|
If you're coming here from the Holidailies portal, welcome. Right now I'm not keeping a typical online journal; you can read a brief statement about the purpose of this site here. Everyone has their vacation "thing." Some people hike. Some people take rolls and rolls of film. Some people do nothing but go to museums or see shows or take tours. We like to do all of those things in moderation and end up doing some or all of them whenever we go away and we enjoy them a lot. But not as much as we enjoy the food. Vacation is all about eating for us. We like to seek out the hidden restaurants - the non-touristy spots. We don't eat at chains (unless it's something we don't have at home and we want to try it) and we eat as much ethnic food as possible - Ethiopian, Venezuelan, anything we can find. We stalk the Chowhound message board that's specific to our destination. And in foreign countries, we visit grocery stores. Several, usually. I took this picture the day we got back home from London - sometime at the beginning of March. This is all the food we managed to cram into our bags before we left. You can see six different flavors of potato chips there, none of which we can find in the U.S.: four cheese and red onion; gorgonzola cheese with leek and rosemary; oven roasted chicken and thyme; sea salt, lemon and coriander; thai green curry; thai sweet chilli. Don't they sound delicious? Why don't we have those here? Then there's our favorite cookies (biscuits): plain chocolate McVitie's digestives for him; Jaffa Cakes (Giles's favorite) for me. It's really hard to have Jaffa Cakes in the house because once you open the package it's hard to stop eating them. There are only 13 in a box, and they're very low calorie, and they're absolutely delicious - it really is that smashing orangey bit - and you just can't stop eating them. (If you're going to get some, try to get McVitie's - the Jacobs are okay, but inferior. I tried the Marks & Spencer kind, too, but they weren't as good either. And the Pim's cookies available in the U.S. are but a pale shadow of the real thing.) I also brought back lime & orange TicTacs (which come mixed together in one container) because they're actually lime and orange flavored, not lime mint and orange mint which are just Bad and Wrong (tm Kymm). A whole container of orange KitKats came home, and a bunch of mint Aero bars. Jelly babies for my brother and caramels for my coworkers. Greg brought home those blackcurrant juice boxes and I brought home a couple of bottles of Lilt. We also brought home some cooking sauces and a huge, cheap jar of lemon curd and this fantastic Indian dinner kit which we loved so much we begged an overseas friend to mail us more (they did). Nine months later we still have some of this stuff left. We have rationed so carefully and we still have some left. Some of it can be ordered online, of course, but it really isn't the same as picking it up in a store in Kensington and bringing it home in your bag. Rationing our vacation food out can make the trip last and last, and whenever we need a little peace of mind, it's helpful to pull the British crisps down out of the cabinet and remember what a great time we had.
|
