Recipe substitutions/omissions

It is something I do all the time, often without thinking. Thinking about it, I did it before I came to Australia too, it's just stepped up a bit here where not all the ingredients are available.

When I see Self-Raising Flour, I automatically add Baking Powder to our plain flour. I just skip over added salt and often other little additions that aren't essential to the recipe, like celery, parsley (because I don't like them) or Bay leaves.

Other things are hard to get or expensive to get. Some I do without, others I substitute for and still others prevent me from making the recipe at all.

For example:

• I substitute for evaporated milk a lot of the time (milk plus butter does the trick). It isn't at my regular shop and it's expensive.
• A lack of puffed pastry prevents me from cooking a number of recipes.
• Sour cream is also expensive and comes in tiny portions. We cannot get low-fat versions either.
• Corn syrup I encountered yesterday, I just substituted sugar mixed with water.
• Cheese is an expensive thing to buy and most local stores only sell "plastic" varieties; very processed. We buy blocks and grated from Costco. As for all these Gruyer, brie, etc. I don't bother.
• Cream Cheese I can buy, but not 60% Less Fat version. Just the old ordinary fat-level one.
• And of course packet mixes just are not available, at least the ones in Australian magazines and recipe books. French Onion soup, for example!
• Yesterday I also ran out of Baking Powder. I had Baking Soda, but the substitute for Baking Powder is supposed to be Baking Soda plus Cream of Tartar. Cream of Tartar isn't something I've seen here, so I kept looking. It was essential for a quiche I was in the middle of making. Someone online suggested Baking Soda mixed with some natural yoghurt would do the trick, and it seemed to too, a nice fluffy quiche emerged 45 minutes later from my oven. 

I get frustrated when I read recipes that have ingredients like "Dutch cocoa", "smoked paprika" or "Roman beans". I doubt I would bother to go looking for these ingredients if I lived in Australia.

And there's cuts of meat that we cannot get. Like lamb or roast beef or beef steak.

But mostly we make do. Really, many of the things we cannot find are extras. It is quite possible to make basic meals without them. An immediate turn-off for me is a recipe where the list of ingredients is longer than the instructions.

Most times I cook from scratch. So on Friday when I wanted Cherry sauce, I made it from the dried cherries I had in the cupboard. I also made my own cheesecake and pickled the hard-to-find canned beetroot myself. I once made an Aussie meat pie, pastry included, from scratch. (Never done it again, it took ages.) Grocery shopping in Australia was bewildering for much of the year we were there, because there were so many ingredients, some of which I'd never heard of before.

Most of my recipe books are of the basic kind, without all those hard-to-get ingredients. Occasionally this book (published before I was born) comes in handy too. It has a wonderful selection of from-scratch recipes.  Yesterday I read about how to make Chocolate Eclairs from scratch. I'll have to try it one day so that I can say I've done it! But I still have to do calculations, it is in pints and ounces after all.