I could live anywhere in the world, I’m fairly sure, now that my wife Karen can make a killer donair. It’s the only thing from this area I would miss because just about every other food and snack available here is available (at a price) in other parts of the world. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a real donair outside of the Maritimes. There’s a legend told for years that someone in Toronto makes and sells them, but I’ve never found out the name of the place.
Thanks to globalism, Mexican foods I learned to love when I spent a year in Southern California have been available locally for years now. But it wasn’t always that way. When I came back to Nova Scotia in the mid-70’s I craved tacos, burritos and tostadas but you couldn’t get the shells or the spices in the grocery stores. I had to find an Indian grocery in Halifax that would get the shells in from time to time and learn to make the darn things. After a year or so they began to show up on our grocery store shelves, then a Mexicali Rosa’s opened up on Spring Garden Rd, then Taco Bell franchises arrived.
There is one foreign food that I still crave, and I’m told that I’ll never be able to get them here. After a couple of trips to New Orleans, I got hooked on Cajun boiled Crawdaddies.. basically a much, much smaller cousin of our lobster available down there from February to April. You boil them up, pepper and spice them and can walk around New Orleans eating them out of a big paper bag. Like lobster, they have to be shipped live and preferably in running water so unless you’re a millionaire, you have to go to the crawdaddies- they’re not coming to you.
But, no matter where I travel, the donairs are coming with me!
