I think I love you both. 
Food: I miss the Slaw dog.
Weather: Snow. Just ain’t gonna happen here on the Texas coast.
Vegetation: I so miss the trees changing color in the fall. They just turn brown here for a few months out of the year. :eek:
Environment: I miss the Great Lakes. Hopefully I can take my daughters up there soon.
Drink: Vernor’s Ginger Ale
:smack:
I skipped over the food reference myself.
My apologies to Pygmy Rugger.
When I left the midwest I could no longer get good German breads and pastries, strudel and kaiser rolls and creampuffs with real cream filling, or Polish sausage and Polish dill pickles worthy of the name.
Yeah, Eegee’s is pretty damn tasty! They’ll actually ship their ice drink out to you. My little brother and I had our graduation party this June (his high school, my college), and we had a tub of strawberry and a tub of pina colada. Oh, how I love dry ice!
No need to apologize, no need to be food-specific.
Pretty much can’t get grits outside of the South.
Tortillas in a can???
Portillo’s, which encapsulates the best:
[ol]
[li]Hot Dogs[/li][li]Grilled Polish[/li][li]Italian Beef[/li][/ol]
Pizza. I travel a good deal around the US, and I have yet to find an area with a decent pizza. It’s confounding! The South…nothing even resembling a pizza (shrimp on a 'za!!!), NYC…fuggedaboutit, and the West Coast…no, sir.
No good pierogi, Mexican food is sub-par (with notable exceptions in TX and CA), and no Old Style!
-Cem
I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree with you here. All those things are found here.
Oh, and Ghanima, I’ve never heard of a place up here that puts raisins in an enchilada. 
Foods I can’t find when traveling and such:
Maple syrup. That fuckin “1% maple flavor added” shit is the pit secreations of Satan himself. Seriously, how do you people deal with it? Blech.
Good cheese (having never been anywhere near Wisconsin, I can’t comment on their cheese, but I hear it’s pretty good too.) Any place not around here or there, though, and it’s tough to find anything good outside a speciality shop (which tend to be fewer and farer between.) I get world award winning cheese in my supermarket (hell, even the gas stations) for god’s sake.
Apples. Outside Washington and the northeast, apples just suck balls.
Beer. There are several local brews that I love (Magic Hat #9, Long Trail Blackberry Wheat, and, above all, Switchback) taht can’t be found too far from the northeast.
Cemetary Savior, I’ll see your Portillos and raise you to Johnnies, truly among the top three Italian Beefs in the city. Beats Portillos like a red headed step child.
Combo dipped with sweet peppers and a large italian ice on the side, thats some damn good eating that you just can’t rea;;y get outside Chicago.
I think it was a special at Tortilla Flats or something. There are plenty of foods in Burlington that I miss too. The entirety of the Vermont Pub and Brewery, for one, with their sweet potato fries and annual Bobbie Burns dinner and whiskey tasting. I miss lobster rolls. I miss the sandwiches at The Red Onion, the upstairs bar at the Culinary School restaurant and Foodee’s pizza. I can get grade B maple syrup here in California, but it’s not as good. Oh, and real wild blueberries, not the frankenfood variety they have here.
Mmmmm…Vermont…
Oh and yes, tortillas actually come in a can, I swear.
Old Bay
Berger Cookies
GOOD steamed Crabs
We moved to a suburb between Bawlmer and DC and now we have to search for Berger cookies and crabs, but we can still buy Old Bay.
Vernors ginger ale.
Johnnie’s on North Avenue in Elmood Park? I was married in the church across the street, and I think if my husband had his way, we would have served Johnnie’s for the reception!
That is yummy…I love their Italian Sausage, myself. Double yum!
Gas at $0.65/gallon.
White Hots.
Garbage Plates
Not that I eat a lot of them but they are local comfort foods.
Grape pies. Seasonal at best.
I’ve never left for long so I don’t know what I’ve got, 'cause it’s not gone.
When I left Chicago, I missed two things greatly: Renaldi’s Pizza (on Broadway, near the Century Centre) and the ability to order a wine that I can’t find in any store (it’s a minor South African wine). Indiana, for some retarded reason, doesn’t allow wine to be shipped through the mail. (Boo!).
Define “anywhere else”.
My hometown is famous by its veggies. It’s the only place where I’ve ever found Black Lettuce but, since the Black Lettuce Hearts Salad got famous, you can find Hearts all over Spain, Italy and France… but you can’t find the whole damn lettuce anywhere unless you know someone who grows them!
Never seen fresh white asparagus outside of Spain.
And no idea yet as to what’s unique to Basel 
but I was very happy to find “almendras garrapiñadas” (of course here they have a German name I still can’t pronounce), it’s my favourite winter treat!
Crawfish, as in spread out the newspaper, toss in the taters-n-corn and cayenne, and add pounds of fresh live crawfish for a good old-fashioned crawfish boil.
(I’m originally from Louisiana)
Hmm, I could be wrong about this but I’ve never seen it outside of Cleveland:
Cleveland-style Po Boys (Polish) - Polish boy topped with BBQ sauce, cole slaw and French fries.
Man, thats some good stuff. Coronary inducing, but good!
Sorghum syrup. (It just ain’t breakfast without some sorghum syrup on your biscuits.) Sadly, it’s even getting hard to find sorghum syrup here in the South. Few grocery stores carry it these days.
Plus I understand it can be hard to find self-rising cornmeal in some parts of the country. Or at least it used to be. My sister used to complain about that when she lived in California.
It’s hard to find okra cooked right, except in a few Southern home-style restaurants or on the tables of your Southern kinfolks. (*I.e., * fried after being rolled in a mix of cornmeal and flour. NOT battered, dammit.)