Having decided to write a blog about American breakfast cereal, it’s ironic that 4 mornings after arriving in the country I’ve not eaten any yet. I call it “pacing myself”.
The journey and arrival was really very painless. I’d like to say thanks for all the help from all the friends. Staying with Sarah and Greg who made life so easy for us at the London end before setting off, and with Susan and Skip who’ve been fantastic hosts since we arrived in Arizona, has made everything much less stressful and painful than it might have been. We’ve had great hosts at both ends, and people doing so much for us.
At the border, despite their horrible reputation the US immigration and customs people were nice and charming rather than obstructive and difficult. I think us Brits just aren’t used to being asked questions by people in uniform, which is why lots of people think they are getting interrogated at the border. In fact, when I get asked:
“Why are you here?”
“To eat breakfast cereal.”
“What varieties are you going to try?”
“I’ll try everything.”
“I recommend the butterscotch lemon Trix.”
I know that it’s basically friendliness.
As I’m writing a blog about breakfast cereal, I’m going to talk about eggs and bagels. Here we are in Tucson, and on our first day we had a nice proper American big restaurant breakfast at the Blue Willow, where I had a monstrously large portion of scrambled eggs with chicken and salsa verde and chiles and things. This is a form of the American breakfast that I won’t be writing much about, but which they tend to do much better than us in the UK. The “Big Cooked Breakfast” (Full English, we call it, as if nobody else has worked out that bacon and eggs can be served in the morning) is something the Brits have self-mythologised about for a long time, but over here, there’s a lot more variety, and you can actually get it in restaurants and not just hotels and greasy spoon cafes, and you can get it at any time of day.
Since then, we’ve been eating bagels for breakfast: if any of you Americans had ever had a British bagel, you’d understand why. A bagel in the UK is slightly stale bread made in a toroidal form. The shape is the only similarity with even chain-store bagels in the US. We’ve come to America and have the chance to eat real bagels, so we’re not going to turn it down. Delicious, boiled, baked, huge range of flavours: Salt; garlic; cinnamon sugar; rosemary and olive oil. Lovely. A note to British readers, here: Don’t let bagel vendors put cream cheese on your bagel for you. They are under the impression that it should be spread a couple of centimetres thick. So much that they become impossible to eat.
But there hadn’t been a sight of cereal until this afternoon. We took a drive to the western half of Saguaro National Park – there are enclaves on the east and west side of the city - which we’d not seen before. The last time we were in town we were in the eastern half, it was New Year’s Day a couple of years back, and we were stopped by a park ranger of having been (falsely) reported as having drugs in our car. This time there were no reports of drugs, and not even any park police. There was just a stunning drive amongst the cactus and the beautiful desert mountains: my favourite kind of scenery which is in abundance around here. What a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon. On the way home we headed to the shop to pick up a few things. My preconceived notions of the variety on offer in the cereal aisle were slightly disabused – the choice a little disappointing, but that may be because Target isn’t really a grocery shop in the traditional sense. I hope they just had a small selection of what will be on offer elsewhere. But what was on show was sufficiently mad that I know I have some sugar and tartrazine crashes coming in my future. And I have bought my first packet.
Which means that the first instalment of Andy V Cereal starts properly tomorrow.
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