Tom's Dinner - Why are onions so big in America?

I'm not a natural cook. I tend to think of it as a bit like reading novels, something I'm not a natural at, but it should be good for me, if I keep trying.

I'm off to the UK on Saturday, and I'm trying to finish up all my food that is in the fridge and is only past it's sell by date by a week or so, so I made Chinese with the noodles tonight that should have been used by last week.

American supermarkets are really different from the ones in the UK. All the packet sizes are different, all the brands are different, they don't do quiche (someone at work told me quiche was "very '80's" - well, so am I!), they have a whole row just for peanut butter, they don't have that handy green label that tells you what's vegetarian and what's not, and the check out people always say - "do you want help out today?". Most strange. "Did you find everything today" is an even stranger one. I never do. Where's the quiche?

I took me months, but I found out that there is a little corner of Safeways at Rivermark Plaza, just up the road from here, that will be forever Britain. There are two rows of Jaffa Cakes, chocolate digestives, brown sauce, and proper tea. They don't do the Sunday Post, but that would be too much to ask.

BTW I just remembered (it's funny how your mind works), I was dreaming about the Sunday Post last night. I had read most if it through, and just remembered that I still had the "Fun Section" to read. Well, "The Broons" was always about coincidence I suppose....

Anyway - as if I need an excuse not to cook with proper vegetables and all, for some reason you can only buy these gigantic onions in Safeway. So you either have to have a whole onion festival for tea, only use one half and put the other half back in the fridge to use in two weeks time, which'll be the next time I get round to cooking for myself, or you chuck the other half down the waste disposal. All rather unsatisfactory alternatives, in my opinion.

So there is another thing I don't understand about America.

I had another question today about driving in America, about rights of way and emerging into traffic, but it was so boring that I forgot to ask anyone about it.

I'm secretly scared of the waste disposal unit too - but that's another story.......

p.s. The spell checker wants to turn "Jaffa Cakes" into "Java Cakes", a nice open source spelling alternative there. After the CTO of Yahoo was nasty about Solaris (see my very first post to this blog), their spell checker is pro Java!