Grrr. I've just spent fifteen minutes on allrecipe.com hunting for a good peanut butter chocolate chip refrigerator cookie, which you wouldn't think was asking the world. But all the top-rated recipes contain insane American ingredients! Peanut butter chips... what is a peanut butter chip? Where I come from (the back of beyond, admittedly, but we do have running water, spinning jennies, the wheel, and so on), 'chips' come in chocolate or newspaper, period. And even though Reese's Pieces mini peanut butter cups *are* actually available in NZ now, they're still far too much of a luxury item to be squandered on cookies.
But it's not just peanut butter cookies which suffer from strange and unholy ingredients. I'm sick of finding that all the American fudge recipes online contain marshmallow creme, or that all the American caramel sauce recipes contain '16 individually wrapped caramels, unwrapped'. Heck, half the so-called 'homemade' top-rated allrecipes desserts seem to consist of cake mix, pudding mix, bottled topping and whipped topping, whatever that is.
Am I the only person with a whisk whose pantry contains normal ingredients? Flour, sugar, cocoa and the like? Am I the only person who considers it a tad insane to mix canned pumpkin pie filling with premixed pumpkin pie spice, pour it into a bought pastry shell, serve it with more whipped topping and call it a homemade dessert? The only person who sees a recipe calling for 'one package cream cheese frosting' and wants to slap the writer of said recipe upside the head? Crescent roll dough, biscuits sold in rolls, almond bark, butter essence... my world doesn't have those things. More to the point, my supermarket doesn't.
Hmph.
(All right, I couldn't bring myself to use the phrase 'bloody colonials'. I'm Australian, so it cuts both ways. But still, at least WE make our damper from scratch like the good Lord intended!).
But it's not just peanut butter cookies which suffer from strange and unholy ingredients. I'm sick of finding that all the American fudge recipes online contain marshmallow creme, or that all the American caramel sauce recipes contain '16 individually wrapped caramels, unwrapped'. Heck, half the so-called 'homemade' top-rated allrecipes desserts seem to consist of cake mix, pudding mix, bottled topping and whipped topping, whatever that is.
Am I the only person with a whisk whose pantry contains normal ingredients? Flour, sugar, cocoa and the like? Am I the only person who considers it a tad insane to mix canned pumpkin pie filling with premixed pumpkin pie spice, pour it into a bought pastry shell, serve it with more whipped topping and call it a homemade dessert? The only person who sees a recipe calling for 'one package cream cheese frosting' and wants to slap the writer of said recipe upside the head? Crescent roll dough, biscuits sold in rolls, almond bark, butter essence... my world doesn't have those things. More to the point, my supermarket doesn't.
Hmph.
(All right, I couldn't bring myself to use the phrase 'bloody colonials'. I'm Australian, so it cuts both ways. But still, at least WE make our damper from scratch like the good Lord intended!).