How I Stock My Kitchen

I don't claim to be any sort of gourmet chef, but I think I can hold my own in the kitchen.  We eat pretty well, and pretty fresh.  It's not as if chicken nuggets have never graced a child's plate in my house, but I try to make that kind of thing the exception, not the rule.  Before we came, I was pretty confident that, for the most part, we eat whole foods.  It turns out that is not entirely the case, but generally speaking, making meals with simple ingredients has not been an issue for us.  That's good news, because it's the processed stuff that is (unhealthy, obviously) unavailable or extremely expensive here.  You can eat cheap, if you eat whole grains, legumes, meat, fruit and vegetables.  Processing hikes up the price at an alarming rate.

Our diet has certainly changed, in ways that I would have expected (enter rice and beans, tropical fruit) and in ways I didn't expect (snickers bars!). 

Generally, I make everything from scratch here.  We eat Brazilian, we eat American, and somedays we eat somewhere in between.  We have our small supply of highly guarded peanut butter and hidden valley ranch, but here is what I've moved to in the last 11 months:

I make my own broth.
I make my own spaghetti sauce, white sauce, casserole base.
I make my own salsa.
I make a lot of tomato-based products from fresh tomatoes.
I make homemade mac & cheese.
I make my own croutons.
I make my own bread crumbs.
I make imitation maple syrup with maple flavoring we brought from the States.
I made my own seasoning salt, poultry seasoning, and other spice "mixes."
I make (healthier and tastier) chicken nuggets.
I make granola bars.
I make "reeses" peanut butter bars.
I chop chocolate bars for chocolate chip cookies.
I make our salad dressing.
Oatmeal is our most common breakfast food.
I make marinade, BBQ sauce, and the like.
I've even tried homemade wheat thins.
I make nothing from a "packet mix."
We eat dried beans that need to be soaked overnight.
We pop our popcorn on the stovetop.
We make a Brazilian BBQ, or Churrasco, on weekends when we have time.
I scan internet websites for old faithfuls and new ideas using basic ingredients.
I have an "fake-it" cookbook that has cured some major cravings.
When something we love hits the store, I stock up in a way that is shocking to cashier.
We beg favors of travelling friends and grandmas ;) to bring us things we can't find here, peanut butter, good coffee, certain spices, tahini, etc.

We've had a love-hate relationship with favorite products.  The kids fell in love with a whole grain cereal bar I found, but once we shared the info with fellow ex-pats, we collectively bought out the store and have never seen more.  Learning our lesson, if we find a favorite product, we never let it sit on the shelf.  You hate to fall in love with a product, becuase you may never find it again.  Here is a list of things we rarely see, but if we do find (usually in a larger town) we stock up like you wouldn't believe:
previously mentioned cereal bars
tortillas
mexican food products of any sort
canned tomato products, such as sauce, diced, whole peeled, paste
chimichurri
sundried tomatoes
seedless grapes
blueberries (extremely rare, and extremely expensive)
celery
feta cheese
cottage cheese
cream cheese
pecans
vanilla extract
salsa  (!a new discovery at a store 1 hr away!)
tabasco sauce
one of our 3 usual cereals
greek yogurt

I find, however, that I am drawn by the lure of American made products.  If I see something from home I have an overwhelming urge to buy it.  Whether or not I have ever bought it in the States is irrelevant.  I cannot explain this phenomenon, other than I guess it's just a bit of gripping to the familiar.  Case in point, I can remember about 2 times in my life I have bought a snicker's bar, but when we were shopping at Sam's Club here (yes! They have Sam's Club! Too bad it's about 7 hours away), we saw snicker's bars.  I do not know what possessed me, but I put, not one, but two Sam's Club packages of snickers bars in our cart.  The same goes for any number of other "familiar" items.  Part of it is surely that it makes me feel closer to home.  The other part is probably the uncertainty of  never knowing if I'll ever see it again.

And so, we have a high shelf stocked with American products that I bought in bulk and on impulse, or someone lovingly hand carried for us.  We have a middle shelf full of staples that I bought in large quantities because they are our favorites, and then there is the rest, which is what we eat every day.

We have a fruiteria, a sort of fruit market, where I prefer to buy my produce, which really is my favorite part of eating here.