/ck/ - Food & Cooking

A while back I realized that where I lived had no regional dishes to call our own, everything being sourced from some other culture. I've made it my goal to develop our own regional dish to help give us an actual food culture. To make it more authentically local I decided to limit myself to ingredients to the Americas, preferably the southwestern/southern part of the North America. This was a mistake because I just now realized how limiting new world ingredients are.

>Loose access to pretty much all spices leaving only Mexican oregano, California bay leaf, sage, vanilla, chocolate, and peppers
>Very few green veggies.
>Only have Mexican squash, chayote squash, amaranth and dandelion greens(good luck getting a hold of those), nopale, tomatillo, and green bell peppers
>Those last three are sour which limits their uses greatly
>EVERYTHING else is a starch (beans, squash, potatoes, rice)
>Turkey is the only readily available meat
>Lose access to most fruits
>Only get to keep berries and a couple others
>Cant use any grain that isn't corn, quinoa, or amaranth
>The only saving graces are the variety of nuts and the avocado and tomato
>Though tomatoes have been done to death by everybody

That at first glance may seem lie a reasonable amount of ingredients to work with but keep in mind I now cant use onions, garlic, butter, milk, nor celery and its stocks. Roux is right out. Most flavor bases are gone. I also wanted to avoid drifting too close to Mexican cuisine since I wanted something unique to my region. Is there anything I am missing? How should I go about this?