Wednesday, November 10, 2004

American Food?

Well, I am back at my husband,s office this morning. Unfortunately, the only free computer is the one with the French keyboard. The going is slow. You move a few keyboard keys around and all of the sudden you are typing like a 7 year old.
I was invited to a lunch yesterday for a German friend moving back to Berlin. Her husband is in the diplomatic service so her apartment is subsidized. It was a gorgeous apartment on the 6th floor. I live on one of the first floors of my building, so seeing all this light in the apartment almost made me jealous. Of course, it had an amazing view too. The woman had about 20 friends over, it was quite the tri-lingual lunch. She served traditional German food... sauerkraut, sausage, smoked ham and pretzels. She also had this delicious red fruit dessert. (When I was raving about the dessert too much, a German friend told me it was very easy and gave me the recipe - I thought that was too funny). But this lunch made me think about American food. If I had a bunch of international people over, what would I serve to give them a flavor of American food? I mentioned this to my German host and she said she knew.... she'd been invited over to an American friend's house this past summer and they served..... Thanksgiving dinner.... turkey, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes. Is this the best of America? Does anyone have thoughts about what to serve, aside from chili with corn muffins and brownies for dessert??
On another note, my US sister sent me an obituary from the NY Times yesterday about Benjamin Mehlman, a former judge in Ocean Beach, Fire Island, since I wrote about the island a few days ago. If you have a chance, read the article, because it gives you a flavor of life on Fire Island, including how people "appeared before Judge Mehlman for such offenses as eating in public, illegally beaching a raft and failing to post numbers on one's house." Boy do I miss that place!

-- said Auntie M in Paris
9:26 AM

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