Things about America Kiwis don’t understand

After Things about America Kiwis Love, you must have known this was coming.  Apologies in advance. 

• Tipping.  How can visitors ever figure out when, or how much, or who, we’re supposed to tip.  It’s a minefield we’re doomed never to understand!  Why not just pay people a decent wage and charge a little more?
• Adding tax at the check-out, not on the price-tag.
• Pennies.  What do you do with them all?
• All the banknotes look the same.  Do people ever make mistakes?
• US spelling.  Yes, I know I’ve said this before.  But it’s just wrong!
• Wearing green on St Patrick’s Day.  It’s an excuse for green beer here and a lot of over-indulgence, but that’s about it.  I’m of Irish descent, but never really knew about St Patrick’s Day until I got to university.  It is promoted mainly by bars and clubs for obvious reasons.  No-one else makes much of a fuss.  (Well, except for two dear friends of ours who met on St Patrick’s Day ten years ago).
• The message that “America is the best place in the world.  Everyone wants to move here.”  (Blame the media, as this is where we hear it.  All the time).  Umm.  Well.  Sorry, but no.  We don’t.  I guess what we really don’t understand is why it is so important to emphasise this all the time?  Is the country that insecure?  How can it be when it is so large, so powerful, and has George Clooney?  (Though I will add that I’d love to live in DC for a year or two).
• The “right” to bear arms.  Huh?  We really don’t get that.  What about the right to safety, the right to live in a society where guns aren’t routinely carried by police or criminals?  Where you don’t hear fireworks and automatically think of gunshot?
• The right to free speech, as long as you don’t criticise the USA, the flag, the troops, or God.
• The US political system, and US politics (the two things are different, but equally puzzling).
• Politicised news media.  What happened to the idea of the Fourth Estate?  (which brings me to …)
• Fox News.
• Donald Trump.
• Donald Trump’s hair.
• The strong role of religion in society/politics/the sheer number of people who identify as religious.  We don’t realise this about the US – and even when we do, we don’t understand how it is possible, given the whole “separation of church and state” idea.
• Peanut butter and jelly.  Peanut butter and chocolate (way to spoil the chocolate).  Oh heck, just peanut butter.  (Yes, I know we have Marmite and Vegemite.  But this is my blog, and I don’t understand the attraction of peanut butter!)
• Bucket-size cups of filter coffee.  Shudder.
• Cheerleaders.  My feelings about cheerleaders are worth an entire post on their own.  Nope.  I don’t understand.
• Baseball caps at the dinner table.
• Why a main course (on a menu) is called an entree when it is not.
• Graduation at many different levels of education.  (We only have university graduation ceremonies with cap and gown.)
• How big the US really is.  We forget.  The scale of it is hard to get our island-bound heads around.

Disclaimer:  Forgive my observations and inevitable generalisations – I know that many Americans, including many of my readers, struggle to understand/accept some of these things too.

Note to my Readers:  Believe it or not, I self-censored.  A lot.   And I love you all! 

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A Tribute to the Tomato

After three years of living in Thailand, a fellow expat New Zealander asked me what I was looking forward to most, when I returned home in a few weeks. “Tomato sandwiches,” I responded, without question. I’d be arriving back in New Zealand in February. Mid-summer, prime tomato season. The tomatoes would be ripe, full of flavour, delicious. Tomato sandwiches were a staple as we were growing up. And there’s still nothing like the taste of ripe, sliced tomatoes, sprinkled with salt and pepper, sandwiched between two fresh thin slices of bread. The key is its simplicity. The taste of the tomatoes reigns supreme.

Sadly, the summer tomato season is over now, though the supermarkets are still full of greenhouse tomatoes. They don’t taste the same, but even slicing one the other day (for fried rice) saw me inhaling the scent of it in bliss (and hence this post).  In winter I still use tomatoes, roasting them or putting them in stews and soups and pasta.  I cannot imagine a world without tomatoes. (Tomatoes were available in Thailand – so I didn’t have to go cold turkey, but they were just not the same). Think what I would miss:

• Tomato sandwiches
• Tomato and basil – these two things equal summer
• Tomato, basil and mozzarella salads. (I have a recipe where I add roasted capsicums into the mix).
• Tomato and mozzarella pizza; the best pizza I’ve ever had was in a vegetarian restaurant in Rome, smothered in fresh slices of ridiculously ripe and tasty beefsteak tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, with flurries of basil and mozzarella. Sigh.
• Roast tomatoes
• Tomato soup – yes, from a can if necessary
• Chopped tomatoes in fried rice
• Various tomato sauces over pasta  (including Bridgett’s sauce with pesto and cream/low-fat evaporated milk she included in a blog comment)
• Cherry tomatoes with lemon, caramelised onions, olive oil and smoked salmon over pasta
• Tomato relish bringing taste to just about any savoury dish
• Lasagne
• Semi-dried tomatoes, adding flavour to pasta, stir-fries, anything
• And yes, even processed tomato chutney sauce (a bit like ketchup) with our fish and chips

I’ve heard that there are people who don’t like tomatoes.  My mind boggles.

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A squirrel at heart … or stomach …

I never really thought of myself as a hoarder. I’ve been to other people’s houses and find that every spare inch is covered with something, and have been thankful I don’t have that drive. But then I read Dona’s post about hoarding, (though I confess I don’t quite know what the difference is between a hoarder and a pack rat, Dona – pack rat not being a phrase we use here). And realised I was guilty too, particularly when it comes to food and related items.

Hoarding foodstuffs and bottles of water is encouraged in Wellington. It is called “disaster preparation” and we’re all supposed to have three days worth of food, water, and other necessities stored away in the event of an earthquake. Of course, I live on the side of the hill, and fear that if an earthquake is strong enough to cause havoc and cut off water and transportation, then my house is likely to be in bits at the bottom of the valley, with me in bits with it, or trapped, injured, and miles away from the carefully stored food and tins of baked beans. That hasn’t stopped us putting together our emergency rations though.

Even in normal times however, I do not work on the “just-in-time” principle of food purchasing that would save me so much money and space. For some reason, even though I live within walking distance of two supermarkets (30 minutes walk away, but still …) I live in fear of not having what I need when I am cooking dinner. Perhaps it is a result of growing up in the country, or perhaps it’s just that I don’t do menu planning. But my pantry is over-stocked with cans and jars and herbs and pasta and rice (four different kinds). Periodically my husband gets fed up and goes and throws things out that are five years past their use by date.

I also hoard recipes. I LOVE recipe books and magazines. In my twenties, I collected a series of Australian Women’s Weekly recipe books. I have the Dinner Party books 1, 2 and 3, and make the lemon chicken, the chocolate cheesecake, a light tomato pasta sauce, and grilled steak recipe. That’s about it. Also on my shelves from this series are French, Chocolate, Fruit and Vegetable, Chinese and Healthy cookbooks. From these books combines, I make the Beef bordelaise sauce, the rack of lamb with either the lemon/mint sauce or cream/bacon sauce, a strawberry shortcake, and a low-fat beef and beer casserole. I may have forgotten one or two recipes, but you’re starting to get the picture.

I also have a stock of Jamie Oliver cookbooks (gifts and self-purchased) that have produced a few favourite recipes, and one or two others. A favourite is my Long Italian Lunch Cookbook. I just love the idea of a long Italian lunch. All that wine, food, conviviality. If my deck ever gets finished, I plan hosting a long Italian lunch for my friends in the summer. You’re all invited.

The cookbooks are not really my problem though. I have a subscription to Cuisine magazine, a fabulous New Zealand magazine along the lines of Gourmet. I look forward to it arriving, and love reading the recipes and wine reviews, and drooling over the gorgeous photographs. It’s food porn. Then I place it carefully on a pile of magazines going back a number of years. I am very slowly working my way through these, ripping out recipes that appeal to me, and discarding the sometimes 4-5 year old magazine. It’s a slow process. I hate ripping up a beautiful glossy magazine, and I’m always worried that I’ve thrown out the recipe that will be perfect for my next dinner party. (Did I mention that my last dinner party was last year? I don’t entertain that often!)

The recipes, once torn out of the magazine, eventually make their way into some of those folders with plastic pockets. Each of these folders has with about forty pages, several recipes per page, and yet I probably regularly use fewer than ten of these recipes. For the record, these include a chicken and apricot Morrocan style dish, spicy lamb tagine, lemon and raspberry almond tart, another lemon tart, white chocolate cake, marinated lamb, a spicy tomato soup, and a few others I can’t remember right now (and I’m feeling too lazy to go down the stairs and check). Half the fun of deciding what to cook is going through these recipes and remembering why I chose to keep these, above others.

Earlier today I arranged to have a dinner party two weeks from now. Already I’ve started worrying about what I’ll make for the entree (translate to US English = appetiser or first course) and main course. I intend to make something decadent and chocolate for dessert or a lemon tart, but I’ll most probably end up buying something from my gourmet supermarket. So why do I hoard all those recipes?

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