Yummy, yummy, yummy

More on food:




Chips or fries are what I'd call home fries or potato wedges here. For skinny "french" fries, you'd go for "American style" fries (bit ironic I think); for curly fries: Louisian style. Waterford seems to have quite the reputation for bad chips - most people here agree with us that the chips here are terrible! I don't know why no one is doing anything about that - there is a sense of defeatism here that is a little strange.




Here are some funny foods that we miss:


Nestle Tollhouse - you should see the puny bags of chocolate chips here, I'm not sure what you are supposed to do with them, but you could really only make a couple cookies. If anyone gets ambitious and wants to send me the cookie recipe, I'd be a very happy camper. I can make chocolate chips out of the yummy chocolate bars that we have here, but I wouldn't have ever thought of transcribing the recipe.




Nutter Butters - what is really weird is that we never really ate them, but for some reason we both think that they sound so yummy!




Cocoa and powdered milk - for those of you that have had my (well really Alton Brown's) hot chocolate, these are two of the three basic ingredients. So far, I cannot find either of them. How do they make chocolate cake here? From a mix - but chocolate is the only kind of mix I can find. Which makes my famous (okay, Paula Dean's - yes, we are still Food Network junkies) pumpkin (or banana) gooey cake quite difficult. I have made it however, using a made-from-scratch cake base. It was tasty, but needs some work as the base was way too moist (hard to fathom, I know, but the base needs to be quite dense for this cake).




Powedered dashi - aka fish broth. One of the few basics for Japanese cooking that we could not find in Cork.




Frank's Hot Sauce - they do have hot sauce, but nothing like Frank's, glorious Frank's




Canned beans - if it isn't baked beans, you don't need them (apparently as that is ALL that is available in the stores). In fact, the canned food aisle: baked beans, mushy peas and maybe some chopped tomatoes. That's it, seriously! Yes, we can get a variety of dried beans, which I know are better for us anyway, but those take forethought and planning, two things that we aren't very good at.




It is funny the things that you miss (Paulita, Turkey Jerkey?). And I'm sure that if we move on from Ireland, there will be things that I will miss (like Moro candy bars), or even if we leave Waterford - no more blahs and redlead. I remember missing oyster stew my first Christmas in DC even though I had complained my whole life that we had to eat that every Christmas Eve. Food really represents comfort and home, and I do have my homesick moments. But I'm also enjoying exploring our new home through the food, people, sights and more.

We know that we are very behind in catching you up on the non-food related activities in our lives! Let's see, we've been to a hurling match, a fancy french dinner with friends (sorry, that is food related, but it is a fun story), on a Cork shopping trip, a couple neat walks and that is all that I can think of right now. Details on all of that later!