Australian restaurants, sydney cafes, aussie food in other countries

I finally looked at Sean's link. I'm all for him and his operation.
I would quibble re the font, but none of my business on that.

In this world there is not just kung foo fighting but also font displeasure. I like the play of it, enjoyed it, not sure others would.

I've a favorite australian writer, Peter Robb, who has written books on Brazil and Sicily, basically describing his, um, wanderings but including history and present daily life, including food. I'll have to look up to see if he wrote books re Australia.
Oh, he wrote one on Caravaggio too.

I ate at an Outback once. The walls were covered with colorful boomerangs, so I set them up for the old joke. I said "They're only called boomerangs if they come back". They fell for it and asked what they were called if they didn't come back. I told them.

I was there and I didn't hear you re that. Hearing, always a problemo.
I'm not so sure I had to saw my meal that time, but I remember being highly grumpy about it.
And, by the way, thank you for the going to a local good place, taking the check.

White oz cuisine was basically a variant of British when I was little....only we had far more cheap meat and fresh veg.

Vegetables were boiled soft or baked or mashed.

We ate lamb chops and veg or fish and veg or beef and veg, with a bit of chicken. There was always a Sunday roast of some sort. Weekends might be eggs and "scratch" meals except for the roast. You'd get leftovers in your school sandwiches all week. Salads were served with just a bit of vinegar in my house.

For special occasions mums might go a bit French. Mornays were an exotic new food when I was about eight or nine! My father refused to eat such new dangled nonsense.

My family almost never used the ubiquitous tomato sauce that many of our neighbours did, but in other middle class homes where I grew up it was liberally splashed over almost everything.

As the influence of the huge waves of postwar migrants began to be felt, things such as spaghetti bolognese began to be seen.....but, in my house, only when my father wasn't there.

The daring hostess might rub a clove of garlic around a salad bowl and olive oil made an appearance.

Then, almost overnight it seemed, the stodgy Anglo oz palate seemed to surrender to wave after wave of cuisines. Italian, Greek, chinese, Lebanese, Japanese, Thai, Indian all became staples.

Then fusion food....

Now, as margo said, there's a merry mix of any cuisine you can think of. Some serve faithful versions of their national cuisine, many serve various fusions or modern versions.

Even my father, in his later years, surrendered and embraced the wonderful flavours of the world.

Thanks, helpful.

This happened at a bank's appreciation dinner for it's good customers in Farmington. You're thinking of a different occasion.

That bank obviously didn't appreciate you! I hope you moved your account.

Re: the old joke...g r o a n!

It isn't old if they hadn't heard it. Since they fell for it, they're probably still retelling it to new suckers.

My mum made us eat fried liver for a while. She tried to pretend that tripe was chicken. It was served in white sauce. Couldn't fool me! We happily ate crumbed brains until, in my case, I found out what it was!

Kippered herrings or smoked fish were an occasional weekend treat.

Like many kids of my era, we had a quarter acre block. We had nectarines (huge and juicy), so so peaches and oranges, wonderful grapes, soft shell almonds and plums , lemons and a delightful loquat tree.

We kids were nomadic in summer and autumn, following fruiting neighbourhood trees like flocks of birds.

We half grew up in a neighbour's olive grove with century old trees. The olives were sold to faintly threatening Italian families who put tarps on the ground and whipped the trees like convicts. They were faintly threatening because some of the men would attempt to be sexually inappropriate with us little girls.

Looking back at the food from that time I can't believe how hopelessly insular our food culture was. It was kept so for longer than necessary by many of the dads....they wouldn't tolerate any of those nasty oils or unknown herbs and spices! Meanwhile, mysterious shops full of strange things were springing up as migrants sold each other the food they were used to.

The region I live in has a strong local food culture, celebrated in farmers markets, little shops, restaurants big and small and huge wineries and export businesses.

We grow wine grapes, olives, nuts and fruit. There are local cheeses, free range chickens, eggs, turkeys, pigs, pheasants, quail, goats etc. I love locally made oils, cheeses, wines, olives, breads and seafood...some smoked.

http://fleurieupeninsula.com.au/food-wine

Your childhood menu looks much like that we had at home with my grandparents. The main differences were the lamb--although we ate mutton when i was very, very young, it disappeared along with lamb as it became increasingly rare in the American diet. We also ate veggies with every meal, and as we grew out own, usually of a very high quality--but no salads. We had a seemingly endless supply of a wide variety of fruit--some we grew, some we gathered in the woods.

Chinese restaurants were common even in small cities, so we could make a night out with that. Italian was less common, but still to be found. That was the extent of "exotic" cuisine. None of i twas spicy hot. The first big wave of "exotic" cuisine that i recall was pseudo-Mexican. Even in New York, which was where many of my relatives lived, one mainly saw Italian and Chinese, although of a better quality and in more variety. There was high-end French, but i never ended up in any of those restaurants. Greek and Thai seeped into the culture in the 1970s. Now, as i suspect is the case just about everywhere, just about anything can be found in most cities. In rural areas, i suspect it's not much changed since the 1950s.

Ok, that made me hungry. (I nabbed a couple of the recipes.)