As I said, there are many tastes that we try to recreate within the limitations of the Indian home kitchen. Earlier the challenge was the unavailability of the fancy ingredients. Now, when most are readily available, I sometimes refuse to buy ‘ordinary’ ingredients such as Philly cream cheese or sun-dried tomatoes if they’re going to cost an arm and a leg. There are others like fish sauce which I must. I haven’t looked for a recipe yet, and doubt if TH will be all that understanding if I stink up the house instead of just the dish I am going to eat all by myself. Believe it or not, I’m the only one who likes Thai in this house!
Now, the cream cheese base I use here is something I have used for years and years. But I used to call it curd-cheese till I had Philly for the first time. So, on my return to India, I knew cream cheese would not be hard to get.
Sun-dried tomatoes?? How to get these without burning a hole in the pocket for something that is basically not so dear? Brace yourself people, here comes another tip that will save many of you who may be the quintessentially penny-pinching Indians (like me 
. It’s a good thing!) some moolah, or help out those of you away from what we erroneously call ‘civilization’, or even those who just want to have more control over what goes inside.
Now, all of us have heard of cooking with dried vegetables, right? Nothing new there. In Kashmir it was very common to dry most vegetable for use later in the winter months when everything would be blanketed in snow. Turnips and turnip greens, egg plant, cauliflower, and even bottle gourd! Dried vegetables have a unique taste and smell all their own. As does hawgaad, the tiny dried fish cooked with other things. I never liked that; only smell, no meat.
If you can dry gourd, you can pretty much dry anything, I thought. And Italians obviously dry the tomatoes in sun?!
