You can't get American donuts in Paris (at least not that I know of), but you can get them in New York on just about every corner. You know the kinds I mean? Round with a hole or twisted like a rope, glazed, powdered, chocolate covered, sprinkled, you name it sweet and gooey. Curbside stands offer every assortment imaginable with a "sock juice" of your choice. When I was living in Knoxville, Tennessee, the most popular spot in town was the Krispy Kreme where you could watch hot glazed donuts come right off the conveyer belt into a box where a dozen sat flat side by side. It was impossible to eat just one and I knew lots of folks who could down a dozen at a sitting. Today, Krispy Kreme is hot (no pun intended), opening shops coast to coast. Buy stock now.

Unfortunately, I didn't personally have the perfect burger during the entire binge, but in a classic diner in Manhattan, I ogled what I would call the real thing being served up, bigger and fatter and juicier than ever, smothered in cheese and bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup. They looked delicious and you could tell, by the sheer numbers of burgers coming off the grill, that they were about as good as they get. What a shame that the French don't have a clue how good a real burger can be, since their idea of an American hamburger is "MacDo."

By sheer fluke, we stumbled into another classic New York diner looking for a phone and a place to rest our weary feet. It turns out that Joe Junior's, at the corner of 12th Street and Avenue of the Americas, is where neighborhood folks line up for pea soup, a specialty only on Mondays and Saturdays. Luckily for us, it was Monday and I must say the pea soup was damned good. When I mentioned Joe Junior's to friends living in the city, they all said "of course," since it's an institution everyone in the know knows about. Gorgeous Gregg, son of Joe Junior and regular counter guy, seems to know the name of everyone who comes in, although he says after 26 years of serving up pea soup to the regulars, that's a piece of cake. We skipped the cake this particular afternoon.

My daughter's idea of American pig-out heaven is ribs. Baby Back Barbecued Ribs at Timothy's in Wilmington, Delaware are sold by the slab. One slab is a small portion. Ha! You should see the large portions. At the "Outback," Long Island's answer to an Aussie Barbie, imported ribs, smoked and grilled, served with Aussie chips (we call them "French fries" and the French call them "frites") and cinnamon apples are more than enough for two adults, I can assure you. More importantly than that, they were seriously "finger-lickin' good." Again, non-utensil dining, quite acceptable.

Throughout our journey we got hooked on root beer floats and argued whether they were better with vanilla or chocolate ice cream. Purists prefer vanilla. I prefer chocolate. The French have never heard of this concoction, mainly because they've never heard of or tasted root beer. Where I come from, Barq's is the best. We all seem to have our favorite brand. Friends we stayed with on Long Island have reported that now that we've left, they're hooked, too, as if it were a kind of contagious disease. I miss them already – the root beer floats and the friends.

In "our nation's capitol," we sopped up delicately spiced morsels of meats, chicken, shrimp and vegetables with Ethiopian "injera," a spongy crepe-like bread (slightly sour) in a restaurant in the Adams-Morgan area of Washington called Meskerem. The injera are layered on a round table and stew-like mixtures are piled on top, then more injera are used to scoop up and eat the stews. We all agreed that we liked the stews, but the spongy consistency of the injera left us cold. Once again, cutlery here is for the faint of heart. Considering the terrible starvation Ethiopia is experiencing now, it occurred to me that "Ethiopian Cuisine" is an oxymoron in itself.

Being in DC, so close to the Maryland shore where the blue crab is plentiful, was an opportunity for me I wasn't going to pass up. The Dancing Crab on Wisconsin Avenue often serves up "all-you-can-eat" boiled blue crabs in the traditional method simply on layers of newspaper along with a mallet for cracking the claws. My friends were long finished with their oyster sandwiches and clam chowder while I was still cracking and peeling. One dozen crabs and two hours later, I finally turned in my mallet in exchange for the check. My mother swears that one time while vacationing on the Gulf Coast, she and a friend ate one hundred crabs in one sitting after catching and boiling them, so it seems I inherited her appetite.

Lina's Sandwiches are pumping out paninis all over Paris and you can get a baguette filled with jambon de Paris in almost every boulangerie but you still can't get a real club sandwich in Paris. That's exactly what I got at the Lyric Diner on 3rd Avenue near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where a club sandwich consists of sliced breast of turkey, lettuce, tomato, bacon and mayonnaise on three pieces of whole wheat toast, cut into quarters, skewered by a "dressed-up" toothpick, accompanied by French fries and a dill pickle. Of course, I could only finish three of the quarters, half the fries, half the pickle, but, of course, I managed to down all of the root beer float. What's a club sandwich without a root beer float?

In the end, that last morning before our plane headed home to Paris, we had our favorite American food of all -- one big flat pancake with a fried egg on top, four strips of bacon, butter and syrup. What a shame I had to wash it down with "sock juice" and have my American "pig-out" come to a halting stop. It was certainly fun, undeniably memorable and I learned one very important thing: what's more American than apple pie? French fries, of course.

P.S. The French don't "pig-out." They "dine."