Adventures with British Food
Hi kids. Zeke here. A while back, I did a rather humorous post about the lack of quality food in British culture. Well, you know what? It’s actually even more bizarre than originally suspected. I imagine this will even become a running subject on the blog - weird British foods and the Americans that are fascinated by them.
First on my list was the realization that the British have a real love affair with mayonnaise. Now, I’m not unfamiliar to people putting it on fries/chips, sandwiches and the like, but these people are determined to put it on everything. When Wendy and I were eating out at a restaurant, three normal-seeming girls sat down at a booth near us and asked the waitress to bring them some mayonnaise. The waitress obliged by bringing out a freakishly large squeeze mayo bottle that was enormous even by Sams Club standards. And the scariest part was that I’m pretty sure the girls proceeded to use it all, despite the fact that their plates had meals of small meat pies, fries/chips and the like. It was like watching the Coneheads eat or something. Though we were too busy attempting not to vomit to capture that particular event on camera, I do present to the jury as proof of the British mayo love this iPhone picture from a recent grocery store trip, constituting about a third of the condiments aisle:
dang homey, that’s a lot of mayonnaise. i rest my case. gross.
the next item to report is the British fascination with exotic flavors (flavours?) in just about everything, from chips to milk. the prawn chips got a lot of attention in our last post, so I decided to tread into the weird chip-flavor waters, and to my incredible delight and fascination, it was AWESOME. Not quite willing to dive headfirst into eating the prawn-flavored chips, I instead was drawn in by one of my favorite flavors: bacon. Yes, gentlemen everywhere, they have bacon-flavored chips here, and they are everything you’ve dreamed about and then some. Witness the first eating of the crisps:
Walker’s Bacon Chips from Zeke Smith on Vimeo.
After that proved to be so successful I happened to notice they started putting holiday flavors of things out in the grocery store already (seriously, people LOVE them some Christmas here - the decorations were already out in full force before October even began) and one particularly caught my eye: there was a seasonal flavored bag of TURKEY AND STUFFING potato chips.
And once again, they were amazing! Of course Wendy wasn’t about to try either flavor but her friend Katherine was more than happy to oblige, and we both agreed that it felt like being in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where they eat the candy that tastes like a full meal. If things ever go south here in jolly old England and we’re too poor to afford meat, now I at least know I can always fall back on buying Turkey and Stuffing potato chips and have Thanksgiving any time I like.
As far as weird flavors go though, the milk has to take the cake. American kids love their chocolate milk and sometimes even strawberry milk for the truly adventurous, but the British are exploring entirely new dimensions of fatty milk flavors by creating monstrosities like this:
Yes, that’s cookie dough flavored milk, endorsed by Homer Simpson (another weird British-ism - they LOVE the Simpsons over here. they’re branded on everything. i feel like time-traveling back to 7th grade and asking my past self to borrow a Bartman t-shirt so I can be cool in present-day England). And I know it says “milkshake” but don’t be fooled - that just means you shake the bottle to get the flavor mixed in. While this seems like a decent idea in theory, I am sorry to report that while milk is awesome and cookie dough is awesome, cookie dough milk is not at all awesome. It tasted like someone liquified a roll of cookie dough, then threw in a few extra cups of sugar because they didn’t think it was sweet enough. Seriously, that thing was intense.
Fortunately in this story, there’s a happy ending. We’ve had a very good food week, between eating our very first good meal out in Manchester and making a few of our own at home. The restaurant was called Kro - it’s a Danish place in the heart of the city and they had great grub.
The only downside was they didn’t know how to mix a Manhattan )Wendy’s go-to drink when we go out) but hey, I guess we’re not in the US anymore. Gotta learn if they call a Manhattan something else here…
We’ve also had a great week of eating Italian at home, between a heaping portion of baked ziti earlier this week and tonight we tried homemade pizzas together for the first time, with awesome results! wendy friend up a little panchetta on mine and she heaped some spinach on hers, and while it’s no IP3 (seriously, it’s still one of the things we miss most about Chapel Hill) it was still pretty darn good. Wendy was making “Italian hands” while kneading the dough and getting the ingredients together…
And the final result was beautiful to behold.
Smith… Zeke Smith.
So yeah, as long as my wife doesn’t contract the swine flu again I think we’ll still be eating ok here. As always, thanks for reading.
