American cuisine has a poor reputation here in Austria, and certain regions seem to go out of their way to live up to this reputation. Seattle, however, is not one of them. I mean, okay, there is bad food in Seattle too, and plenty of it, but there is also good seafood, which we craved, living in a landlocked country as we do; and good Mexican food, and good Asian food, and good pizza, all of which are hard to find here in Austria.

So anyway, I went to America looking forward to eating Mexican food. And mass quantities of Oreos, with milk. And I did. The Mexican food was good. My sister cooked some delicious enchiladas. I gained 10 pounds during my 2 weeks over there, and most of it was from those enchiladas.

I also got the Oreos. We will be devoting another post to American supermarkets, but I have to mention here that Oreos – those little black (with white filling) industrialized, standardized round cookie simulacra (bearing as they do no relation to real cookies) that I never especially liked when I lived in the United States (they taste to me like dirt mixed with sugar and a little cocoa) but came to crave when I moved away – now come in a variety of versions: Regular, “Double-stuff”, reduced fat (!!), peanut butter and, I think, mint.

I bought one each of double-stuff and reduced fat, but the latter only by accident as I had meant to buy the peanut-butter ones to gross out Alpha, who does not like peanut butter.

We also enjoyed eating bagels, which are hard to come by here in Austria, although there is allegedly one baker somewhere in Vienna who makes them. Blueberry bagels with butter; poppyseed or sesame seed bagels with cream cheese, lox and sliced Walla Walla sweet onions. We ate blueberry toast too, slice after slice of soft, sweet bread incredibly dense with blueberries. And large cups of strong coffee, and various sorts of cinnamon rolls.

We ate various things. We ate, and ate, and ate. I guess because we were guests and everyone wanted to make sure we got enough to eat. They pelted us with food from the time we woke up until we went to bed. We ate at picnics, at nice restaurants, at little holes in the wall, and we ate takeout. But no one hardly ever cooked. My sister cooked the great enchiladas and a few other things; my mother cooked bacon and eggs, once, I think. The rest was dining out or taking out. Or potlucks. On our last day in the States we visited some friends for a barbecue, and they had cooked everything from scratch, including an apple pie, and we were greatly comforted.

Here in Austria, we (or my mother-in-law) usually cook dinner every day.

The refrigerators I saw, at my sister’s and my folks’, were about twice the size of ours here (which is large by Austrian standards, but not huge) and packed absolutely full of stuff. Beverages, food, leftovers. They were so full you had to be careful opening them and taking stuff in and out. When we were visiting my parents, my mother got up at night to get something out of the refrigerator and a jar of pickles fell out and broke her toe. She acted as if it were no big deal, apparently it happens to her a lot.

Alpha and I went out to dinner at a nice restaurant outside Seattle one night and it was pretty good, but also expensive. Eating out here is a bargain by comparison.

We also went out for breakfast with some of the old relatives one morning for all the usual stuff like pancakes and eggs, bacon, biscuits, etc., the kind of breakfast food we rarely eat here. If they eat breakfast at all, Austrians seem to prefer chocolate cake, or maybe toast, or maybe just coffee.