It's strange that in Italy you can't get those things whereas we do. Where do you live? Is it very remote?

American baking chocolate. Some recipes I have really only work with American baking chocolate- Australian chocolate has a different sugar and fat content which effects the outcome. Graham crackers- we just don’t have them here.

Remote....five miles/fifteen minutes to the nearest town and small supermarket; an hour to Piacenza, the nearest decent-sized city, where I don't go by car; two hours to Milan. Piacenza province isn't a fashionable place to live; it has no significant prosperous lifestyle-conscious expatriate population. The local cuisine is heavy on animal products. There's no local sizeable Chinese population (unlike down in parts of Tuscany, for example), so little demand for tofu and soy sauce; we can get ingredients for Indian and north African cooking, because there are a lot of immigrants from those areas. I suspect the Florence area, for example, would offer a lot more culinary variety than we have locally, as would Milan.

N.b. as in much of Italy, here the hills, where we live, continue to empty as people move to towns in or closer to the Po Plain. Local society is culturally conservative; innovations, also in the domain of food, come slowly and awkwardly. Newcomers, mostly poor immigrants, have little social and little economic weight.

Where do you live? (real question)

P.S. (cross post) That's funny, Colleen: they're not on the top of my list, but I miss baking chocolate and graham crackers, too. And the natural partner of graham crackers: peanut butter!

We relocated from the south/ southwestern United States to the Upper Midwest. I miss getting great okra, honeydew melons, cantaloupe, peaches, fresh Hatch type green chilis, home grown, i.e. fresh new crop pecans, guaranteed new crop pinto beans, Williams Chili Seasoning, raggedy ripe O'sage canned peaches, Stokes Green Chili Sauce w/ Pork, Del Monte Cajun Style tomatoes, fresh home-grown tarragon, local-ish molasses, 3-4# fresh whole frying chickens, sweetbreads, good fresh whole grain cornmeal....

That's the stuff that I can think of right now and that I miss on a near-weekly basis.

The Asian market near me closed recently and I'm having problems finding tahini, hulled sesame seeds, Hmong ginger sausage and toasted sesame oil. Luckily, I found a back-up bottle of sesame oil in the basement refrigerator so I'm good on that for a while and I can buy ready-made hummus, albeit at higher cost than home made. But I sure am hungry for some of that sausage.

There's always Amazon for the non-perishables but I'd much rather actually see what I'm buying and not have to pay a premium price because shipping costs. Guess that I'm lucky in that, at least, shipping is generally reliable in the States.

Living in the South-East US now... missing those amazing chili's from New Mexico (what they sell in the grocery here is not the same), can't get quality fresh seafood and much of our fresh water fish are frozen or just poor quality - on occasion I can find good salmon and catfish. Can't find many authentic ethnic ingredients... We have no specialty markets close by. I have a hard time finding semolina, real polenta is sometimes not available. I'd love to find a wider selection of fresh mushrooms - we have button and portabella only now. I have to hydrate dried if I want anything else.

I use Amazon or specialty online stores for a few items (jarred, canned, spices for Asian, Indian, etc.), but not many. If I need good chocolate I'll order it from the manufacturer. We had a vegetable garden which had to be taken out this year, but hope in a couple years to start that up again and expand... thankful we have enough room for a small garden as there is nothing like home-grown produce. We previously had various tomatoes, garlic, okra, pole beans, leaf lettuce, cucumbers, blackberries, green peppers. Still have my herb garden though, thankfully. Nuts of all types are very easy and fresh to find here.

It's rather amazing to see what other people can't get or have difficulty finding. I guess I should stop complaining be very grateful for what we can get!

I am on the west coast of Florida and I cannot complain about the produce here. Even in the supermarkets it's often local and really fresh. Right now Plant City strawberries are in season. It is just wonderful to have fresh strawberries in January!

I move here from the NY metropolitan area and I have to say there is nothing that I miss-okay, there used to be a place in Queens that made a fantastic porchetta but honestly, I could probably figure out how to make a better one, if I wanted to.

The one thing I am missing right now is an ingredient called Fior di Sicilia. I hate to order it online because I don't want to pay the shipping.

I lived in Italy in a casa colonica about 15 miles outside of Florence (and then in Florence proper for a while) for about three years a long time ago and even then (the early 70s) I found food to be quite expensive. I remember that everything we ate was plain. A hamburger was just a beef patty on a roll - no condiments. A potato was just a boiled potato. I survived on figs and olives. We had no refrigerator so everything had to be bought the day we were going to eat it. Everything got cooked on the hearth. I must say it was probably the healthiest meal plan I could have. I walked everywhere and was relatively thin (even during pregnancy and after I gave birth).

Moving from one place to another, there are the foods of our youth that become harder to find. Fortunately, there is Amazon.

For me, Amazon has provided the following that I can't find in local supermarkets:

Kosciusko mustard - there is no better mustard, especially when it comes to pastrami or corned beef sammiches

Tuttorosso crushed tomatoes and Contadina tomato paste - it is not possible to make real tomato sauce without either of these. Accept no substitutes!

Batay Turbinado sugar - that stuff in the box is horrible.

Sadly, you can't get a real Sloppy Joe outside of Essex County, NJ, even from Amazon.

What an interesting adventure to live outside the US! I have no acquisition complaints here (MA, north of Boston). I don't think we can get Batay, but turbinado - definitely. Graham crackers, chocolate -- check! ;-) Hmm. no Hatch chiles, although we are getting "Satsuma" mandarins in the grocery this year. There is an HMart grocery about 20-30 minutes away (Korean owned grocery chain) and they have a much larger selection of fruits and vegetables (durian, aisan pear, chinese celery, root vegetables, chestnuts, all kinds of mushrooms, etc.), and rice, seaweed, etc.

I live most of the year in the food paradise of Northern California, with some of the finest available locally or via shipment. However, I still have trouble sourcing Vacherin Fribourgeois cheese for use in moitie-moitie Fondue. I can find it generally at a small cheese shop in the Dogpatch of SF, or on occasion in at the Rainbow Grocery.

When I lived in Switzerland, I could not find a source of fresh jalapeno. The taste of the alternatives was not quite right. But there were Asian, Hispanic and even "American" markets as they had quite a large expat population -- I could buy dried and canned chile, but not fresh. Now, we have a place in Nice and it's still not something you'll find at a supermarket (I have not yet searched out the specialty market). But it's international and pretty well equipped for foods, in general.

Your situation sounds pretty extreme -- walnuts are expensive? No oats?

I'm in New Mexico now from the southeast. I miss any fresh produce that's not a chile!

Ha ha ha! cooper8828, I'd love to swap homegrown-from-the-southeast produce for some of your chiles! Oh, and wild sage and piñon (miss the scent). Do you miss fried okra? I'm getting rather sick of it, but would love some warm sopapillas drizzled with honey... : ) Funny isn't it, the things we miss with all we have? I could make sopapillas... can't 'make' real chiles.

I'll add good cheeses... it's hit or miss here, mostly miss. And I love cheeses.

Black walnuts. Almost unknown in the San Francisco Bay Area, and expensive when you can find them. I get them shipped to me from Amazon so I can make my own black walnut ice cream.

Can't think of anything else. If I can't buy it or special order it, I can find it at a restaurant which saves me having to cook/clean, LOL!

The only thing that comes to my mind is fresh mamey. I tried growing a mamey tree here, but I put it in the wrong soil. I do have a white sapote tree now, which I think is related - I should be getting my first fruit from it this spring, and so I'll see how it compares to mamey.

And yes, I do wish truffles were cheaper. It's difficult for me to think of something I want that I cannot find in Los Angeles - I do not have Gooster's taste in cheese, and so I've been able to find plenty of varieties of cheese to satisfy me, and I'm trying to cut back. Tofu is made in Southern California, and so I can find plenty of that. Fortunately, I live close to some large Japanese markets, and I find ingredients there that are not otherwise widely available.

There are a few things that I grow that are otherwise somewhat difficult to find, such as yuzu and Kaffir limes. I also grow cherimoya, but that is fairly easy to find at farmers' markets as are a variety of mushrooms, although those can get expensive.

Padron peppers from Spain. You can get them here but it's very difficult, and for whatever reason, they're been very bitter the few times I was able to snag 'em.

I've tried substituting Shishito peppers but it's just not the same.

I live in Southern California, not far from the coast, and can get most anything from anywhere locally, and at a reasonable price, if I want to go searching it out.

We do hear tell of fresh Michigan sour cherries occasionally, but they're here and gone and I never seem to get any to make a pie for my Michigan bred father.

What I'd really like is fresh hoop cheese. I can get aged by mail, but I need fresh. It used to be the most common cheese available, and found in every store, country or city. Apparently, no one has figured out how to automate the making of it, however, so what was once cheap and easy is now "handmade" and "artisanal" and you can't charge artisanal prices for hoop cheese! The home cheesemaking expert/supplier didn't even have good instructions/recipe last time I asked.

Many years ago, I lived abroad in a tiny town in the hills in the middle of nowhere, with one small city the better part of an hour away on the bus. There was certainly the kind of limited food available that you talk about, but there was always plentiful and good produce, grain, etc. There was also good bread, but there were no sweets worth eating except expensive from the bakery. There were good baking ingredients to be had, however.

I got very creative. I figured out how to make tostadas using the local flatbread and hot pepper paste, cabbage (no such thing as lettuce there), and ingenuity. They came out great, though more like Southern Mexico, which is "foreign" cuisine, rather than the Californio foods I grew up on. The frijoles I made were authentic, however, and it was certainly different from local! I did that with a lot of dishes. Figured out how to reinvent them using the limited local resources. And I learned how to make up cakes and bars to have a nice variety. Of course, I wasn't there long enough to get bored with my ingenuity. I think you once said you'd been living there for something like 15 years?

2ManyDiversions,

I found some old guy here that grows okra and turnip greens! I'm ok on that front. I would gladly trade some chile for being able to walk in somewhere and get fried okra, fried catfish, cornbread with no sugar, and sweet tea, chess pie for dessert.

Now I want sopapillas! I also love getting really cheap tortillas, still warm. That is the definition of aromatherapy. :)

Interesting how many people have longings: I didn't realize. We're not oppressed here. We eat quite well, it's just there are a lot of things we can't get. It's like the situation plllog described when he lived abroad. So, walnuts are expensive: I use almonds for everything. I can't get rye flour; but recently I found (again) buckwheat flour, albeit expensive, and have been baking enthusiastically with it. I can't get parsnips, so I make roasted vegetables with fennel. There are a few nice things we have that can't be found everywhere: chestnut flour, inexpensive bags of porcini "crumbs", excellent for stock. Thank goodness for the local foreign stores that sell Indian spices.

Produce is generally pretty good (though apples have been really poor this year), and then there are realities like our own big cherry tree. After an inadvisedly hard pruning about five years ago this year it finally produced well again. We swam in the finest cherries in the world. Things like this compensate quite a bit for not being able to get graham crackers.

Though I'll add that I also miss blueberries, mangoes, and limes.

I used to go to the foreigner stores, specifically the American store, and wonder who bought the Pop Tarts. The things some people miss (more likely, their kids). Though, tbh, I remember making guac with thai bird chilies.

@Melissa: I can't believe you can't get blueberries and limes! I mean, not too far away those are not uncommon.

Michigan is actually very agriculturally diverse and I live in the "fruit ridge", so I can easily get fruit and berries from apples to apricots, cherries to blueberries, beans, asparagus, raspberries, melons. I can't get/grow fresh Meyer lemons and figs, though, except on very rare occasions. My garden provides me with pretty much any vegetable I fancy, except cabbage and brussels sprouts because the groundhogs love them and get them far before they become mature. We have local dairies and so can get any cheese I want, I'm not much of a cheese fan and I did take that cheese making class so I can make mozzarella, feta, ricotta. Cheddar/swiss/provolone/etc can be had at Aldi and it's fine with me.

Fortunately, I'm only an hour from Grand Rapids, where I can find Asian groceries, a Mediterranean market, Hispanic items, halal grocery stores, Trader Joe's, Penzey's. The Downtown Market has fresh seafood. The downside is that just because it's available doesn't mean it's affordable, or I'd be eating seafood every day. Somehow Michigan is quite a long way from the ocean, LOL. We also have The Cheese Lady with her 90+ varieties of cheese, many of which I cannot correctly pronounce. (grin)

Unless I make that trip, though, my small town is very limited, having no independent or ethic grocers. I would love to get freshly made tortillas, like I did when I lived closer to the migrant centered groceries, and Meyer lemons don't store well, so having them more regularly available would be nice. I don't care about chilies at all, so that's not a problem, but avocados are usually not great, nor is citrus, something about shipping thousands of miles doesn't improve them.

jakkom, it's funny about those black walnuts. Here I pick them up in 5 gallon buckets because they turn into missiles when hit with a lawn mower. I dump them in the back of the pasture and hope the squirrels take them. They're a devil to crack, though, I'm assuming you get the nutmeats already removed from the shell? My job used to be to sit on the porch with a hammer, drop a black walnut into a depression Dad made in a board, and whack it until it broke, then Dad would spend evenings picking the nutmeats from the shells and storing them in glass jars in the fridge. I never did like the darned things, too many times whacking my thumb. I probably should have eaten them in revenge!

Annie

Jakkom - I’ll gladly send you black walnuts. In fact I’d gladly send you the whole freakin tree.

@jakkom -- there are black walnuts outside of the Bay Area, even in the wild (the state planted the native versions along highways). I think there are some available for sale, although as you know the commercial crop is normally the regular english walnuts, and is 99% of the nation's supply.

Yuzu is nothing like the combination of lemon and lime. It is as different from lemon/lime as lemons are from tangerines. You can make the substitution, but it will not resemble yuzu. I make a sauce with yuzu and wasabi that was inspired by a Japanese/Peruvian restaurant I used to go to in Marina Del Rey (no longer open), and there is no substitute for the yuzu that will taste the same. If you've never had it, you can certainly live without it. You can find bottled yuzu juice at your local Japanese market, but that is still not the same. There is a fragrance from fresh yuzu that does not make it into the bottle. I freeze excess yuzu fruit when I have them, as the tree produces for only two or three months.

My parents had a black walnut tree in Texas, and my great grandfather had grafted English walnuts onto it, but it still made both nuts. They also had a huge pecan orchard, and so we never bothered much with the walnuts.

I can't get twiglets . Sigh.

Where I am in New Mexico, as far as ingredients, the things that come to mind are primarily fresh seafood and fresh blueberries. I can get pretty good frozen blueberries from Trader Joe's but the blueberries in the supermarket are not worth the exorbitant price. Growing them would be far too much trouble in my alkaline soil with my alkaline water. DH has had a hard time finding a decent Madeira. Around here, Rainwater is about the best you can get. We will likely have to approach one of the local places to special order it.

In general though, my irritant is from trends. Trends are wonderful when they expose you to something new. Then, as the trend fades, it becomes harder to or more expensive to locate. I used to find Arborio rice in the bulk bins for a decent price or at Trader Joe's but new things have come along that have displaced it (probably quinoa). I can order it but the price goes up for something that used to be cheaper.

A larger problem for me is finding quality gluten free products to fill a need. Even when I do, the cost is often prohibitive for me. I would love a source of reasonably priced gluten free phyllo and gluten free puff pastry that also tasted good.

Beyond that, I am pretty loose with my cooking and enjoy working with what is available to prepare good tasting food that reflects my reality. The ability to recreate a very specific taste is not high on my priority list though I do enjoy experiencing the wide range of flavors out there. Come to think of though, I would like on occasion to find some Spanish chorizo as opposed to the more prevalent Mexican chorizo.

You can order Spanish chorizo on line from a market in Los Angeles. Jessica took us to this market on a field trip, and I've been back to get their chorizo and smoked paprika. They also have especially good varieties of Manchego.

>>foodonastump: Jakkom - I’ll gladly send you black walnuts. In fact I’d gladly send you the whole freakin tree.>>

LOL! I'd trade you for a full-grown over-producing Meyer Lemon since I have 3 and nobody in my family to give them to any longer!

Yes, I understand black walnuts are very very hard to shell. And they stain, isn't that correct? I stick to the pre-shelled ;))

I know they do grow in CA, which is why it's so annoying that they're hard to obtain here. I was at a restaurant a couple of years ago and ordered a beet salad. Lovely fresh red beets, not pickled, and came with chopped black walnuts and fresh goat cheese. An absolutely incredible combination! Would never have thought of it myself.

When I was about 11 some friends gave us a grocery bag full. I had to crack and pick every one. Gave me a fondness for whatever nuts I can buy at Trader Joe's ready to eat. :) But boy were they good!

Beets, fresh, are only very occasionally available. It's a pity as they make a good salad grated, paired with grated carrots. You prepare them in separate bowls, dress them very simply with olive, lemon juice, and salt (little salt) and combine to your own taste on your plate. The original carrot salad recipe is from Marcella Hazan. I'm always looking for another way to fix vegetables.