Food I Miss

Originally this was in response to a note from my mother, regarding the food I hope to eat when I visit home. What a dangerous topic! But I went on a mouth-watering tangent and decided to post it here.

Ah, home tastes. There are so many. I miss good beer, cheese, and coffee dearly. And "cheese" encompasses so many things, doesn't it? Fresh mozarella, cheddar, munster, cream cheese, cottage cheese... I miss milk dearly too. And yogurt, I miss yogurt. Even the instant coffee we have here would be much better with some real milk in it.

In addition to beer, there's also no decent affordable wine here, and the crappy wine is as expensive as good wine ought to be. No good bread either, though I've recently discovered some wheat bread that's actually not half bad! But while it's not half bad, it's not 3/4 good either.

I've had in my mind a thick, juicy hamburger with swiss cheese and avacado. I've been craving that for more than a year now.

But I also miss alot of the variety of home, all the foreign foods we eat. Particularly Mexican and chinese foods call to me. You can find Mexican here, but it's not made by mexicans. I've found good Thai food here though. But Burmese? Ethiopian? Mark's kitchen (which I couldn't easily classify)

I miss decent pasta too. I mean, they have pasta here, but as easy as it is to find, there's only one meal ANYONE seems to know how to cook with it: Filipino birthday spaghetti. It's a birthday tradition to cook spaghetti thusly: cook up the pasta, pour on premade tomato sauce from a pouch (they have fresh tomatoes here, but people I've talked to actually feel home-made sauce is extremely inferior to cheap stuff from a vacuum-sealed pouch). The sauce already has sugar added, but usually people add more. Then they cut up a few hot dogs and throw those in. And voila! You have traditional birthday spaghetti! Oddly enough, people are very impressed when I tell them I know how to make spaghetti.

Anyway, the point is, I miss good pasta too.
Oh, and I intend to eat nothing with MSG in it. Everything I eat here has MSG.