Cheeseburger in Paradise

It's interesting to observe yourself if you go overseas for an extended period of time to see what you miss from home. Sometimes you surprise yourself. I remember when we moved to Kenya 25 years ago I walked into church at Christmastime and realized I missed seeing women wearing red and green dresses. Who would have even thought about missing something like that? Sometimes the things that make us feel at home are so subtle.

A colleague of mine at UCF writes about sensory shock in new cultural environments. We typically think of culture shock being primarily cognitive, but it's often experienced, literally, at a gut level. Missing the smells, textures, and tastes of familiar foods. For example, this past January when we first arrived in Uganda we found a container of Blue Band among the groceries stocked for us in our kitchen. Blue Band is margarine made of palm oil. It's solid at room temperature and is probably terrible for you (but who knows? one can't keep up with the shifts in thinking about fats and cholesterol these days). We had eaten it all the time in Kenya, and that first night, jet lagged, I sat down at about 2 a.m. and ate two slices of bread slathered with it. It was comfort food in the best way.

By now, though, we are missing some foods from the U.S. In Florida Jim used to eat tuna every day as part of his low carb diet--I've already confessed in this blog we're not exactly foodies--but it costs $4 to $8 a can here so we didn't feel we could indulge. Recently I found some on sale for $1.50 apiece in Kampala and we bought, I am not exaggerating, 27 cans. We might have bought more but we ran out of cash. We had not anticipated that we would start hoarding tuna as if for the apocalypse on that particular day. Anyway, those cans should last until we leave on June 30.

Joanna has been craving non-chocolate sweets. Ugandans, incomprehensibly, don't like sugar as much as Americans. (They are way ahead of us on that one.) A few days before the tuna incident I found a package of marshmallows at a South African chain store. They weren't quite the same as American ones, heavier and sort of square shaped rather than cylinders. Even so I took the bag home and handed them to Joanna. She grabbed them and ran toward Luke's room. I found the empty bag about 30 minutes later. Luke hasn't talked about what he is craving but obviously he didn't mind the marshmallows.

Personally, my "cheeseburger in paradise" is American pizza. I'm going to try to make some from scratch tomorrow with a couple of substitute ingredients, but in my book pizza is like brownie mix--home made inevitably falls short. It's the first thing I want to eat when I get back on U.S. soil. And whatever the nutritional wisdom on cholesterol by then, I might even need it with pepperonis. Just the first slice.

Photo: Blue Band. In the cabinet, not the fridge. Beside sunflower oil and Kimbo (vegetable shortening or lard? depends on the batch, but good for pie crust). The Millers successfully ignore the nutritionally implications of the contents of their pantry/store.