It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!

It’s peanut butter jelly time! At least I thought so. On Sunday, I walked up to Oasis to visit Spar, the world’s largest independent food retail chain, to grab a few groceries for the residence. My primary objective-bread, peanut butter, jelly. I was given a list of “American” items that were available for purchase here, and these were on there, so it never even crossed my mind to pack any to bring along. Maybe I should have asked some specific questions. Here is a pic of the peanut butter that was available for purchase.

Yeah, that’s right-American Gardens “brand”. Ever heard of it before? Me either. Maybe because it is based in Dubai, NOT America!

The website describes their peanut butter as follows: "The Dutch peanut butter is very different from its Canadian and American counterpart. It is sharp instead of sweet and most people say it tastes kind of like Satay." Keep in mind that I’m from Dothan, AL, the Peanut Capital of the World, so taste of peanut products is something that I don’t take lightly.

Moving on to price. Either because this is an American item (aka Americans will actually spend the money no matter the cost to get their hands on it) or because it is an import, a jar is actually pretty expensive. This 18oz. jar was Rs. 280, or about $6. To put that in perspective, I could eat a feast at lunch or get a jar in the states about 2.5 times larger for the same price.

The peanut butter is definitely edible, but the bread-not so much. I searched and evaluated all of the choices of bread at Spar, and picked the loaf that I thought was most similar to bread in the states. However, I quickly discovered that the bread, in terms of size and texture, was actually more of a mix between melba toast and sourdough. Dry, hard, and basically burnt ‘crusts’ (hence the texture of the actual bread).

The jelly taste is simply indescribable (aka not good), so I can’t even go into detail about it. Needless to say, the sum of these parts did not make for a very good PB&J.

So much for bringing a good old American classic to lunch one day. This week has gotten off to a rocky start.