Fruit Mince

A feature of expat life is becoming increasingly clear: the constant flexibility and adaptation involved in adjusting your norms to fit in with the new environment.
Case study: Fruit mince
Problems:
No one had heard of fruit mince. It is definitely a British tradition that was not kept in the new world...
Suet - couldn't find it. Used butter instead.
mixed peel - ie, candied orange and lemon peel - couldn't find it
Raisins - don't exist in the Australian style. There are raisins that are our sultanas, but no raisin raisins. Mixed dried fruit doesn't exist here. On the other hand, dried cranberries are cheap!
Dried apricots appear to be exotic. You can find them, but we shopped around.
Glass jars for storing while it matured - we ended up buying some, as we hadn't thought to accumulate any in the last nine months!

Add to this our unfamiliarity with the recipe, and that is why, it took us two weeks to get to the point of actually mixing it (and even then, we were still phoning around to see if we could find suet or mixed peel!).  Hence, with the three week maturing time, our fruit mince will be just ready in time.
My worry now is that we've promised a taste to so many people that doubling the recipe won't be enough! The good thing was, with the spices and the brandy, it did actually smell like fruit mince. Now all we have to do is work out the making of the little pies!

Reading this you could well get the impression we're just one mean scientific adaptation machine - please don't keep this impression, it would be very wrong. There is plenty of complaining going on, it is just difficult to capture the true essence of that in a blog post.