There were some challenges when we first came to Portugal in terms of ingredients or foods that we were not able to find in regular stores because the Portuguese apparently don't eat them. For example it was a huge surprise for us to discover that the Portuguese don't eat corn on the cob, either boiled or roasted. I have previously lived in Romania, China, Hong Kong, Canada (both coasts) and in all those places people eat corn on the cob, so I expected to find it here too. But... no. Another thing that we were not able to find was dill. Fortunately in Porto it is available in an Eastern European foods store, so now we can get it. Same for pickled cabbage (available in all those countries above but not in Portugal). We discovered that pickled cucumbers are sweet here in Portugal (added sugar).
We mainly cook at home because we found Portuguese cuisine to be rather bland and boring (a combination of some meat with rice/pasta/potatoes and little if any vegetables). While at home we cook a variety of foods from various cuisines, from Romanian to Ukrainean to Chinese to Indian to Italian. We also adopted a few dishes from the Portuguese cuisine (feijoada de marisco, atum a bras, etc) but enriched them in terms of vegetables, which we found rather poorly represented in the original recipes.
Another big surprise was how many meals the Portuguese have during the day, how poorly represented breakfast is and how huge the morning snack, and how late in the day they have the last meal. Most locals seem to have just some sort of sweet bun with coffee for breakfast (including kids!!! I saw colleagues of my daughters in confeitarias in the morning with a sweet bun and a cup of espresso in front of them before school), and that, to me, seems to explain the very high rate of diabetes in the country (second in the EU after Spain).
Also, soups here seem to be all the same, some vegetables blended together to death and consumed without bread, whereas the soups/borsch/chorba that we cook at home have a variety of cubed vegetables combined with various meats offering a large variety of tastes and textures.
Salads and vegetables in general seem to be very poorly represented in the main courses in the Portuguese cuisine, and we practically never see anybody in any restaurant consuming a salad. (I even heard the abomination that if you want vegetables make sure you eat your soup!) Whereas half or more of our normal meals consist of vegetables. Our daughters' colleagues at school are amazed that they always have vegetables and salads in their school snacks (sometimes they even make fun of them), and do not seem to understand the importance of eating not just white bread with cheese/ham and sweets as a snack.
I'm pretty sure that Johnny fellow will have a stroke reading my post. :-)
