Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Whenever I get back to the US in summer I love to indulge in strawberry shortcake. mmm. So imagine my horror when I ordered it in Florida and got spongecake with frozen whipped topping, defrosted frozen strawberries and stale vanilla ice cream. I felt like asking for a refund on my air ticket.

Could it be that for them their reference is grocery store cakes which are so vile that anything delicious must be from a box, because the concept of baking from scratch is outside their known universe?

your refrigeration habits should reflect the climate of your kitchen. When I lived in an un-air conditioned house in the tropics, I refrigerated the bread so it wouldn't go moldy in two days, but in an un-air conditioned house in Austria I didn't need to. I've noticed Northern Europeans seem to have more salmonella problems with eggs, possibly because they are never refrigerated. On the other hand, I never refrigerated my butter in those countries because room temperature was usually kind of cool! I couldn't do that in the tropics. So I think some people refrigerate to prevent spoilage, and other people do so to keep insects away, and it's all right, depending on where you live.

When I lived in Austria I had to go grocery shopping on Saturday mornings, and it seemed that the stockboys were always blocking access to the product I wanted. I so wanted to ask them whether the food was there for customers to purchase, or just to look pretty. But they wouldn't have understood the sarcasm.

When I had my first child, in Germany, the midwife prescribed raspberry leaf tea post-partum, to encourage the uterus to contract and shrink more quickly. My husband when to the drugstore and bought the tea, which really was just leaves, and I brewed a couple cups a day. It didn't taste great and I don't know if it actually helped, but it was a very common, routine treatment there.

You guys are so lucky! I've lived half my life outside the US, and sometimes Cool Whip is as close to whipped cream as I can get. Also, it doesn't melt as fast in tropical heat. And Vegans will eat it. The Splenda stuff is the only sweetener my diabetic kid can use. And canned peas and beans were the only way to find those veggies in some places I lived. I do draw the line on canned berries, though, even when they are they only kind I can find!

Where I live, in Peru, hardboiled quail eggs are considered a suitable snack for school kids to take along to class. They are sold right along side the regular eggs, and are available in organic varieties. In El Salvador no fancy party was completed without hardboiled quail eggs impaled on toothpicks stuck into half a melon, served with thousand island sauce on the side.