I don't know what to cook

 Before we joined the foreign service I was a pre-made girl.  If it came in a box, a can, or a bag, I knew how to use it and expand on it.  About the only thing I consistently made from scratch was cake.  But then we joined the foreign service.  Our first post was Beijing, and it was delicious and cheap to eat out, and eat out we did (and we both gained a bunch of weight)!  Then we went to Baku.  The first year I didn't cook a thing.  The markets were crazy, the food odd, everything was in Russian-- oh and I was pregnant.  By the end of the second year I had started to cook some things, but I was still having trouble coming up with things for us to eat.  After all, I couldn't go to the store and buy a can of soup, or a box of tacos... what's a girl to do?  By the time we moved to Taiwan, I realized that the world simply did not supply their grocery stores the way America does, and for better or for worse I was going to have to make some changes in the way that I thought about cooking. 
So I began simply.  Instead of dwelling on what wasn't there, I started to look at what WAS there and I tried to figure out what I could make from that.  I discovered that with a little flour, sugar, and vegetables there are TONS of things that you can make yourself.  Now, despite the fact that we live in China and nothing looks familiar we eat Western style almost every night. When we go out we eat Chinese because Chinese food in Chengdu is good, Western food...not so much.  This is true in most places outside of the major cosmopolitan areas, you are not going to get quality __ food unless you are in that country.  In all other cases it will be expensive and tasteless.  So cook what you can at home, and eat the local foods out, this way you get the best of both worlds. 
I guess my point is, that if you are a foreign service spouse, or officer, you have to be brave, and daring even on the culinary front.  There are very few things that you can buy, be it in a can, a box, or a package, that you cannot make, and often times make better, at home with a few simple ingredients.  And when you start to think it's impossible remember that your grandmother (or maybe your great grandmother) used to do all this AND she didn't have a microwave or a refrigerator.