There are a lot of times, while living abroad, where I have just felt super American. Most of them revolve around the patriotic holidays we have- 4th of July and Thanksgiving are two that stick out. But there is never a time where I feel a stronger tug to Michigan than Fat Tuesday, which is weird because, on the surface, this day seems to have nothing to do with the Great Lakes or cars. It has everything to do with pązcki, which my family actually hates (or claimed to hate whenever we were at the bakery) but I adore.
Pązcki, for those of us who are neither Polish nor come from Detroit/Chicago, are donuts filled with some sort of fruit compote (typically plum) and covered in powdered sugar. They sound like typical jelly donuts, but these things are huge and come in at about 400-500 calories. They are a big deal up North, and everyone goes crazy for them for Fat Tuesday. Since moving from Michigan, it has been a struggle trying to find these things. In North Carolina, I made my own (there was a lot of lard involved, the kitchen stank for 2 days after). A&M had them, but you'd never know it if you asked around, considering everyone called them pack-zees (it's actually poon-chski, but you can't blame people for assuming that pronunciation should make sense). And here in Germany, they have Berliner/Pfannkuchen, but they're smaller and healthier and those are two qualities I never look for on that day. I do my best, but without fail, these pastries make me start to miss Michigan with its terrible highways and skiing and Vernors and accent a lá Great White North (minus the "eh", more to come on that later).
So, in this year's missing Michigan phase, I tried making pastys. These can be seen as either poor white-people empanadas or more northern Cornish pies. I found a recipe that didn't call them "hand pies" (come on, hipsters), and did my best. But in trying my hand at the crust, I couldn't find anything even close to Crisco and had to use these strange refrigerated blocks of coconut oil. They ended up cooking properly, but definitely didn't taste like what I was hoping. But this is a problem with living abroad. Regardless of how well you adjust, sometimes there are just days where you want some comfort food, and the whole ordeal of converting ingredients and measures and Fahrenheit to Celsius makes obtaining said comfort food a struggle. It's difficult to find metric recipes that are both authentic and within the limits of what you can buy at the supermarket. You can always order stuff online, but that is so expensive and probably also unnecessary. There's got to be another way, and so for the next year I plan on finding out what that is! I have a list of (easily) 50 foods that are either difficult/impossible to find or germanized (or maybe just not americanized) at the supermarkets. It ranges from tortillas and chocolate chip cookies to jambalaya and corndogs. I figure, with a year remaining, I can get through these at about one a week and see how the conversion goes. It'll be a fun project :D Expensive, sure, but definitely fun.
In other, accent-related news, I have come to the realization that living in Germany has caused my accent to go deeper South. What?!? I don't understand it, especially since I lived in Texas for, what, 30 months total. It's an impostor accent! North Carolina doesn't even count because of all the people migrating from the Rust Belt. But maybe, since I'm talking to fewer and fewer native speakers, it's just become unhinged. It's the weirdest thing, seeing how your language changes as you move around. There are still some words that I have kept from Adelaide, and I sometimes still revert to that (according to my sister, annoying) inflection that makes questions sound not like questions. And I'm sure my pronunciation of German things, while not German, is not as American as it would be if I had never moved. It's a slow change, but when it hits you, it hits hard. So, if you are American, please skype me. Please. I need to get this pronunciation settled down.
