Rose Reviews: Diet Leche Culturada, Sabor Ciruela

So fans of this blog's archives (or long time readers) might remember my reviews of Dutch food stuffs from my time in the Netherlands. Good news! My trip to the grocery store today yielded my first Chilean food product for review. It is worth noting that Chile gets sort of a bad wrap for its cuisine. As far as I can tell that is because it lacks the intensity of flavor of it's neighbors (mostly in terms of spiciness of seasoning). But when compared to Dutch cuisine, the culinary living is easy down in this hemisphere. I mean there is just so much affordable, fresh seafood and produce. Desserts and drinks tend to be a bit sweeter than I like them, but really there's very little to complain about.

Unfortunately that assessment does not extent to packaged and processed foods. When deciding to make the purchase in question I knew I was being adventurous. It seems that yogurt here tends to come in pourable jug form more often than spoonable container form. So rather than the Yogurt Batida Sabor Fresa I had tried earlier this week, I decided to branch out a bit and try this fat free, plum flavored, cultured milk. They were right next to one another. The bottles are the same shape. But on the inside... Basically it Leche Culturada has the consistency of milk. But with a vaguely coating, grainy sort of texture. And the flavor! Maybe there was an element of plum there somewhere... but as a person who has been known to consume upwards of twenty stone fruits in the height of the season, this tasted more like prunes mixed with maple syrup. Ugh.

Book Discussion Group: On imagery and nostalgia

On my way home from work tonight I had this strong bout of nostalgia for a college I never attended. It was a longer wait for the F train than usual and I was reading to pass the time. I started Americana by Don DeLillo earlier this week, mostly because it seems like everyone is always talking about how great he is, and even though I don't feel like I'm really into it (like I won't read another chapter instead of going to sleep at night), I like it. Anyhow, between the wait and the train ride I was probably reading for almost an hour. And I was thinking about this conversation I had with my friend Jean last night about descriptions of place and how important they are to stories and, at least so far, Americana takes place in New York City, so the descriptions are vivid in this way that they are not only so obviously and brilliantly concocted out of images from the mid-twentieth century cultural zeitgeist, but they are also images and places I live among everyday (or at least to the extent that I am in Manhattan, which is often enough).

So my nostalgia had to do with this fantasy I have about what life in "normal college" dorm is like. In this nostalgic reverie I pictured myself returning to the dorms at one-thirty in the morning and going down to the second floor (because my nostalgia is specific enough to place me on the fourth) to knock on the door of some dreamy English major I knew would be up (probably reading Proust or something awful like that). Anyhow, we would sit on his bed at a perpendicular angle to one another, with my back against the wall at the head of the bed and his against the wall against the length of the bed, and eventually, after dissecting imagery and the power of the ego in literature or whatever words we were using to mean "It's really fucking good the way he says that," I would tuck my feet under his thighs and we would feel really close but probably not even kiss because those situations always feel too heavy and cliche anyhow.

This fantasy is fraught for several reasons, starting with my cynical disdain for English majors and Proust. But also because it reveals the ways that my college experience was purposefully a-typical in a way that highlights how my late teens were to a large degree shaped by a desire to be "a-typical" and how it's strange but I sometimes regret that. But really only because lately my life is full of times like now when it's after three in the morning and I can't think of a single person who it would be appropriate to call in order to discuss literature. Maybe I'm just too old for that.

But when I came home I was glad to find Richard awake and we drank beers and watched the season finale of Greek, which is really a fantastically sincere show, but maybe feeds my college nostalgia-regret fantasies a little too much.