Yes, I’m thankful for that! I love cheese and I eat it all the time, both imported and locally made. But I do NOT eat that “processed cheese product” crap that some people call “cheese.”
I think that tomorrow I will pick up some port wine cheese and slivered almonds to make a cheese ball over the weekend =) All the talk over on that cheese and wine thread makes me want one!
The default unspecificed cheese in this house is extra sharp cheddar, though brie is a favorite cheese as is a nice emmenthaler. I frequently add a piece of cheese to my lunch to serve as the protein.
It’s not the distinction between milk and dark chocolate that’s the key here. Hershey’s milk chocolate tastes rank in a way that’s distinctive from any other milk chocolate. It’s gamey.
Funny, I don’t get that. I agree that Hershey’s isn’t the best chocolate in the world, but I think it’s okay. Doesn’t taste rank or gamey to me.
except that our sodas are also almost completely filled with ice, so you are still drinking more.
I’ve heard from foreign people from a variety of countries that Peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches are bizzarre. A filipino who tried it first as an adult liked it but found it weird. A lady from England finds them revolting because you don’t mix sweet and savory, supposedly.
It does vary quite a bit from brand to brand. For example, even to my American taste buds, JIF is considerably sweeter than Skippy. I prefer the Skippy.
I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re referring to, but one of the cruelest jokes (IMO) ever perpetrated upon my childhood self was the time my family was having dinner at the home of another family, and the hostess plopped down in front of me a blob of Jell-O with fruit inside it, topped with a big dollop of … mayonnaise. Imagine being a child thinking you’re about to scoop a big spoonful of whipped cream into your mouth, and it turns out to be something entirely different. I learned much later that some people actually consider the combination of Jell-O and mayonnaise to be quite “normal”.
As somebody else already mentioned, this is a food safety measure. As with ground beef, combining multiple eggs into a mixture risks spreading contamination to the entire batch (salmonella in the case of eggs). So some jurisdictions now require the use of pre-mixed pasteurized eggs.
A couple years ago one of the comic books I read had a storyline that took place in Detroit, and the artist elected to draw every single background character with an absolutely immense ass 
• Sunny-side-up: Fried on one side, yolks unbroken
• Over Easy: Fried on one side, yolks unbroken, then flipped and cooked briefly on the other side, then flipped again and plated. Yolks should be runny, as well as most of the whites surrounding the yolks.
• Over Medium: Like Over Easy, but the whites should be fully cooked,
• Over Well: Yolks unbroken, cooked hard all the way through.
• Over Hard: Yolks broken, cooked hard
The melting thing is the key. American cheese (and its variants) melt beautifully, which makes it well-suited to topping burgers and hot sandwiches. Real cheeses like cheddar and Swiss get all stringy when they melt, and the oil separates out of them, and they’re generally messy. And to my tastebuds, the flavors of cheddar and Swiss change dramatically when melted, becoming much sharper (to me, unpleasantly so). Also, the melting factor makes American cheese wonderful for making sauces; again, you don’t have to deal with the components separating in your sauce.
Oh, and filipinos waitstaff at restaurants also are baffled by wanting more than two small sized pieces of ice with your drink.
A friend of mine from Texas came to the UK and ordered a Coke. What he got was some lukewarm generic supermarket cola that came to the table without ice in a glass that was scarcely bigger than a shot glass. He took a sip then asked the waitress for ice. She took the glass into the kitchen for about five minutes and returned it with one solitary cube floating in the middle of it. I was so embarrassed.
BTW I agree with Duke about the greasiness issue: I think American fast food is actually less greasy than British.
This is almost exactly the story my dad told of trying to order (iced) tea in the UK in the early 1950s. He was so cute as he acted out the szzzzzzt of the solitary cube melting in the hot tea! BTW, he always told this as a story laughing at himself, not the poor baffled waitress who had no concept of ice tea in the American South!
I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned yet but root beer is generally unknown outside of the US and the usual reaction from foreigners is something like “WTF would anyone drink this medicinal tasting shit”.
A&W Root Beer (plus ice cream!) is unknown?
Our high school German exchange students spat it out, cursing and declaring “You beer tastes like bubble gum!”
Yeah, root beer is a uniquely American thing.
I was once treated to dinner by a Vietnamese guy. He had been here going on 20 years but somehow had never heard of, or tried, root beer. So when I ordered one he ordered one too (after explaining to him it’s not actually beer, but just another pop). I ended up finishing his because he could stomach about a thimble full before declaring it “too sweet to drink”.
I’m American, I have ever tasted something and thought it was “too sweet” a handful of times in my entire life. I enjoy foods cooked the international way (i.e., without a ludicrous amount of sugar and processing) but I also enjoy stupid sweet American foods as well.
Pretty much. Though there are A&W outlets I’ve seen in Thailand and Malaysia.
In Taiwan, sarsaparilla drinks have been popular for a while I believe, and that’s more or less equivalent to root beer AFAIK. The local brands are less sweet than A&W, though.
Root beer–and A&W–is quite well-known (and enjoyed) here in Canada. When visiting a new A&W in Toronto recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were giving away small, stuffed Root Bears. I haven’t seen him in years, but he’s still around, I guess; helping folks discover A&W and its root beer.
It also has a foul, waxy yet grainy texture. The flavor is dull and yes, I too find it slightly ‘off’. It tastes like cocoa shell garden mulch smells.
I thought I didn’t like chocolate for years as a kid because Hershey’s and their ilk was all I ever tried. I love milk chocolate actually; prefer Swiss.
One more person agreeing that fish and chips from a chippie are grease-soaked. I will eat practically anything (even mushy peas), but I had to peel the batter off the fish to choke it down. Way more grease than any American fast food I have ever had.