Unobtainium
unob·ta·ni·um (unob-tayn-ium)
Ingredient not available on the shelf at your local major supermarket.
If you attempt to use any celebrity or TV chef recipe, you will find at least one ingredient is unobtainable locally. You will also find a healthy disregard of the cleaning up operation afterwards. Usually most of this nonsense can be safely ignored and locally available ingredients used instead, and the recipe converted from an N-pot recipe to a one-pot recipe.
An unrelated aspect of this is the long list of useful ingredients that the local supermarkets have stopped stocking:
- Low fat cream crackers. Like water biscuits, but cheaper
- Large bags of paprika, useful for Spanish style cooking
- Large bags of green lentils, very nice in lamb curry
- Easy cook Italian rice. Tasty plump grains, very good for paella
- Easy cook Italian brown rice, same as above, but brown
We make periodic pilgrimages to a large Asian supermarket to get the paprika and the lentils. References to the Italian rice can be found if you Google it, but there is no stock. We haven’t managed to find any low fat cream crackers.
See Also
- Risotto Milanese
- Venison and Chorizo Casserole
- Shoreham fish chowder
- Catalan slow cooked chicken
- Fried Rice