How to Recreate the Magic of your Holiday Through Your Food
As a foodie, nothing brings on the post-travel blues like coming home from an incredible adventure, knowing that you’re unlikely to be able to find your new favourite dish from your new favourite restaurant that is potentially thousands of miles away once you’re back at home.
Even though I have a lot of allergies, I like to think I’ve mastered travelling with dietary restrictions which means I finally get to participate in foodie culture. It also means that I feel personally victimised by enjoying the most incredible meal on the wrong side of the world. To be totally transparent I’ve never managed to perfectly recreate my favourite meals (you just can’t beat how good things taste when you’re stress-free, thousands of miles away from your problems with a nice view!). Having said that, I’ve managed to get pretty close so I wanted to share some of my best tips on how to cure the post-travel blues as a foodie.
Find Restaurants locally
Potentially one of the easiest ways to feed your travel blues, depending on where you visited and where you live, is simply to find a local restaurant that serves the country’s cuisine. I say “potentially the easiest” because, as someone who lives on the edge of a major city, I’m fairly spoilt for choice with unique restaurants. Still, I haven’t managed to find a Nordic restaurant anywhere outside of London! If I want a taste of Scandinavia, I have the choice of taking a 90 minute train or getting cooking.
If you live near a big city, it may be possible to find your new found favourite foods in your own back garden. In Bristol you can easily find authentic food from across Asia, as well as a lot of authentic Middle Eastern food. American barbecue is also very popular in Bristol, but you’d be hard pressed to find anything from the Baltic region.
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| The Key to Recreating Your Favourite Dishes is Finding the Right Ingredients - Peanut Rayu from Morueats |
Recreate your Favourite Dishes at Home
If you live a little further out in the sticks, or you’ve visited somewhere where the local cuisine hasn’t entered popular culture in your country, then your next best option is to find some recipes online and try cooking from scratch. I often find that recipes written in English usually list the authentic ingredients as well as alternatives if you can’t locate the ingredients in your country, which gives you a really good starting point.
You might not be able to perfectly recreate your favourite dish with the equipment you have at home (I don’t know anyone with an Indian Tandoor oven in their garden!), but you can get close enough to scratch the foodie itch.
Living near a very multi-cultural city, I’m surrounded by a lot of international supermarkets - I’ve seen several Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian supermarkets dotted around (several that are focused on one nationality, others that stock a bit of everything from that region). If you’re looking for something specific and can’t locate it in your local area then your best bet is to try online.
Try some snacks from the Country you Visited
A surprisingly common travel past time (in my circle of travel friends, at least) is to explore a local supermarket whenever you visit a new country. Picking up a few snacks is an easy way to try something new that’s unique to that location, but breaking into the final item in the stash of your favourite snack that you brought home with you is surprisingly sad (I miss you, Norwegian chocolate).
While this might not be the case for every country, the UK is very multi-cultural, making it surprisingly easy to find some of the more common international snacks either in store or online - even my local Lidl sometimes gets a few Scandinavian bits in, and I end up coming home with a bag full of “Smash” chocolate. It will almost always be more pricy buying it in the UK, but if you really want a taste of your holiday then this is the easiest option.
Where to find Authentic Snacks and Ingredients - Morueats
While it can be easy to find some of the most common international foods online, the options are usually extremely limited and it costs double (or sometimes even more) to buy certain products in the UK. On top of this, I often find that shops and websites selling international food don’t bother translating/listing the ingredients, which is a nightmare when you have allergies like me.
I recently tested out Morueats, an online Asian food shop which does absolutely none of the things that annoy me about other international food shops. The ingredients are clearly listed, they don't just sell things that are commonly available in the UK already, and even the hard to find items aren’t subject to the huge markups that you’ll find elsewhere.
I have yet to visit any Asian countries, and I’ve always said that when I do it’ll be on a cruise. As much as I want to try all of the local specialities, that’s a bit difficult to do with a shellfish allergy! We’re lucky to have a few Asian restaurants in Bristol (I’ve tried Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese food, all in the city centre!), but I can’t go anywhere really authentic because of my allergies.
While my allergies limit where we can go out for meals, it’s also ignited a love of cooking new recipes and trying new foods. Finding out ways to make things shellfish-free and without wheat is like an addictive puzzle game and Morueats is the cheat code. Morueats has a great gluten free section with all of the basics as well as a few harder to find items. I’d heard so much about konjac noodles being a good replacement for wheat noodles but hadn’t actually seen them anywhere before. I got some konjac to try, as well as some of the Nojo sauces to put on them and they went down a treat. The peanut rayu is now a cupboard staple for me - ideal if you’re someone who loves chilli crisp but wants a bit more flavour from it.
Morueats also had lots of gluten free Asian snacks and different drinks (with the ingredients and allergens clearly listed!), which meant I got to partake in trying Asian snacks and drinks for the first time ever. If you haven’t tried yuzu gummy sweets before then you NEED to add them to your next order.
Since placing my order I’ve noticed a few more gluten free items listed in the main section, mainly because I’d resigned myself to never being able to find wheat-free gochujang, but of course Morueats had it! If you have allergies and you’re looking for something specific then I’d highly encourage browsing the main section as well as the dietary specific sections.
Final Thoughts -
While it may be impossible to recreate absolutely every element that went into your dream holiday meal, there are plenty of ways to revive a little of the foodie travel magic while you’re at home.
Having majorly fallen down the rabbit hole of recreating Asian (particularly Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean) foods at home, I highly recommend giving following a recipe a try. There are so many brilliant creators from across the world who share recipes from their home countries for you to try, and with brands like Morueats in the world, it’s easier than ever to find exactly what you need to make your favourite foods at home (especially if you have allergies). Learning to cook a particular cuisine at home not only gives you a new appreciation for the food you eat, but can also teach you so much about the culture along the way.
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