I’m in the US for a brief visit. High on my list of things to do while here is to hit up the supermarket for some must-have staples I can’t find in Italy.

But, when I returned from the store, I had to laugh at my group of foods.  Only the brown sugar and the dried pintos (for the Mexican food I miss so much) will go back to Europe with me.  The other things will be gobbled up during my American visit.  Funny, right?  I adore the old-fashioned sour cream/onion soup mix dip from my childhood.  That on a great potato chip has got to be one of life’s greatest pleasures, at least to me!

I really like deviled ham (all these childhood flavors), but most of all I crave Welch’s grape juice.  It is a unique flavor in all of the world.  Trust me, I have sampled every grape juice I can find in Europe and none of them come close the the unique Welch’s juice.

Italians, in fact, think it is a great waste of the grape to make anything so simple as a juice when, with a little time and know-how, they can turn it into the miracle of wine!

There are some other things I will take back to Florence with me: dry yeast, vanilla extracts, otc meds like ibuprofen which is very expensive in Italy.  You can buy it in packages of 10s or 20s.  You get it only at a pharmacy and it isn’t otc.  You have to request it of the pharmacist.

I was amused to discover in London that while you can purchase meds like ibuprofen in the same way as we do in the US–that is, you can find it on a shelf in a bottle of 100 tablets or so–there is a limit as to how much you can purchase at one time.  The limit at the Boots Pharmacy I was in was 1 bottle of 100 tablets per visit.  Of course, with a little planning, you can get around that, but what a pain in the neck to stock up on a vacation.

All for now, I need to go drink some juice and have some chips and dip!