While backpacking through various countries I have noticed that the types of food available differ regionally. One way for a budget traveler to tap into the region specific foods is by adapting to new ways of eating and preparing food. Specifically, produce can differ in huge ways and, depending upon the season, a certain fruit or vegetable may be more readily available at a lower price. Lets call this the “plentiful fruit”.
Once the specific type of plentiful fruit has been discovered, decide what type of dishes can be prepared. Ask someone at the store how they would cook it. This is especially good, if you have never prepared this type of produce before. The “plentiful fruit” could be pumpkin. This has become the plentiful fruit now in both Ireland (as we were there in the fall) and is also rather popular here in New Zealand as well. As a result, I have learned how to make pumpkin soup and pumpkin lasagna. Both are quick and easy to make, and they are delicious too!
Even if you listened to the cashier describe their favorite way to prepare your plentiful fruit, you may still feel apprehensive to prepare it on your own. Instead of heading directly from the market (after buying your food) back to the kitchen (at a hostel, your apartment, etc), a quick recipe detour can be helpful. You could Google for recipes. Don’t feel overwhelmed. You won’t have to go to MarthaStewart.com or anything scary. Just type in the name of your plentiful fruit, spelled as best as you can recall (you can always have someone at the market write it down), then type it in like this, “pumpkin recipes”, and wait for the results. This could lead to more frustration, especially if you came back with eggs, milk, pumpkin, bread, and spinach and you don’t have the correct ingredients to make any of the mouth watering recipes you have found in your search results. A little creativity doesn’t hurt. Make a hungry friend (this won’t be difficult if you are at a popular hostel). Introduce yourself and see if they would be interested in buying the few missing ingredients and cooking the meal with you. Make a friend from somewhere new in the world, and split the cost of a meal. A group of people did this one night, but we didn’t partake because we are vegetarians, and they were drinking wine from a box.
To discover specific recipes for the area of the world you are in, I would suggest going to a local library and looking for the FOOD section. Their should be dozens of cook books with region specific recipes, featuring your plentiful fruit of choice. Here in New Zealand, another plentiful fruit I have experimented with is rhubarb. It’s something I had never cooked before, but after visiting the library I discovered tons of recipes. You don’t even need a library card, you can just write down the ingredients and directions, and head straight to the market, or start your search for a hungry friend. So far, I have made Orange Rhubarb Jam, Rhubarb Custard Muffins, and Caramel Crusted Rhubarb Pudding. I know it feels reminiscent of Bubba Gump, Shrimp Creole, Shrimp Cabob, Shrimp on the Barbie, etc. As long as you eat additional nutrients other than the plentiful fruit you have discovered, you should remain relatively healthy.
Let me know if you are interested in any of the recipes I have mentioned, I would be happy to email them to you. In addition, if you are currently backpacking or have had a similar experience discovering a “plentiful fruit” somewhere else in the world, feel free to comment and share. Working together we can bring budget travel a new way to spice things up and make hungry friends all around the world. Even if you do prefer your wine in a box, you can still be my friend.
you manage to gather the necessary courage to bite into one. Now, New Zealanders are smart people. If they did not like really really hard cookies, I am certain they simply would bake them for less time – so they resembled something closer to cookies instead of hockey pucks. Being a bit of a cookie connoisseur myself, I eventually convinced Natalie to bake some real, American style, chocolate chip cookies. (Just shopping for the ingredients was interesting because Kiwis have different names for all sorts of baking goods. Try to picture Natalie and I walking aimlessly around a mid sized grocery store, attempting to figure out why chocolate chips are called chocolate drops and why they are only available in 5 oz bags. Baking the cookies was a whole other kind of adventure that found us converting Fahrenheit to Celsius, ounces to milliliters, and eye balling teaspoons and tablespoons because of the lack of measuring spoons.) Natalie, despite my firm objections, decided to give away some of our precious children.. er….I mean, cookies to the lodge chefs. (Looking back, this was the nice thing to do and staying on the good side of the chefs certainly does have its advantages 
) This whole exchange I realized, while I was staring longingly at the empty cookie platter mourning the loss of six of those tasty morsels, was another step in the cultural exchange game. People here know about the United States but their interactions with Natalie and I show them something they will never see in a Ford Motor company marketing scheme, or a Hollywood movie. Thus, cookies have once again taught me a valuable lesson. Simply 
