Mary,
That's a good test for your new sealer - can you smell the shrimp through the plastic?
Pad Thai is a traditional dish using dried shrimp, as is Som Tom, the shredded green papaya salad (which I have make with many vegetables - jicama, carrots, noodle beans, and shredded stems of bok choy, to name a few). Those are the two I have used the most dried shrimp in.
Something I have seen suggested to use a a replacement for shrimp paste is anchovy paste. I only tried my own mashed up anchovies (back in the days when it was still hard to find the good ingredients around here, and before the internet!), which isn't as strong as commercial anchovy paste, and I could hardly taste it, compared to shrimp paste. And dried shrimp has a totally different flavor, and as strong as they are, they are nothing like the potency of shrimp paste.
When I was first experimenting with Thai curry paste, and the only shrimp paste I could find was not really that good, I tried some vegetarian versions, figuring they had to be better without that horrible smelling stuff! However, side by side tastings showed that, while the shrimp paste was not really perceptible, the flavor of the curry with that paste was much better, even though we could not put it into words, or find what the flavor was. That was before that term "umami" was being used in this country, but that's what it was.
Is there anyplace you can get things like that online over there? I know there are companies that ship overseas, but I can't imagine the shipping costs!
The shrimp paste shown on this list of
Kasma's favorite brands is my favorite, if you can find it. Trachang is another good one, though the containers are smaller. And don't get the watery, purplish, Vietnamese shrimp paste for Thai or Malaysian food.