So much more than peanut butter and jelly

My last few posts haven't really been about travel. Sorry  if you really missed hearing about my adventures. Here's one just for you.

I REALLY want to go back someday.

In New York, Mommy and I went to a restaurant called Peanut Butter and Company that specializes in--surprise!--peanut butter sandwiches. If you think this sounds boring, IT WAS NOT. It was very good. There were more types of peanut butter sandwiches than I could imagine. They have some normal stuff, like PB&J, and some weird stuff, like the Pregnant Lady, which has peanut butter and pickles. That is crazy. And strange.

When you order a sandwich, they bring it out to you with carrot sticks and potato chips, "Just like Mom used to do." Interesting. My mom almost never allows potato chips in the house.

They have all kinds of peanut butter, and by "kinds" I don't mean texture like crunchy and creamy. (Although those are offered.) I'm talking flavors. There is a white chocolate peanut butter, and a cinnamon raisin peanut butter, and some spicy peanut butter made with chili powder. And a lot more types. Of course, you can have just the regular, unflavored stuff, but it's more fun to try something new.

I chose a Fluffernutter sandwich made with dark chocolate peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. That was wonderful--how could anyone have something against peanut butter and marshmallow, unless they're allergic? 

Mommy decided on peanut butter BLT made with maple peanut butter. She said she was surprised at how good it was. I was surprised too!

Scrumptious. No other word for it.

They make the best peanut butter sandwiches I've ever had. If you ever go to New York, make sure you stop there for lunch.  

Smile!

I recently started arranging my dry cereal or crackers into smiley faces when I eat them.

Cheese crackers. This was the first smile I made with
food.

Made with Yummy Mummy cereal (and one marshmallow)

Count Chocula

Yummy Mummy marshmallows

Chocolate chips

I think this one was made of Count Chocula marshmallows.
Not sure.

This one was star sequins. Not food, but hey, it's nice.

New Moon Girls magazine had an article about kids with cleft palates, a condition that disfigures the nose and mouth, and how girls like me can help these kids. When you find a smile in the world around you, you take a picture of it. You pledge to donate money for each picture of a smile to a charity that provides surgeries for kids with cleft palates.


You can also host a smile-a-thon. Ask family, friends, and neighbors to find or make smiley faces and take a picture of them and pledge money to donate to a cleft palate charity.

It's very fun to make smiles. You can do that too, or host a smile-a-thon yourself! (I actually haven't done that yet. Something to talk to my mom about.)                                                                                                    

Jell-O!

 I LOVE making Jell-O. I don't know why, just something about the taste, and the texture, and how fun it is to cook.
It's very good with whipping cream mixed in it ("decadent", Mommy calls it).

 I've stopped using the brand name packets after Mommy said that some of the food dyes they put in the Jell-O packets are banned in Europe. Instead, I make it from scratch, using this recipe.  I couldn't put the whipping cream in it, though, because Mommy says the lemon juice might make the cream curdle.

Sliced lemon smiley face!

First, Mommy showed me how to slice the lemons in half. That part was fun. For some reason, I really like using the knife. Then I squeezed the lemons, added some sugar and water, and started boiling the juice. That was not my favorite part -- I'm not a big fan of hot things. Luckily, Mommy did most of the work with the boiling water.

Stirring the mixture

The lemon gelatin dessert took a long time to set. Kathy was very impatient. The whole evening, it was, "Taryn, will the Jell-O  be ready soon? Well? Will it?" She called it Jell-O even though it wasn't. When it finally was ready, she thought I gave her less than I gave myself. (I didn't.) But we both liked it very much. 

Mommy made her special whipped cream to go on top, and it was very, very good. It reminded me of a lemon meringue pie.

Ready to eat!

Someday when I grow up,  I want to figure out a way to powder fruit juice without using artificial flavors and colors for my gelatin dessert. Then I'll package the mix. It'll be even better than the brand name packets. (And healthier!)

Where My Taste Buds Have Traveled

My taste buds have traveled to different places than I have. For example, last night they went to Japan. We went to a restaurant called Ariake. It's a Japanese restaurant that specializes in sushi. My favorite types of sushi are kani (crab cake), tobiko (flying fish eggs, or roe, if you want to be fancy), and California rolls (I don't know what they have to do with California, but they're really good). They're filled with avocado, cucumber, and kani.

There were also appetizers. Kathy and I each had our own bowl of miso soup, which is cloudy, tan broth with scallions and tofu. The temperature of the miso soup was perfect--not so hot you'd burn your tongue, but not so cold you wouldn't want to eat it. We shared fried shumai, shrimp-and-onion balls covered in dough and deep fried. The shumai was crispy on the outside and the dough came off when I ate it. So much better than American french fries. Even better than Dutch vlaamse frites. It's a close call. 

For dinner, I ate California rolls and kani, and Kathy got tobiko and ikura, salmon fish eggs. Mommy got a different kind of sushi, the special of the day. Daddy got shrimp tempura, which is deep fried shrimp dipped in batter, arranged in a pyramid on the plate with the tails sticking up. There is a fried onion ring on top holding the shrimp tails together.

After dinner, Kathy and I ordered dessert. She chose green tea and red bean mochi (ice cream covered in rice flour paste and sprinkled with more rice flour--really good), and I decided on black sesame ice cream (not mochi, just ice cream). It looked like this:

(Half-eaten) black sesame ice cream

and tasted delicious. There was a hint of chocolate, a hint of peanuts, and an undertone of sesame. It left a good aftertaste in my mouth. Mommy liked it too!

My taste buds really liked visiting Japan. Their favorite part was the black sesame ice cream. Someday I want to visit Japan for real, and find out if you can get shumai on the street.

Mostly Delicious Food In Amsterdam

I liked trying new foods in Amsterdam.

A box of the best chocolate sprinkles I ever tasted

They had chocolate sprinkles, called chocoladehagelslag. We call them "jimmies" at home. Chocoladehagelslag actually taste like chocolate. At home, jimmies are just waxy sugar sprinkles colored brown. Dutch people eat chocoladehagelslag on toast for breakfast. I liked that!

Also at breakfast, I tried yummy white cheese, whose flavor I can't describe. I call it "pepper cheese" in my head because I never found out its real name. It looks like it has bits of ground pepper in it. The Dutch eat this cheese on toast, too (although not with chocolate sprinkles!)

I enjoyed cookies called stroopwaffles. The "waffle" part is  
a thin sugar cookie made on a waffle iron. Then two waffles are squished together with a layer of caramel.  We always had some with us because they were easy to carry around and they made a good snack!

We wanted to try black licorice because we had heard it was good. When we finally found some in a grocery store, we thought, "Let's buy it!" It tasted like gummy molasses without the sugar. We were disappointed. I didn't like it that much. Neither did Kayla, Mommy, or Joy. Daddy didn't even try it! 

Delicious Dutch chocolates

On the other hand, Dutch chocolates are good--very good. In one chocolate shop, they served us our chocolates on little plates, and we sat down at a cafe table to eat them. Mommy drank an espresso with her chocolates. Joy and I had milk with ours. I had one that was flavored with green tea and lemongrass, and another that was chocolate and cinnamon. A lot of the chocolates I wanted to try had alcohol in them, though, so I couldn't eat them!  

More delicious Dutch chocolates

Lots of places sold a chocolate milk called Chocomel. That's yummy, too! It makes a good pick-me-up whenever you get tired. I had it at Keukenhof Gardens, Vondel Park, and with lunch while out and about. 

One night, we ate vlaamse frites -- Dutch for French fries -- for dinner! We had them with mayonnaise and Andalouse sauce, which is made with mayonnaise, ketchup or tomato paste, and spicy paprika. It was a good picnic dinner to eat along one of Amsterdam's many canals.

The Biggest Candy Store Ever

One of  Mommy's chocolate bar wrappers

It was Sunday, our last day in New York, but there was still time to do fun stuff. At around 1:00 p.m., Mommy and I took a bus to Dylan's Candy Bar. (If you can't guess what we were doing, we were buying candy.)

Dylan's Candy Bar is three floors tall, but the top floor is more of a cafeteria. The bottom floor was where Mommy and I did our shopping. It had a chocolate fountain, wall after wall of candy, souvenirs, T-shirts, and even dog treats. I chose jelly beans in eight flavors: coconut, raspberry, caramel corn, toasted marshmallow, strawberry cheesecake, pear, lemon-lime, and mango. They were so good! Mommy chose two Belgian dark chocolate bars.

Then I asked Mommy if I could walk around the floor for a bit. But the floor was bigger than either of us thought. Suddenly, I couldn't find her!

I asked an employee wearing bunny ears (it was Easter that day) who had helped us earlier, if she could help me find my mom. She did, and we were reunited by the wall of rainbow colored candies. We both thanked her a lot. Phew.

The wall of rainbow colored candies