Availability of Foods
When we moved here more than five years ago (yup, it doesn’t seem that long at all!), foods we took for granted in the US were not available here. Over the years, more and more foods have appeared—usually one here, then later one there. When I think back over the time, I am surprised at the selection that we can get now.
Our first Christmas, our church sponsored a Christmas cookie baking and decorating event. We had around 20 people in our kitchen while I was baking cookies, and everyone was decorating. It made for some very warm fellowship! In preparing for the event, I bought lots of butter (no shortening), but I could not find powdered sugar. One funny thing happened when I bought what I thought was powdered sugar and was mixing the “icing” with beaters—it kept getting thicker and thicker. When I asked a Russian what it was, she laughed and told me it was potato starch. Oooops! And I had bought 10 packages of it! Finally, we spent a long time travelling to a big grocery chain store because someone told us there was powdered sugar there. I bought a sack full of packages which are around 2 cups of powdered sugar each. It was really fun watching everyone decorating with red, blue, green, and yellow icing. (I had brought the food colors from America.) Now I can buy powdered sugar at our nearby store as it’s very common. Just a note—the Russians do not have anything like our powdered sugar icings. Recently a young woman who makes cakes for people took my old Betty Crocker cookbook to copy the pages of icing recipes. She was fascinated!!
When you know you can’t get something, you tend to crave it. Thus we were really missing corn chips like Doritos. The Russians are only into potato chips, not corn chips. At the big supermarket, after about 2-3 years, we discovered small bags of corn chips! When we got home, Rex and I sat on the couch handing out chips going, “One for you, one for me.” These bags are still coveted since we cannot find them very often.
Rex loves his corn flakes in the morning. We have always had boxes of name brand cold cereal available. However, many of you know that Rex’s middle name is “Tighter than bark on a tree.” So, when bags of more reasonably-priced corn flakes were on the shelves, Rex did handsprings all the way home.
Russians are learning to drink coffee, but we could not find decaf anywhere until about a year ago. Now it is fairly easy to find. The other day, I was in a nearby store and saw dry split peas! We love them, so we are happy they are close by now. The store also had spinach noodles, whole wheat pasta, and spaghetti made from 8 vegetables. I’m so excited to use these soon.