those other ex-patriots

The empty coffee cup was sitting on the kitchen counter top, the corner of the list of American food products lying just underneath. In a typically lazy fashion, I tugged on the list, the cup fell on the stone floor, and ... nothing. It didn't break. Who says IKEA doesn't sell quality merchandise? My bare feet thank you IKEA, as well as the happenstance that there was not the usual steaming brew therein. And I didn't have to spend a half hour searching for shards of coffee cup which might pierce little feet as well as my own. We are a barefoot happy family.

Les Monstres just prefer life without shoes. My French immediate family, male and female, doesn't like shoes in the house as a matter of cleanliness. For me it is more a case of vanity. At age 54, my feet are about the only things left on my body that I think is sexy.



Nothing to do with a foot fetish. Just plain visual aesthetics. As a design/art/architecture person, I'm very visual. And therefore, I am less than thrilled about the degradation aspects of the aging process. The spiritual, inner beauty bit hasn't sunk into my acceptance process.

But on the bright side, I'm thrilled about my new "Crocs". Yet another way to show off my sexy feet.



If you don't think my feet are sexy, please keep it to yourself. Leave me this little shred of something to make my days bearable.

So the list I made before I had the scary coffee cup tumble, is about imported American food stuff I found here. No purchases have been made, but there are a couple of items for which I find comfort knowing they are available if I'm in a panic.

The food subject came up because I was stalking Amy at her blog, Chitlins & Camembert. I have a thing about southern literary types, especially if they are from Alabama or Louisiana. You can ask Sarah Shankman at wherever she happens to be if you can find her - somewhere in Greece or Turkey at the moment- or just Google her. Once upon a time she made the mistake of moving next door to me, and her life has been miserable ever since. It is probably my fault she hasn't even written a book lately. But I'm going to bug her about that in a couple of weeks when I stalk her in London. (Just because you travel does not mean you are safe.)

So Amy, although lucky not to live next door to me, poor thang, is just wait'n and wait'n to have this baby and probably isn't thinking too straight so she puts up a long blog about her mother's index card recipes. That's cooking recipes put on index cards which anyone who was born before 1980 might recognize as an integral part of the American homemaker experience in the middle of the 20th century.

Amy has just finished a 3+ year project of typing up all the information from those cards into a database or some sort of organized format on the computer. And, printed them all out. And, dolled them all up in a multi-ring binder. Need I say more. Well, she freely admits that she had run out of projects and had some free time on her hands. I say get that baby out of there and give this woman her life back.

But being the obsessed stalker that I am, I immediately ran out to find some of her missing ingredients. The inanimate ex-patriots. Wrote them all down on a list that I put on the kitchen counter, under my coffee cup. The one that fell. In fact I had already scouted out a few items I believed she had earlier reported as difficult to find out in the boonies of France. As a dedicated stalker one never passes up the opportunity to provide a service. "Woo-hooo, I can send you a bottle of Karo syrup and some pecans. They have them in a specialty shop just around the corner from me."



Also available: Pancake mix; micro-wave popcorn; maple syrup (ok, from Canada); Skippy peanut butter (crunchy or smooth); baked beans; Hellmann's mayonnaise (just in case you have a recipe card that specifies "Hellmann's"); Louisiana Gold pepper sauce; Louisiana "One Drop Does It" hot sause; cranberry juice; Grandma's Molasses; Ocean Spray cranberry (can); and the list goes on...

And in typical Southern fashion, "Where was I?"