Post #478596

Treating myself this Sunday to my grandma's recipe of Swedish pancakes (they're closer to crepes) but with whipped cream and sour cherries, which I first encountered here in Germany. This is about as close as I come to homesickness — I miss individual people, and I miss foods. In this instance it feels strange to miss a food that I know came from very near here, although I grew up with it on the other side of the globe. I have no idea whether it's anything like the traditional recipe. If there even is one. My grandma grew up in Denmark with Swedish and Danish parents, but came to the US early enough that she lost the languages, so we have a cookbook from her with wild guesses at spellings and some ... creative interpretations of recipes. Great baker, terrible cook. Mostly I miss all the foods that aren't northern European. Especially spicy foods. Even good rice and beans — I can and do make everything myself, but it's a lot more trouble to track down the right spices and pantry staples to make anything Latin American. It feels sacrilegious that there aren't street tacos. Hamburg is a city with a huge proportion of immigrants, and I can get amazing Turkish food here, but not Mexican. I know of only one decent Chinese place and one good Korean restaurant, and they're way too far from home (90 minutes, ish). The local places that do sushi have rolls with cooked (like, canned) tuna in some kind of sweet sauce, and poke bowls covered in peanuts. Ironically, it'll be integrating better into Germany and learning more German that will best enable me to find the pockets of everything else. I think I've done a decent job culturally integrating so far, but I need to put more time into the language. I want to become fluent and I'm a very long way away from that.