Gimme S'more

I hope you all had a great long Labor Day weekend! I missed 4th of July this year, and I've been out of the country for the last two Thanksgivings, but dammit! I was here for Labor Day. And with the heat we're having this week, it doesn't feel like the end of summer to me. Though, I guess that's also probably because I don't have a job and don't go to school and am, all things considered, a feckless vagabond contributing nothing to society.
Happy Labor Day!

Anyway, on the topic of the good ol' U.S. of A., there are things I'm not too thrilled to be back for, but I won't get into that now. What I am thrilled to be back for is the food. The food you just can't get in Europe and that I've unsuccessfully tried explaining to my European friends far too often than they cared for, I'm sure. I'm talking about Mexican food, burgers (real burgers), big giant salads with names like 'Wiqui Waqui BBQ Chicken' or 'Quesadilla Explosion.'

I can't tell you how difficult it was for me to explain s'mores to the four Dutch people and one Danish person I went camping with in the Netherlands in the spring. They don't have graham crackers in Holland, of course, and nothing really resembling them (aside from maybe speculaas, a kind of cinnamon cookie), so from the get go it was a challenge. They're like, "you eat burnt marshmallows with crackers?"

What they came up with were the cheapest cookies they could find (being Dutch) and multicolored marshmallows that were at least the right size. The cookies were plain, round, with one side coated in chocolate. So not the idea. And instead of roasting the marshmallows on the long sticks that I meticulously selected from the firewood and then placing the hot gooey puff in between two cookies, they used little wooden grill skewers, basically like big toothpicks, and stuck them through both cookies and the marshmallow and held the whole sloppy thing over the fire. This, of course, failed. At one point they were using empty Heineken cans to prop the ridiculous cookie sandwiches up near the fire, because the tiny skewers they tried using were of course too small and didn't allow enough distance between hand and flame for proper roasting. Essentially, it was a disaster.

One of these amateur Dutchmen will be arriving in California in a matter of days, and I can't wait to show him how it's really done. As for me, I'll go on enjoying my favorite American fare until the next time I go abroad. Like yesterday, when my mom made ribs, corn on the cob, and this delicious apple pie:

It's good to be home. And now, hungry readers, I'm going out with my brother to get a legit steak burrito the size of my arm from a cockroach-infested hole, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Lekker!