What we eat - bacon and kool aid

I do a mixture of German cooking and American, based on the extremely limited availability of ingredients (Germans will say the same about not being able to find Emmentaler cheese, Quark, garden cress, etc,  in America).

I'd like to share a few posts about some of the food we eat, how my diet has changed since coming here.

Bacon 

When I first arrived in Germany it was nearly impossible to find bacon in stores. Once I bought what looked like bacon from the butcher shop and somehow forgot the fact that bacon is a *cured* meat. Embarassing, but mostly just awful.

Finally, FINALLY our neighborhood Aldi has bacon. I bought 4 packs for .89E each that day. The word "Top Quality" was across the top of the packages. I beg to differ.

The problem with all (ALL) bacon in Germany is they only have paper thin, almost transparent slices. That is a huge problem because although it tastes like bacon, it doesn't give the texture good thick bacon should - bacon should be crispy YET chewy, it should not shatter if you drop a piece.

So this top quality bacon package contained 100 grams of paper thin bacon material, and trying to separate the slices was impossible, they just ripped in half.

Despite that, I still must appreciate that I can make a good BLT sandwich now, and happily, my husband fell in love with BLTs now that he knows what they are. In fact, at the store, he'll say, "We need more L."

Upon cooking, you realize how little 100 grams is - honestly, it is less than one serving, but enough to make two small BLTs. (100 grams is 0.22 of a pound - what is the smallest package of bacon available in America - perhaps a half pound? From my last visit, I seem to recall a small package being 1 pound, and most stores have packages up to 3.5 pounds - wow - and please don't remind me about Costco.)

You need to see a photo to believe how little 100 grams of bacon is:

That is a normal sized fork and the entire package of bacon, but each piece is actually two slices thick - that is my attempt to make it thicker; it kind of works.

After our BLTs, we're still hungry, so I open up package #2 and start over.

I'm so happy to have bacon available in our neighborhood, I'll be buying it regularly now.

Kool Aid

Of course there's no kool aid in Germany, and I love it so I bring lots with me whenever I visit home. I like the kind you mix with sugar because I use much, much less sugar and it still tastes good.

You've all seen my tiny dorm style fridge. 2 liter containers don't really fit inside, so I've taken to mixing my kool aid in my husband's empty 1 liter coke bottles. On Easter I made up a batch of blue kool aid and brought a liter to the family's gathering. Apparently blue beverages do not exist here - certainly that food coloring is not legal - and no one would try it, not even a tiny taste.

I enjoyed my Romulan ale alone. Mixed with yellow Fanta, it does turn green.

Oh, and black cherry kool aid mixed with coke zero does make cherry coke, but it's not as good as coke zero or kool aid alone.

The problem occurs when I mix up grape kool aid - it's really dark, and almost impossible to distinguish from my husband's coke zero. Twice now he's made the mistake of drinking my grape kool aid, and reacting as if poisoned.

This  morning my man took a sip out of the bottle, thinking it was coke, and ran to the sink and spit it out. I said, "No one spits out kool aid, it tastes too good!"

Red #40, Blue #1, plus additional unnamed artifical colors and flavors....banned in Europe - gotta love kool aid.