Food for thought

Following on from the other evening, when JK & I sat and talked nearly all night about food we missed from back home (though he's now gone home and is probably eating it all, the lucky devil), here's a list of things I crave:

• Good, tasty, fresh bread. Almost all bread out here is largely tasteless, slightly sweet, with a strange, airy, spongy texture, which goes stale within a day. You can't even spread butter on sliced bread - even toasted! - without it crumbling. Oh for a Sainsbury's multigrain loaf or a decent baguette.
• Nice Brussels paté. Or a chicken liver parfait. Or duck liver paté with port. Or any decent paté to be honest.
• Decent strong cheddar. I've managed to find one at Safeways which isn't too bad (it tastes of something at least) and there's a deli here that does some really nice cheeses (including St Agur, which I just had for lunch), though it's criminally expensive. A wheel of Epoisse is $25! This is what passes for 'normal' cheese out here and it's revolting.
• Branston pickle. After years of not eating it because Cross & Blackwell was owned by Nestlé, when they sold it I was very happy I could re-indulge, particularly with a strong cheddar on Ryvita, but now I can't even buy it. I heard a rumour you could buy it in President's Choice supermarket but there's not one near here so what good is that to me?
• Cranberry & blackcurrant juice, which was my main tipple back home. Ocean Spray don't sell that particular combo out here, the closest is cranberry & grape which is foul. There's no really nice, easy to buy cartons of juice here - everything's sweetened to destruction - and though you can buy nice frozen concentrated orange juice*, it's a bit of a pain to mix and store it. Anyway, end result is I tend to buy and drink tons of easy-to-reach-for cans of Coke, which I hate doing as it makes me feel dirty. I can almost feel my cellulite getting worse with every sip.
• Curry. Indian food is not a big thing here, there's only one curry house in Banff, which is expensive, and the one time I ate there I was very disappointed. It all just tasted blah. Didn't even do nice poppadums, just the baked ones, and there was no lime pickle or raita in sight. I can buy and fry my own poppadums, which are very nice but takes up time, effort and mess, so is a bit of a pain when it's just you. But Kate & I used to have 'poppadum evenings', where we'd make up a huge stack of them and scoff the lot with yoghurt dip. Good days, good days.
• Gü chocolate soufflé. There's nowt like it.
• Chocolate digestives. They do sell them for $4 for a small packet in Canmore but I can't get there very often.
• Rachel's Organic Greek Style coconut yoghurt. Rich, thick, creamy, coconutty. What's not to love?
• Mozzarella. Now, you can buy mozzarella over here, but it's a hard, usually ready-grated cheese to put on pizzas, that bears no resemblance to a ball of soft, delicious buffalo mozza. Oh how I miss its creamy goodness.
• And for that matter, Parma ham. Not seen hide nor hair of the stuff.

That'll probably do for now, though there are inevitably many others that I can't bring to mind just now. There are things out here that I think are just as good if not better than back home - cupcakes for one - but they're few and far between. No wonder I'm actually losing weight at the moment.

*do you remember Waitrose used to sell this back in the day? I used to eat it like a sorbet. Yum.