Food you miss from home and how you get it now

Mangoes. Pakistani mangoes in summer, eaten on the roof with my brothers, juice to the elbows, arguing about which variety is best, which is a serious national debate. We can buy imported ones here sometimes, at a price that made my wife laugh out loud in the shop, and they're good, but they taste of the airport.

What we did instead was build a small network. There's one halal butcher in our area who also sells spices and lentils, and he knows which days the good produce arrives. A family from Lahore two streets away shares the order when someone's relatives send a box of mangoes in season, so twice a summer our kids get the real thing and understand why their father gets emotional about fruit.

And my wife now makes nihari on Sundays that is honestly better than the restaurant version at home. It takes all day and the whole house smells of it. Don't tell my mother I said that.

A proper British sausage, with no herbs in it at all. The Portuguese sausages are wonderful, but they're not trying to be the thing I want on a Saturday. Sue found a butcher who makes a British-style batch once a month for the expats, and I'm not ashamed to say I plan my weekends around it.

Real dark bread, the sour kind. And buckwheat, which I can find but only in small packets at a price that makes me buy it like a luxury. The Ukrainian community here shares recipes and one woman bakes bread every Friday, so every Friday is a good day.

Nigerian and African shops in Rotterdam saved my sanity in the first year. You can get palm oil, the right peppers, egusi, stockfish, and the right rice for jollof, which matters more than people think. I found the first shop by following a woman with a very specific shopping bag out of the supermarket and asking her where she bought her ingredients. She gave me the address and her phone number, and she's now a friend.

The one thing I can't find is fresh ugu leaves, so I've learned to use spinach and pretend. My kids now think the spinach version is the original, which is a small cultural tragedy I've decided to accept. When my mother visited, she tasted it, said nothing for a long time, and then asked where I'd hidden the real vegetables.

So, Joy, I understand the adobo completely. We cook the food, but the food is also cooking the memory, and the memory needs its own ingredients.

Aisha, the spinach substitute is universal among West Africans abroad. We've all done it. My jollof in Dubai is surprisingly close to home, but the waakye I just have to wait for until I visit.

Pão de queijo. I found frozen ones at a Brazilian shop in Lisbon, but they're not my grandmother's. I make them from scratch on bad days now.

Cuts of meat for a proper asado. Spanish butchers are excellent, but they cut the animal differently, so the pieces I grew up with simply don't exist in the display. For the first few weeks I bought what looked closest and was disappointed every Sunday.

So I did something that felt ridiculous at the time. I printed a diagram of an Argentinian cow with the cuts marked, took it to the butcher near my flat on a quiet Tuesday, and explained with drawings and a lot of hand gestures what I wanted and how thick. He found it very funny. He also found it interesting, and the next week he'd cut a piece exactly the way I'd drawn it.

Now he knows me as "the Argentinian" and sets aside what I need on Fridays, and his son asked me to teach him how to salt it properly. That relationship took three months to build and it's worth more than any recipe. My advice for anyone missing a specific ingredient: find the one person who can make it, and make them curious.

Pierogi, obviously. There's a Polish shop in every Irish town, it turns out, so I'm luckier than most of you. What I can't replace is my mum's version, which she refuses to write down.

Diego, "the Argentinian" having his own Friday meat is exactly the kind of relationship I want with a bakery. Anna, my lola also refuses to write things down. Is this a grandmother thing worldwide?

Anna and Joy, yes, it's a worldwide grandmother policy. My grandmother measured spices "until it looks right". I record my mother on video when she cooks now, which she finds hilarious.