Cheese

Having lived in the US for a number of years now, I am still amazed at the low quality of cheese. Strange thing to mention, but cheese is an important food item in Europe. The French, obviously, have amazing cheeses including Brie, Camembert, Roquefort, and various Bleu cheeses. The British have more cheeses than imaginable, including Red Leicester, Stilton, Double Gloucester, Single Gloucester and so on…

So, to see an advert for Kraft Single Slices as the ‘American Cheese’ is pretty funny to a European. Please tell me there are more cheeses in America than Kraft Single Slices…

Chicken Salad

This morning I was tasked with making lunch for work, I was told to make chicken salad sandwiches. In my mind this means lettuce, tomato, cucumber and chicken, probably breast. But what I found was a tub of chicken in mayonnaise that said it was chicken salad.

Now, perhaps I have hit upon the issue of weight in America. People are told to eat more salad, and if they think that chicken in mayonnaise is salad then we end up with a weight problem.

As I pointed this out to my wife she promptly asked me what we call ‘chicken salad’ in the UK. To be honest, I do not know. When I worked in a cafe for a number of years we did sell something similar but we simply called it ‘chicken mayo’.

My wife loves to tell me how un-inventive we are in the UK, she will count out all the Kingstons, Yorks, Richmonds etc that we named when we landed in a new country, and she laughs at how we name food items so literally such as ‘cheese on toast’, ‘poached eggs’, and of course ‘chicken mayo’.

We might not be very inventive but we at least do not leave room for ambiguity!