This year, on March 1st, I was emailed by my Texan friend, the incomparably wonderful Mary Stewart:
“Hey buddy! It's the second half of your birthday! Well, actually, in England your birthday may already be over. But it's still your birthday in America!! You really gotta stretch that shit out.”
I had the dubious good luck to be born on February 29th one year. Dubious, I suppose, because on the one hand I’d rather have been born than not. On the other hand it leads to a fair bit of hesitancy among my friends who are never quite sure, in non-Leap Years, when they should be dishing out the cards, sending the congratulatory texts and making the obligatory divide-my-age-by-four jokes. To be honest, it’s nice that they remember full stop; I feel it’d be rather churlish to quibble in these circumstances. I know other leap children who celebrate on 1st March, but I stay loyal to the month of my birth, and go for February 28th.
And due to the unpredictable nature of transatlantic postal services, I managed, as Mary had suggested, to stretch shit out without even trying, because the hefty parcel Stacey had sent didn’t arrive until yesterday, Thursday, 2nd March. Now, the packing being well and truly under way, Stacey hadn’t wanted to send me anything too bulky. I’ve been trying to get rid of books since September last year. In addition to selling books online I took around 120 or so to Oxfam and about the same to an auctioneer. Actually, credit where it’s due, my Dad helped out a lot with the actual taking of the actual books. The practical help I’ve had from my parents has been invaluable. My point is (did I have one? Oh yes…) that since September I have been a net exporter of books, which is (and I say this through gritted teeth) a Good Thing.
So the bulky gift package 
which arrived was not packed 
with books, as it might have been in days gone by, but with stuff which you just can’t get very easily on Tyneside, but which abound in America. It was, like the CARE packages of old, sent halfway across the world to comfort and sustain the starving of Europe. Stacey, in other words, is like a one-woman mini Marshall Plan (see right for nice juxtaposition of 1940s Marshall Plan poster with unflattering maritime photo of fiancée, culminating in moderately clever extension of the “ship” metaphor.)
So, what is it that we are short of, here in the Old World? Wondrous things!
1) Beef Jerky Cure: If you don’t know what beef jerky is, I pity you mightily. The definition doesn’t do it justice. In theory, it’s spiced, air-dried strips of beef. In real life it is the very essence of saliva-invoking, savoury beefiness. It’s what ambitious young beef calves tell their careers advisers they want to become. And it’s achievable at home, if you have the time and the inclination. You get a couple of kilos of brisket and some packets of stuff. One packet contains the chemical salts you need to cure the beef, another contains spices. You slice the beef into strips, marinate it for a day or so in the cure, and then dry it on a very low heat in a fan oven for hours on end. I swear, it takes immense self-control to make the stuff last as long as it took to make. Great for long walks, low in fat, high in protein. But that’s not why we eat it. We eat it because it makes us feel like cavemen, without us having to dig a pit and chase a dangerously dangerous hairy elephant into it.
2) Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix: It might come as something of a surprise to British readers that the idea of serving Chili con Carne (or, as we like to spell it, Chilli con Carne) with rice is a somewhat unusual one in the US. It’s not unheard of to do so, but other accompaniments are more usual. Corn (tortilla) chips are usual, or you might just as often as not get chili served on its own. However, if you want to push the boat out in taste terms you could do a lot worse than cornbread. It’s a kind of bread, made from corn. It’s sweet and has a lightness which is hard to reconcile with its depth of flavour. It looks about as likely to stand up to soaking up chili as a slice of Madeira cake, but somehow it manages. And the best way to go about getting fresh, hot cornbread is to use Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. American packet mixes are far superior to ones you get in the UK, for some reason. I don’t know if it’s because in the UK packet mixes are seen by snobby cooks (and I will include my past self in this category) to be cheating, and so food manufacturers have perhaps avoided paying them too much attention. I now take the view that if it tastes good, it’s alright. Getting sniffy about it doesn’t make sense. For example, you might, if you wanted, make some home-made ketchup one day. But I defy you to do it every time you needed a bottle, forever; you wouldn’t dream of looking down your nose at someone who bought Heinz, would you? They’d look at you as if you’d taken leave of your wits, and rightly so. So why draw the line at ketchup? Are we going to make our own pasta, churn our own butter, bake our own beans and mill our own mustard seeds? No, I didn’t think so. Not every week, at least. If it tastes good enough, it’s authentic enough. The Americans have known this for a long time, which is why when Deirdre (my future mother-in-law) gave me some Ghirardelli brownies, I came as close as is polite to calling her a liar when she told me they had been out of a packet. She had to take the box out of the cupboard and show me the bags of powder. This Jiffy mix is along the same lines. It’s in the oven in 30 seconds, and it’s magnificent. Amaizing. Ahem.
3)- Take Five Bars: Okay, it’s a calorie bomb. But it’s a calorie bomb which contains peanut butter, caramel, chocolate and pretzels: try arguing with that. Take Five bars are made by Hershey’s, who also make Reese’s peanut butter cups. The salty-sweet phenomenon is a thing which is understood better in the United States than perhaps anywhere else: who else puts bacon with their pancakes and syrup? I tell you this: if people were really serious about bringing the Great Satan to its knees, they’d forget trying to pinch Russian warheads or hide bombs in their shoes. I’m fairly sure that if they had a real go at the peanut butter industry, American civilisation would be lost to the world within a week. THAT, my friends, is when you need Jack Bauer.
4) Ranch dressing: Santa Barbara County is the next county down the coast from San Luis Obispo. There, in the 1950s, two guys who worked at a resort known as the Hidden Valley Ranch. They invented a salad dressing, bottled it and sold it for a fortune. It’s tangy and creamy and savoury. It’s what “Cool Original” Doritos are flavoured with- they’re called “Cool Ranch” in America. It’s great on reheated spicy pizza for breakfast. At that point Stacey took my hands in hers, and gently and calmly explained that if I ever do that again, she’s leaving me. The implication was that how exactly I would be left might well be “mutilated with an axe on the kitchen floor”, but she never said it out loud. I could tell by the way she was controlling her temper, though. Still, she trusted me enough to send me some packets of dressing mix. Thank you, darling!
There was some other stuff too, but I know when I’ve outstayed my welcome. I shall leave you, then, with:
5) Palm tree bottle opener: I wanted a bottle opener, the one I had was broken and hadn’t worked that well when it was in one piece. When I first went to America, we drove from LA to Cambria up Highway 1, the Pacific coast road. Southern California is about as different-looking from North-East England as it’s reasonable to expect in the English-speaking world. Stace laughed at how much I loved palm trees. Palm trees will grow in practically any temperate or tropical climate, and they do. There is one species which is native to Switzerland, and a few examples grow outdoors in the Faroe Islands. There are palm trees at the end of my street. But they don’t belong there. They know it, and so does everyone else. They’re ugly and stunted; pathetic interlopers living a lie. Those people could have a perfectly respectable Rowan or Silver Birch in their gardens, but they’ve got poxy bloody palm trees. As if they’re expecting coconuts or something. It’s not a bloody Bounty advert, it’s Gateshead. It’s sad. But if those poor sods are the Tracy Emins of the palm tree world, then those that I then beheld in LA were the Elle Macphersons. They were outrageously tall, for any urban tree, and they were so…palm tree-y! They were beautiful, and I couldn’t get over it. So, when Stacey managed to secure us a little house to rent in Cayucos, the town in the background shot on this blog, she made sure one of the first things she told me was that there are beautiful palm trees visible from the windows. And I have a bottle opener to match. Thank you, love.
