Yesterday, Jeremy and I went to WinCo (a grocery store) to begin the task of choosing some food items to bring home to Sharjah. It's a daunting task, as anyone who has ever organized a consumables shipment could tell you. Since we don't have an official shipment - just the spare room/weight in our 8 allotted suitcases - we're not being too systematic. There are a few things like powdered buttermilk and vanilla flavoring that I need to be sure to stock up on, but I think there is plenty of room in our luggage for novelties, things that we can pull out from a corner of the pantry on a dark (well, sunny) day in the UAE and eat and think, AMERICA. By the end of our shopping trip, we had $80 worth of edible Americana in our shopping cart. Withhold judgment for just a moment after looking at this representative sample of our purchases, would you mind?
Do I like Pop-Tarts? Not really. I never ate them as a kid (my mom never bought them) but I did enjoy them sometimes...a lot of times...as a college student. Do they remind me of America? Absolutely. I didn't buy a crate full of them, just a couple to enjoy of an evening at home. I also bought a sampling of bizarre Goldfish flavors. I picked up a box of those Peanut Butter Cheerios I kept hearing about. You can't get baking chocolate in the UAE so I got a few bars of that as well. As for different varieties of baking chips - well, I can't even believe there ARE different varieties of baking chips in America. In Dubai, it's chocolate chips and THAT'S IT, you American weirdo wishing for white chocolate and butterscotch and peanut butter.
A few of these items are instructive, for the benefit of our children. Some day soon in Sharjah we will take out the pink and white frosted animal crackers - possibly on a road trip, as in my childhood - and talk to our kids about how we ate those same treats when we were young. The candy corn is to make our Halloween a little more culturally rich.
I will brook no disdain from you re: Gushers. I have an irrational love for those things and I will not apologize for it. I think it's because I pined after them for great swaths of my childhood but never once had the chance to eat them. So now, as an adult, I'm making up for lost time.
The boring stuff like Bean with Bacon soup and ranch dressing seasoning packets and onion soup mix are for recipes, not casual eating.
OK, now you may judge. Just know that there's more where this comes from! We haven't even stocked up at Costco yet. Uncooked tortillas and Tillamook cheese bricks are up next.
A few of these items are instructive, for the benefit of our children. Some day soon in Sharjah we will take out the pink and white frosted animal crackers - possibly on a road trip, as in my childhood - and talk to our kids about how we ate those same treats when we were young. The candy corn is to make our Halloween a little more culturally rich.
I will brook no disdain from you re: Gushers. I have an irrational love for those things and I will not apologize for it. I think it's because I pined after them for great swaths of my childhood but never once had the chance to eat them. So now, as an adult, I'm making up for lost time.
The boring stuff like Bean with Bacon soup and ranch dressing seasoning packets and onion soup mix are for recipes, not casual eating.
OK, now you may judge. Just know that there's more where this comes from! We haven't even stocked up at Costco yet. Uncooked tortillas and Tillamook cheese bricks are up next.
