Only in Chutz la’Aretz, you say? Pity!

There was a tea commercial a while back – for some Canadian brand (okay, I googled it, and it was apparently Red Rose Tea) – in which a Britishy voice tasted the tea and proclaimed, “Only in Canada, you say?  Pity!”

So you probably already know that there are a bunch of food things you can’t get here – or, if you can get them, they are a) so expensive and b) so inferior that it’s barely worthwhile.

That said, I want to jump in (thus interrupting my own post) to say there are far FEWER of those things than there used to be.  Used to be you couldn’t get decent toilet paper (not a food product, but bear with me), chocolate chips, tinned tuna, vanilla extract (okay, still no vanilla extract) and more.  Those are all easily available now, albeit sometimes at a slight premium.

Still – when it comes to one of our favourite sorta-healthy snacks it is pretty tough to assemble all the necessary ingredients… but not impossible, as the delicious smell from the toaster oven is proving as I type this.

Making nachos the way I like them requires three special ingredients:  nacho (corn) chips, salsa and cheddar cheese.  All of these are hard to come by, to different extents – but again, not totally impossible.

In this case, I found the cheddar at the shuk in Yerushalayim on Friday (yay!).   We served it sliced on Shabbos and Elisheva proclaimed it not wonderful, because she’s been spoiled by the sharp cheddar we got in Toronto.  I find it subtle but tasty.

Ted found the salsa (kind of expensive) in the “ethnic” section of a grocery store not too far away (yay!), and the chips were actually pretty much the normal price (three smaller-than-our-usual bags for ₪10, making it about $3-4 for the equivalent of a regular-sized bag) in a different grocery store (yay!).  They were hard to find, though, in case you want to feel sorry for us.

The one thing that’s still lacking is sour cream.  We have shamenet in the fridge, but it’s not exactly the same thing:  it has a bitter edge that I don’t really love yet.  Tasty enough when mixed into things, but it just isn’t sour cream, so for now, I’ll eat my nachos “naked” (except for the cheese and salsa), thanks.

B’tayavon!!!