Peacock...I think the "20 cereals" description only referred to the density of the cereal in the box. It does seem a lot like Shredded Wheat, now you mention it.
Mushy peas are pretty good - I tried them after seeing Nigella prepare them on one of her shows. (Yeah, you know Nigella and I are on a first-name basis, like Madonna and I.) I really enjoyed them...can completely see them as "comfort food."
So Turbo Jam may not have hit the UK yet. I won't be surprised if it does, and soon. It's becoming kind of a cult thing over here...You can check it out at Beachbody.com. But I'm not sure if they're available for play in UK players. Can't hurt to look if you're interested in a crazy hopped-up workout, which I really enjoy, even if I look like a spastic hippo doing it. And the music is fabulous - they use actual songs, if you can believe it - none of that icky muzak-with-drumtrack you usually hear in workout DVDs.
beans by Heinz, which I seem to remember Ozzy or Jack Osbourne eating on toast on their reality show,
We lived in the US for a year so I think I know why the Osbournes had to import their beans - US canned beans are totally unrecognisable to a Brit - as are a lot of foods that have the same name either side of the Atlantic, but in reality as soooo different! US beans are in a brownish sort of sauce, our's in a red - and they taste absolutely different. We had loads of little surprises that way - cornflour in the UK is a white stuff you use to thicken gravies, sauces. In the UK it's bright yellow flour made from corn/maize with this strong flavour, not something tasteless to bulk anything out.
One interesting thing about culture/food we noticed was that, after a while the Brits and Aussies in our MidWest university town often got together to cook for eachother - as our foods are much more similar, and we found ourselves missing the same things, from home, despite coming from opposite ends of the world! Even when we found ourselves cooking non British stuff, like Italian meals, for example, we found we made them the same way, oddly - but cooked by someone from the US, they were really different! Another cultural taste thing was, it was really striking to us how much stuff over there is flavoured with cinammon - or cherry - the same stuff here would probably be vanilla or strawberry. Oddly, food was one of the things that made the brits and Aussies (also some other foreign student friends of our's, who were from Taiwan) feel homesick - and missing food/drink from home was always a big topic of conversation amongst the foreign students! We even made relatives send us British (well, Indian) tea through the post, and we all elarned to make curries from scratch as in the early 1990s, they were imposs to get in the US, so we had to find recipes with the exact spices in - in the UK, you can buy tinned ones, or spice mixes readymade, everywhere! It made me realise how much a part of our life food really is. I remember DH coming home in victory when he found one shop in the little Coloradan town where we lived, that had English chocolate - although all they had were Cadbury's Animal Shapes, bizarrely! One great thing we did learn over there, foodwise, was how to cook Mexican!
But yes, I know where Ozzy is coming from, foodwise - there are certain things that are just soooo different, you can't manage them! (Our other big disappointment apart from US chocolate which tastes nothing like European, were cookies - which aren't remotely like biscuits. On the plus side we lost loads of weight!)
cornflour in the UK is a white stuff you use to thicken gravies, sauces. In the UK it's bright yellow flour made from corn/maize with this strong flavour, not something tasteless to bulk anything out
Too funny. THe "white stuff" we call cornstarch, the yellow cornmeal. Definitely two different things!
DH and I were in England last spring, and happily spent an hour in Tesco's in Chester wandering around trying to figure out what some stuff was! We might as well have had signs reading "tourist" on our backs. One couple who was planning a trip to the US came up and started pumping us for information. We totally loved how many different cheeses there were available - and DH was all over the sweets!
Phoenix and WaterRat...isn't food one of the most fascinating subjects? I've always been intrigued by the "little" differences in cuisine; though actually, as you've pointed out, the little diff is often a lot bigger than it would seem at first glance.
It's lucky for us here in Ann Arbor; the University of Michigan is located here and so we probably have access to more international items than you might find in other Midwestern towns. Lots of little specialty stores and, as mentioned, even our biggest supermarket has an impressive array of authentic foods from other countries...plus the last decade or so has brought a lot of "exotic" items into our everyday existence...which can't be bad for Americans since many tend not to see past their own noses. (Not all, by any means, but enough.)
I'm sure if I found myself out of the country for any length of time, these are the junk foods I would find myself missing: Cape Cod Brand white cheddar popcorn, peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwiches, macaroni and cheese (and please, don't bother with the homemade recipe because it just doesn't have the tanginess you need with trashy mac and cheese - you need the cheap 85-cents-per-box kind, the sort our Canadian friends refer to as "Kraft dinner"), and Ben & Jerry's Pistachio Pistachio ice cream. This isn't to say that you can't get this stuff anywhere else, but I'm not sure how widely it's found.
I must know: what's the difference between American and European chocolate? I think I've heard that our chocolate doesn't have the same "bite" that yours does. We do tend to add a lot of dairy to our foods (Exhibit A: the above list). And I'm also intrigued by the cookie/biscuit conundrum...?
I must know: what's the difference between American and European chocolate? I think I've heard that our chocolate doesn't have the same "bite" that yours does. We do tend to add a lot of dairy to our foods (Exhibit A: the above list). And I'm also intrigued by the cookie/biscuit conundrum...?
Biscuits snap, cookies bend, that's the best I can come up with
American chocolate is milk chocolate generally...in Britain dark chocolate is just called plain chocolate I believe. I can't stand the sweetness of milk chocolate...all about the dark and you retain more of the health benefits of chocolate.
I live in Victoria, BC in Canada and we're a very "British" town. (we have high tea, British Sweet Shops, fish and chips etc.) Guess it must be the British in British Columbia.
I used to have an email pen friend who lived in PA and we had long long emails about this exact subject.
Yellow cornmeal - we call it polenta and, biscuits (bi-scuit) were called that because they were cooked twice to get the dry snap to it - I don't think it happens any more but we still like the texture.
My biggest surprise was to find out that US tablespoons and US pints are smaller than ours - you'd think that something like that would be exactly the same - but that was the reason that the recipes she used to send me would never work out.
I have heard of Kraft Dinner before. I cannot get my head around the peanut butter and jelly sandwich even though I know you don't mean Jelly(UK)-Jello (US) but probably some kind of jam?yes? (Please tell me you don't mean jello!!
And what is this green jello stuff some of you have on picnics with a salad? I keep coming across this and cringeing.
Another thing I will never get my head around (and yes they are sold here) Oreo cookies. Why? They are foul!!!!
Oreos are revolting! They always reminded me of those black Bonio dog biscuits! (I once ate one for a dare as a kid, and I think they taste the same too...)
US chocolate is of the same sort of quality the chocolate we use here for melting to stick on the top of cakes, really unappealing. I have a friend originally from New England, although she lived much of her adult life in Colorado, who now lives in the UK and she says the same - our chockie is so much better! (Except Peanut Reeces which are great!)
I've noticed on FitDay a lot of the standard US foods are generally far more fatty and contain far more sugar than UK equivalents, so much so that I had the custom feed in everything I ate, for ages!
One US thing I loved was pumpkin pie. You don't get that here. I came back armed with recipes! I also had a nice recipe for peanut butter cookies which taste better than anything we could buy in the stores, there - but I lost it!
In our town, also a university town, we only had one food shop - a Safeways. And when they ran out of something (I had a newborn baby and once they ran out of diapers ), sometimes it wouldn't reappear on the shelves for a week - I guess because of the remoteness, and the distance between places in the Mid West. That was really shocking to a spoilt European! The other thing we spotted in the supermarket was the almost total lack of alcohol - here there are aisles of it. There was one liquor store in town but hardly any wine - we couldn't even find a bottle of Californian wine, easily - but you can buy wine from all over the world in any supermarket, here! The Aussies also noticed that!
One of our American friends who originally came from 'back East' told us that all the 'fresh' stuff in the supermarket was irradiated, sprayed with wax, whatever to give it a shelf-life. But there was still almost no fresh food - salads were almost impossible to make - and absolutely zero organic food. We appreciated the UK much more when we got home! Also, not the wide range of food generally we have here so whereas we have loads of different breads, cheeses, yogurts, in our little town there was a very limited # of anything on display. I know that in big cities and certainly not in the Mid West, you have more delis and so on but where we lived, there was none of that!
Also, living in Co., we had 'high altitude flour' for baking as the normal stuff exploded in the oven. I dunno if that's a Rockies thing, or you get it elsewhere at altitude in the US?
I prefer the US method of cooking by measuring in cups and brought back some US cup measures. I'd guess that's a hangover to Colonial times when not everyone had brought scales from the Old Country and things like that were hard to come by! Cups are far easier to work with, though.
HIgh altitude flour! Flour that explodes in the oven! Ha ha ha! Oh that's great! (Not to the innocent cook, I bet!).
MInd you, even if you lived in the back of beyond, don't forget, those huge supermarkets we see on Tv both here and in USA may seem like they are given us hundreds of choices but don't forget, most are owned by the same company! eg Lever Brothers washing powders.
Of course a lot of places here and in USA have Farmers markets now.
Even here in UK it can be hard to get decent fruit and veg. Too many French imports (thier apples are crap. Sorry but they are really tasteless. I have tried em in France too).
My aunt lives in Croydon, SUrry in UK and there is a very goood market there but when she visits a friend in Suffolk, she brings down fruit and veg with her because the stuff around ther is awful.
I am happy that in London I can go to a number of markets both traditional and Farmers' type to get decent fruit and veg and some of it is so cheap although the Farmers' markets are not so cheap.
I do try to fly the flag for UK produce when we can get it!
My friend is from California and is now living in PA and she says the same about the supermarkets being very limited. Her meat seems to be mainly pork and she's never tasted lamb - in fact the thought of lamb makes her feel a bit ill and she can't get fresh fish at all.
For a while we were diet buddies and we used to exchange our daily menus - that was REALLY interesting. She considered my food to be very strongly flavoured and I thought her food was always rather sweet (although I did develope a taste for snickerdoodles and sweet potatoes baked in honey!)
I have got a set of measuring cups as well - I got them from Robert Dyas - I get a lot of recipes from AllRecipes dot com and having the cups is the only way I can get the recipes to come out right.
When I first moved up here to Yorkshire from 'down South' I was quite surprised at the limited choices in some of the supermarkets up here at the time, especially vegetables, but they seem to be getting better - probably due to a demand for a wider range of ingredients brought on by television cookery programmes.
LOL I am cracking up at the "UK is better" comment. When I was there I've never seen so much FRIED stuff in my life... even fried bread and tomatoes. I ended up going to grocery stores and living on cheese and yogurt (which WAS great there and so many varieties) because I couldn't take all the heavy, fried stuff.
And LOL about the fresh produce too! Here we have fruit markets where produce comes fresh from local farmers! And in the stores ice misters to keep it cool. But I do agree it depends on what part of the US you are talking about. When I go back to the Midwest for a visit I am always disgusted by the produce. Even our apples which are so yummy here in Washington tasted like cardboard in the Midwest!
And we have TONS of organic stuff here... entire produce sections in the grocery store that are organic. As well as bulk bins where you can buy tiny bits, or large bags, of spices, teas, whatever. And LOL also yes total aisles of alcohol.
I don't know where you shopped but it must have really been in the backwater not to have had that kind of thing!!
But I thought it was pretty bad when I was in the UK. Maybe things have changed in the UK -- it's been a few years since I was there. But from my two visits I certainly do NOT agree with your idea that stuff is fresher and better there. Perhaps I just visited different areas of the UK than you live in.
And no, jelly is not jello. It is like jam only doesn't have pieces of fruit in it. The green jello is not jelly... and it is lime flavored and quite good actually.
Last edited by Misti in Seattle; 05-09-2006 at 08:18 AM.
No - I didn't mean 'down South' as in the American South - I meant 'down South' as in the southern counties of the UK. I'd never say that the UK is better than the US - or vice versa - just different.
Full of hydrogenated vegetable oil... But I like them 
I ended up going to grocery stores and living on cheese and yogurt (which WAS great there and so many varieties) because I couldn't take all the heavy, fried stuff. 