La dulce de vida.

I have a confession to make.

I am addicted to Dulce de Leche ice-cream.  This is a bad thing – especially when there are unlimited supplies of the stuff just 5 mins walk away.

And when it costs only $2 for a pint box.

Dulce de Leche is something I have discovered only since arriving in Texas. It is pronounced as dool-say de letch-ay and translates approximately into ‘the sweetness of milk’.

My good friend Alton Brown tells me that it is the name given to a caramel made from milk. He even demonstrated how to make it. Think of sweetened condensed milk and then sweeten and condense it some more and then stir it through ice cream … come back when you’ve cleaned up the drool.

I should state here that I don’t particularly like sweet things. I perpetually horrify others by removing the icing from cakes. I don’t enjoy American chocolate candies, because they seem to consist of 98% sugar. I just don’t have a sweet tooth.

Truthfully, I don’t even really like ice cream. It became an emotional crutch for me at the time of my retirement and I have been trying to break the habit ever since. At home I am known to buy chocolate ice-cream, eat enough out of the tub to make me feel quite ill and then melt the rest and wash it down the kitchen sink.

I’m not joking.

It’s just so blindingly easy to eat. Unfortunately. Anyway, I have now discovered this wonderful caramel concoction that isn’t too sweet, but is terribly rich. I’m eating far too much of it. Or did I say that already?

I have now banned myself from going anywhere near the part of the freezer section that holds the ice confections. I have plenty of good quality, healthy food to eat right here in my refrigerator and cupboards. I don’t need to eat junk.

Oh but I want to …

Bugger.

ttfn,

S.

A return to the usual programming.

Okay, I’m going to have a fire free day.

No looking at the news, no reading the newspapers on-line and NO reading my book on bushfire safety.

I was beginning to get overwhelmed by it all. Could you tell?

So, I am doing delightfully prosaic things like … laundry and ironing, grocery shopping, paying bills (gotta love on-line banking), and making macaroni and cheese in my mini-crock pot.

Now Mac and Cheese is not something that would normally feature in my diet. I’m not a big cheese eater at the best of times, unless it’s Brie and then all bets are off. However, it does seem to be an American staple and I’m succumbing to the sway of advertising.

Or does making it from scratch not qualify as ’succumbing’? I’m not sure.

Anyway, I must admit that I am still not used to shopping in American supermarkets. My local HEB (Howard E. Butt, for the curious amongst us) store has things on its shelves that I would never have imagined.

They have little jars of pickled pigs’ feet. I’m not kidding. There are cans of yams in syrup – pronounced surrup – and milk cartons full of pre-scrambled eggs.

It’s all very foreign.

The mince, er, ground meat is all packaged in sausage-like plastic thingies, not trays and cling wrap like ‘back home’ and the bacon is either raw or cooked. I hadn’t realised that Australian bacon is sold cooked-ish until I bought some bacon here and discovered that it was really, truly, definitively raw. It’s the selling of thoroughly cooked bacon that blows my mind.

There also seems to be a wholegrain alternative to everything, including corn chips, but the wholegrain corn chips are made out of wheat.

Let me know if I’m going too fast, okay?

The evaporated milk that I bought for my mac and fromage has added Vitamin D. I don’t know why. Have surveys found that most users of this product are also Vitamin D deficient? The cheese is … odd. A lot of it is orange.

This is just wrong. At first I thought it had something to do with cows grazing near nuclear power plants or something, but my good friend Alton Brown from Good Eats, tells me that some time ago dairies found that if they added beta-carotene to cheese people bought more of it, so it stuck.

Americans think this is normal.

I bought a ‘Mexican style’ four cheese mix for my macaroni, purely because none of it was orange and therefore I had no extra-added carrots. The package tells me that it is made with 2% milk (!!!!!!) and has added calcium. Um. Oh dear. How can you make cheese from just 2% of milk?

If it was made out of all milk it wouldn’t need added calcium. Or would it?

Argh!

I have also purchased a package of baby cut carrots. I have since discovered that these are not cut, baby carrots, but full grown carrots that have been cut in such a way as to resemble baby carrots.

My head hurts.

ttfn,

S.