It’s not as dramatic as what you are looking for, but when I was in Costa Rica last summer, breakfast was always a pretty substantial plate of fruit that nearly always included mango, and then some kind of protein, which was often eggs or cheese, and maybe some bread. In deference to me being vegetarian, when the hostess (“Mama Tica”) made leftover meat and toast with jam for herself, she always put peanut butter on the table for me, which I love. I don’t know that she even bought it on a regular basis before me, but two meals a day were included in my “homestay” package.
Anyway, I have made a very similar breakfast ever since. I actually got introduced to mango by an uncle who smuggled a number of them back from Thailand in the mid-70s, and my gawd, they were good. But then when my mother bought some from a local grocery store a few months later, they were flavorless. I never really tried a mango again, until I had these in Costa Rica-- and they were nearly the size of basketballs-- no lie. But at any rate, about two months after I got back, I was just dying for one, so I bought a couple at the grocery-- they had two kinds, one imported from Jamaica, and another from Mexico.
They were both very good. The Jamaican one had a slightly better texture, but they both were full of the flavor I remembered. They were not much bigger than Bartlett pears, and cost a dollar per, but still…
Instead of cheese, I was having yogurt, or very occasionally, some bread with PB. I wasn’t walking 10 miles a day anymore, like I did in CR, so my breakfasts were smaller, but I’ve had mango nearly every morning since I discovered that we are importing decent ones.
Also, I make borscht. If I hadn’t learned to like it as a child in Moscow in 1977, I very much doubt I’d be making it now, but I am. I don’t put veal in it, being a vegetarian, but I found a textured VP that is “chick’n,” but after I pan fry it in spray oil, makes a pretty good “meat” for the borscht.
People put cream in it in Russia, and as non-kosher as that is, we used to eat it that way in restaurants, because it was easier than refusing it, and explaining that we were Jewish.
Getting the cream just right was hard. It’s “smetana,” which gets translated as “sour cream,” but that’s not what it is. It’s almost a hybrid of sour cream and buttermilk, which was the first idea I tried to get something close, and it was very close.
Then when the Greek yogurt craze started, I found a very thick, fairly sour brand of yogurt on the market, and added some of that to my "smetana, and finally wised up to the fact that the real stuff probably had a lot of fat in it, so I got whole milk buttermilk, and whole milk yogurt, and bingo! What I had tasted so close, that considering how long it had been since I had the real thing, it worked great, and no one else in my family knew what the original tasted like anyway, but they liked what I had.
Once in Greece, I had a sandwich on a bread wrap in a restaurant, which was essentially their offering to vegetarians in place of gyros. It had potatoes, cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and yogurt. It sounds awful, but it was SOOOOOO good. I couldn’t believe how much. It was all in the seasonings. It had a lot of paprika, and I could get it right at home only with some MSG. I don’t know what exactly it had, but after lots of attempts, I got something reasonably close. It’s pretty involved, making it, so I don’t make it often, but I occasionally do. I mixed up a bunch of spice ahead of time, and now I can make it when I want.
That’s about all I can think of. I know my parents traveled a lot, and things I ate as a child were things they found when traveling, but I don’t really know all the details. Plus, my mother still ate lots of stuff that was imported with her parents.
