There’s been a cooking renaissance of sorts in the household ever since I've re-discovered the baking gene. In this last week alone I’ve perfected pavlova, meringues and a flourless chocolate cake. 

The downside to this frenzy is I’m currently a household of one and after these masterpieces have been built, I absolutely do not have the appetite to chomp through their deliciousness. So along with suddenly indulging in a dessert course after dinner which is highly unusual for me (unless it's eight sticks of KitKat), neighbors and friends have been the recipients of this unexpected cooking spree.   

But I digress. I’m here to rant. 

Cooking in a foreign country is generally a delight. One has ample opportunity to savor the pleasures of new flavors and traditions and it can and is a treat. But there are days when the lack of certain ingredients can send monomaniacs like myself into a state of meltdown. I had one today. 

Last night, while I watched Brett Waterman restore a gorgeous shingle-style Victorian for a mother and son, I was happily noshing on my flourless chocolate cake with fresh raspberries and cream. As I munched, I realized there was one ingredient missing: the raspberry coulis. The texture wasn’t killing it without some kind of extra fruity deliciousness. The fresh raspberries were fine but it needed something else. After my ha-ha moment, I hightailed it down to King Soopers and their canned fruit aisle. 

And then everything came to a screeching halt. The shelves had raspberry cake filling overloaded with sugar, canned cherries, canned plumbs, some kind of strawberry jelly/jam mixture, mixed berries (with pineapple..?!), pretty much every kind of variety except the straight up raspberries in syrup. I wanted to weep. In the end I bought the jellied cranberries and the canned cherries. I pulped and mashed the cherries through the strainer but the taste and consistency barely hits a ho-hum and when I opened the cranberry can, it was a paste of such a weird radio-active purple, I promptly lobbed it in the bin. 

I jumped online and sure enough I can order canned raspberries from Oregon if I'm willing to shell out a stupid sum of money plus shipping. And right then and there I wanted to weep with frustration. How hard should it be if a girl wants a tin of raspberries?! I want that tartness of liquid raspberries to pour over my chocolate cake. Is that really too much to ask? Why can’t these Americans anticipate my eating needs? Why are the shelves stacked with every weird kind of foodstuffs but not the straightforward kind? It’s the same with trying to track down brown sugar. Wholefoods doesn’t have it, Trader Joe’s doesn’t stock it, King Soopers has something vaguely resembling it and Target is also no help. This is brown sugar we’re talking about. The stuff that’s needed in sticky toffee pudding, that’s absolutely necessary when one wants to eat Greek yoghurt and blueberries, it's the final dusting on a bowl of porridge for chrissakes but to find it on a supermarket shelf, one is required to have the nostrils of a basset hound and the hunting instincts of a lion in the tall savannah grasses. It drives me MENTAL. 

But I'm getting away from myself: my last resort is to simply pulp fresh or frozen raspberries but it’s not the same taste! And yes, I’m metaphorically throwing myself facedown on the floor and shrieking like a demented toddler. Maybe this is a symptom of homesickness rather than a rant. Whatever.  

And you thought you had problems.