31 March 2009 - Dear Doritos, Cholula and Whole Foods

[Choose any song by the Spice Girls for this blog]

I like spicy food. Not really hot stuff, but I like to have my mouth catch on fire every now and again and my efforts in this regard have been rather frustrated here. The three-chili rated Thai food is as closed to spicy that I have been able to experience. So, while I'm not normally a salty snack person, when I saw in the grocery store all the bags of chips advertising themselves as "extra hot" and "spicy pepper" and the like, I got all excited. I was particularly drawn in by the Fuego brand spicy hot salsa chips. Mmmmm..... Spicy AND Mexican. Woohooo!

It was soooo disappointing. The chips were triangular and left a weird orange powder on my hands that might well light up in the dark, but other than that, they bore no resemblance to Doritos. And they were not at all spicy. Strangely, even though I'm not, again, a salty snack person, the idea that I couldn't get good salty snacks drove me to try even more. That and Stephen T. Colbert's conspicuous consumption of Doritos on The Colbert Report as downloaded through iTunes. (Thank goodness I'm not a fan of Sierra Mist!)

My next foray was into the extra hot fake Pringles. Wretched.

African spice recipe. Seriously?? They're supposed to taste like dirt?

Sour cream and onion potato crisps. Like generic Ranch dressing served over Cheez-Its.

Texas BBQ chips. If Texas knew its name was being taken in vain like this, that dormant Republic would rise up and come over to settle the score.

I have identified, after nearly three months here, only three salty snacks that I find palatable. 1) Salsaria Pringles (which I can no longer find, so I assume I ate the entire stock). 2) Salt & Vinegar chips. And 3) Fuego brand salted tortilla chips (which even come in a bag larger than the Big Grab bags of chips in the US, which is generally the size of most bags of chips here -- and we wonder why Americans are fat....)

Yes, we're back to Fuego. That is, apparently, the Old El Paso of grocery stores (and I never liked their stale hard taco shells in the US, either). What I initially found intriguing and a bit alarming, though, was their web site -- www.mexican-food.de. Dot DE?? Seriously? Couldn't get the .com version? Because when I think dot DE, fine Mexican cuisine is not top of mind. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Um, yeah, try that web address out. No pictures of people enjoying fine faux Mexican cuisine. No recipes for making chili cheese dip in your microwave (I can't imagine they have Velveeta over here anyway). Not even mariachi music playing in the background. No, it was a lame placeholder for Theodor Kattus GmbH that brought my browser to a standstill (clearly it was as shocked by the failure to supply a visual fiesta as I was).

I gave Fuego one more try, though. A bottle of Fuego brand hot "salsa dip." Dip? Hmmm.... It's not so good. Like sweet and sour sauce with chunky tomatoes. Being a cheapskate, though, I did what anyone with a set-my-mouth-on-fire thrill seeker would do. I added real hot sauce. Normally I like Cholula sauce. Mexican. Hot, but not too hot. Perfect for scrambled eggs. Not available in Germany. But one of the things Dena brought over with her was some hot sauce recommended by her sister called Sriracha Chili Sauce from Huy Fong Foods. Yes, Asian. It is quite hot and with several seconds of healthy squeezing into the Fuego vat, created a rather palatable hot salsa. Latin-Asian-Euro fusion. Yum.

One of the things that put me over the edge with food tonight, though, was my pre-mixed salad. Like Barack Obama, I enjoy some arugula from Whole Foods from time to time. (Rumor has it that the Obamas are having an organic garden somewhere on the White House lawn that will be used to feed the family. True? Pretty cool, both from a green perspective as well as budget-conscious perspective, since they do after all have to pay for their food, as I understand it.) I don't know what the German word for arugula is, but the Rewe has some pretty good pre-mixed and washed salads. Great. I brought one home as I often do tonight and was a bit surprised to see a new additive to my salad. No, not spicyness. Not wilted lettuce. Not even insects. But corn kernels. Corn! What, a light harvest for lettuce so you needed some heavy filler? Or were they just feeling festive? So I give the fiesta award not to Fuego, but to Erlenhof brand mixed salads. They don't even have a website advertised on their bags. Probably because they're out starting a fiesta someplace.