“A baked good that I always associate with being at my grandmother’s place…”

So this week, my husband and I took a little vacation, or I should say, try to take a little vacation and we went to Grand Rapids, just about two hours west of here, northwest of here. And I have to say, having our, our, our trip was made a little more challenging by the weather, because we wanted to do some things outside and it rained an awful lot. So some of those things weren’t possible and we even ended up coming home a little early. But our last day because we were casting about for things to do. I saw that there was a store in Wyoming, Michigan, which is like a suburb in the west of Grand Rapids. And they said that they serve — that they’re an importer and they had a lot of products from the Netherlands. And so I was intrigued by that since my family’s half Dutch, and so we drove out there and when we got in, and I was looking around at all the stuff, I saw that they had almond patties. And almond patties are a traditional Dutch baked good that I always associate with being at my grandmother’s place, visiting my grandmother’s house in Orange City, Iowa, which as I think I’ve mentioned before is a town that was like founded by Dutch settlers and still has a very strong Dutch identity. It’s not unlike Holland, Michigan in that. Anyway, one of the bakeries there makes these fantastic almond patties. And I’ve never had them anywhere else and I’ve never seen them anywhere else, and it’s probably been twenty years since I’ve had one, possibly more. So I saw that they had some there. And what was really interesting to me is that these that they had were from Iowa. They were frozen obviously brought in on some truck or something, I don’t know if Michigan people just don’t — just don’t make almond patties, maybe it’s more of an Iowa thing, whatever. We got some, and thawed one out and took a bite, and it was just like exactly as I remembered, and it just took me back to eating them as a kid and eating them when I was in Orange City, and it was just like a great memory and like a fantastic taste they are very rich and delicious and I really like them.

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