Some food we brought home

When we lived in the UAE and flew Emirates, we got two checked bags each and took full advantage, bringing them to the US almost empty and filling them up with goods on the way home. Stuff was expensive in the UAE, if available at all, and it became a tradition and even an efficiency to do the kids’ clothes shopping in the US as well as bring home particular foods to brighten up our snacks and dinners for a few months.

Now that we live in Finland, we don’t really need to do quite as much shopping in the US. Goods in Finland are definitely more expensive but they are at least good quality and we have good secondhand shops here, too. And even if we wanted to do a ton of shopping, we couldn’t, since with these European airlines we only get one suitcase each, if that. In fact, this year on the way to the US, they didn’t allow us any checked bags at all! (We each got one on the way back. I will never understand the intricacies of airline baggage policies.)

In the end, we didn’t even end up checking our full five allotted bags, opting for just four instead. And we didn’t stuff them full of food either - just a few treats and special occasion foods plus a couple of essentials that you can’t get here.

Not pictured: two bricks of Tillamook pepper jack cheese, pumpkin pie spice, caramel M&Ms, and real corn tortillas (not yellow-colored wheat ones). We got home on Thursday and I’m writing this on Sunday and not gonna lie…a lot of these treats are already gone! And the fruit by the foot has begun to be parceled out to neighbor kids as little souvenirs.

There are lots of things that I wish we could have brought back but instead chose to enjoy extensively while in the US: Lucky Charms, Corn Chex, plain Cheerios, Frosted Mini Wheats, ice cream, fudgsicles, popsicles, Otter Pops, various Mexican foods, various Chinese foods, Gushers (I missed the week they were on a good sale at Target so I never stocked up and then it was too late!), Wint-O-Green Lifesavers, corn on the cob, Papa Murphy’s pizza, Menchies/Orange Leaf froyo, string cheese, corn dogs, hot dogs, root beer, peppermint patties, and those new Reese’s peanut butter cups with Reese’s pieces inside them, which I snobbily judged to be a superfluous gimmick until I tried them and realized they were somehow more than the sum of their parts.

Now the struggle will be things like deciding just what, exactly, to make with those peanut butter baking chips because we only brought two bags back so it had better be GOOD. To be honest I will probably just end up eating them plain! It’s happened before.