When I first moved abroad, I became the kind of person who would travel forty minutes just to buy the “right” soy sauce.
Not good soy sauce. Not similar soy sauce. The exact bottle I grew up seeing in my family kitchen.
I wish I could say this dedication made my cooking incredible, but honestly, most of the time it just made me tired. There was one rainy Saturday where I spent half the afternoon looking for fresh curry leaves for a recipe I suddenly missed desperately. Three supermarkets, one overpriced specialty shop, and a very confusing conversation later, I went home empty-handed and irrationally upset about herbs.
At some point during my second year overseas, I started realizing I wasn’t really chasing ingredients. I was chasing reassurance.
I wanted my food to taste exactly like home because everything else already felt unfamiliar — the weather, the pace of life, even the silence in my apartment at night. If the laksa tasted slightly wrong, it somehow felt like I was failing at holding onto a part of myself.
Then one evening, out of pure exhaustion, I made curry with substitutes I normally would’ve judged immediately. Dried herbs instead of fresh ones. Coconut cream from a carton. A chili paste that was definitely not sambal but looked convincing enough after 8 p.m.
And you know what? It was good.
Not “exactly like Singapore” good. But warm. Comforting. Familiar enough that I went back for a second bowl while watching random YouTube videos I wasn’t even paying attention to.
That meal changed something for me.
Living abroad teaches you that survival sometimes looks like adaptation, not perfection. The truth is, most of us are building versions of home with whatever we can carry, afford, or find nearby. Sometimes that means pandan extract instead of fresh leaves. Sometimes it means frozen prata instead of the flaky kind from the hawker stall downstairs.
And honestly? “Close enough” can still hold a surprising amount of comfort.
I think that’s what I’ve learned slowly over time: home isn’t always about getting every ingredient right. Sometimes it’s just about feeding yourself gently while you figure things out.
