Pick-A-Day

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It’s American Week at Lidl

I owe a debt of gratitude to Yelli for the warning that Lidl’s American Week started today.  I popped into my local Lidl to see what was on offer–and amazingly I could sort of see a connection for most items to America.

Actually, I lie.

Doritos, ok.  Brownie, ok.  Amerikaner, not really.

The pretzel snacks are amusing: the honey mustard are pretty good, but the sour cream and habanero are pretty hot, way hotter than the typical German is willing to endure.  (At least they were last time American week happened–the pretzel snacks lingered in the bargain shelves for weeks with the sour cream and habanero not selling at all.)

New this time, or at least that I noticed this time was that old traditional American favorite, blueberry drink. I decided to be brave and buy some, even though the package claims to have “Wild Canadian Blueberries”–nothing like the Statue of Liberty right next to the Canadian Maple Leaf, although we’ve seen that before.

11 comments to It’s American Week at Lidl

  • wow, you really bought it all!

  • mateo

    Really? You bought all this crap!!!

  • Don’t knock down the brownie. It was pretty good!

  • Reko

    Sour cream and habanero sounds pretty good.

  • Actually, I was told by a (real) New Yorker friend that the Amerikaners are called Black & White cookies in the US. She said they were created from leftover cake dough from enterprising NYers. I am not sure why they call them cookies. 🙂

    I don’t think they sell them anywhere else and I, for one, have never had one. Happy American week!

  • Reko

    Hey, Fellow elmada-Blog-Buddies, Adamo needs to buy groceries one way or the other. It’s cool if he chose to spend all his grocery money on weird stuff, just because it was marketed as having some vague connection to the US. I almost feel like getting in a train and going up to Weimar just to help him enjoy his (?!)”American” bounty.

  • Reko

    Remember, Adamo is an expatriate, NOT an ex-patriot!

  • Re: Black & White Cookies – I think I picked up what they were from a Seinfeld episode, as I am emphatically not from New York myself. That said, I remember seeing them everywhere in the bakeries here and wondered why they were called Amerikaners. I just figured enough Germans had visited NYC and brought back the idea. Then Cliff asked a colleague that explained it like this, “Well, they’re half black and half white, just like all Americans. Get it?”

    I was speechless.

    • I would be totally speechless as well — unless it was delivered by somebody who I knew was good at telling jokes with a straight face.

      Jeesh!

  • Cool American Doritos? Do they not have a concept of what a ranch is in Germany? It wouldn’t surprise me, but I suppose if native German speakers did not understand the concept it could be explained somehow through the concept of farm, and the rest explained from there.

    • To me, “ranch” denotes a range of flavors/seasonings that is common in American cooking. Although Germans understand what a ranch is (as well as a farm), I think using it to denote a flavor wouldn’t result in sales.

      That said, the “ranch” flavor is unmistakably American, so “Cool American Doritos” is probably a good hint at what it will taste like. I can’t actually think of anything else in Germany that carries that ranch flavor–certainly not even salad dressing.