Anglophilism?)

I was shocked to find these:

But very happy all the same. Now, a lot of these things we can find near my parents, which works out great since we're there to visit with some regularity. Which is particularly great for the cheese and produce since that's I'd rather not buy online. I just wish I didn't have to travel so far to get some of these things.

There are no gourmet grocery stores in the Quad Cities. There are very few Asian markets, and they aren't what I expected them to be. There are even very few stand alone liquor stores (most everything is sold in the grocery store...with limited variety). The closest thing we can find is in the Iowa City area, which is about fifty minutes away. That's a little far for groceries.

This has been the toughest thing to adjust to. And I don't know that I want to learn how to adjust.