Mint oreos in Finland!

Yesterday in the car on the way to the grocery store, Miriam and I were discussing mint oreos. She was saying we should make some (from scratch; we use Smitten Kitchen's recipe but with mint in the frosting). I was saying we should just wait until we're in the US.

Then, in the grocery store a few minutes later, we saw: MINT OREOS. For sale, for the first time ever (that I've seen) in Finland. It was amazing. I held up a package so she could see and we just stared at each other in disbelief. There was only one box of them on the shelf, so I don't know if we'll ever see them again, but in the meantime I bought six packages of them. Mint oreos are delicious.

This all reminds me of the day that Reese's peanut butter cups showed up in Damascus, Syria, in the winter of 2004-2005. One day they weren't there; the next they were - only in the store called Family on Autostrad. It's like an unexpected Christmas morning, right there in the grocery store aisle.

It's possible that you've read this post and parsed it with an eye-roll as "American woman pining for American junk food in a foreign country," and you're not wrong. But it's not that I can't live without this stuff (I don't remember actually buying the peanut butter cups, for example, all that often). It's that food is my language of love and nostalgia for the motherland, and to see a favorite treat pop up on a Saturday afternoon - well, it makes me happy!