In the USA, I think it’s great how many different foods Americans are exposed to. There isn’t much that an American living in the continental 48 can’t find in a restaurant, grocery store, online or in a specialty store. Having had that wide exposure to foods from around the world growing up, we tend to crave those foods. We dearly miss Mexican food. Our homemade version just isn’t the same as El Mazatlan. Another kind of food we tend to crave is Chinese food. I’ve gotten much better at Chinese cooking and can crank out the American-Chinese version of cashew chicken (only no cashews here, so I use peanuts).

Here there are many people here who make different things to sell to us foreign people. It’s all about who you know. There is a woman who we have a standing order of tortilla chips (they are flour, not corn) and salsa (pico de gallo) each week. She comes with our order and we delight in eating them. I couldn’t keep up with our family’s salsa and chip pace. I was making 12 pints every two months and the chip making takes a lot of time because one has to make the tortillas first to cut up and bake to make the chips. We also like bagels that are delivered to us when we order them and plantain chips that Rosalie makes. One of my friends has a source for nems a.k.a. spring rolls-ish. I tried making my own egg rolls, however, it took several hours because I first had to make the wrappers from scratch and then the filling before completing the process. I enjoy the nems this Cameroonian woman makes because they don’t have spicy shredded carrots on the inside (other nems I’ve had here are mostly shredded carrots with piment (ground habenero), but these have ground beef, shredded carrots, onion and other veggies without piment. I make a homemade sweet and sour dipping sauce and we have a meal. My friend places the order and they come in batches of 25. They are packaged in newspaper. I freeze them in the newspaper and all, so I can pull them out in the batches to reheat in the oven to enjoy.