Aussie Food

G'day mates.

The food here in Australia is similar to California. They call their meals breakfast (or brekkie, because Australians love nicknames), lunch, and tea (this is their dinner). They eat pancakes, bacon and eggs, or cereal (called muesli) for brekkie; sandwiches and salads for lunch; and roasts, barbeque, pasta or fish for tea.

The most typical Australian food is barbeque. Barbeques are found everywhere: at home, on the beach, or in parks. They barbeque steaks, chops, sausages (called bangers), fish, or vegetables. This is where the famous line by Paul Hogan, who starred in the movie Crocodile Dundee, comes from. In a television advertisement to encourage tourists to come to Australia, he says, "I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you." Some of the shrimp (called prawns) are really as big as the one in his hand and they are delicious.

Another typical food is meat pies which are eaten for lunch. Meat pies are small pies with meat, vegetables and gravy inside. This is what they look like.

One other food that is popular here is vegemite. It is a dark, salty paste made from yeast that they spread on buttered bread. They eat it for breakfast, lunch or snacks, like people in California would use peanut butter. Children here like it, but it has a strong taste and can be an acquired taste for non-Australians.

Good on ya, mates, and keep your questions coming.

Kookaburras in the Trees

In my friend's backyard there is a family of Kookaburras that has lived here for about 15 years. They are beautiful birds, but can be a nuisance because they will dive into their fish pond and eat the largest fish. As a consequence, they have to cover the pond with mesh to save the fish.

These birds are only found in Australia and one of the most interesting things about them is that their call sounds like they are laughing. The main purpose of the kookaburra's call is to let other birds know of its territory and boundaries.

A kookaburra lives in one place for most of its life. It also mates for life. Kookaburras use their strong beaks to catch prey, including fish, small snakes, lizards, rodents, worms, beetles and other insects.

To catch its food, the kookaburra uses a wait-and-pounce technique, taking up a post with a good view. When prey appears, the kookaburra drops straight down from its perch, its wings back, with beak ready to grab its dinner. Large prey items like lizards and snakes are bashed against a tree or a rock, to kill them and soften them up before they are eaten.

Here is a photo of a kookaburra and the sound that it makes.

This is what a kookaburra sounds like.

Bye mates.

(Information about the kookaburra, including the sound, is from the New South Wales Government Department of Environment and Climate Change website: http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/plantsanimals/TheLaughingKookaburra.htm)

Singing Frogs

Did you ever hear a frog sing? Well, it's not really a song but one way that frogs communicate, especially to find a mate. Last night in a friend's garden I heard the amazing music for the first time.

By the sound it made, I think that it was the Eastern Sedgefrog, a small green frog that lives around here. Here is a picture of it.

The way that my friend got the frogs to sing was to turn off the lights and water the branches of a tree with a garden hose. This makes the frogs think that it's raining and they begin to sing. It was a loud sound, much louder than I would have imagined coming from a frog that is only 1 inch long.

Imagine sitting in your garden and hearing this sound. Click on this link: Hear my mating call

Bye for now, mates.

I Have Landed in Australia

I am now in Australia and so far the only wildlife I've seen was a Butcher Bird on my friend's front porch. A Butcher Bird is interesting because it eats meat. They are mostly insect eaters, but will also feed on small lizards and other meat. There are no kangaroos or koalas on the streets. In this part of Australia, they are only in zoos and wildlife parks. I'll get to see these on the trip but not yet.

The thing that is most different from the US is that they drive on the opposite side of the road. This is very confusing when you first get here. On another trip I was almost hit by a car because I was looking for cars to come from the opposite direction and didn't see it coming. Luckily, my friend pulled me back onto the side walk in time. The steering wheel is on the opposite side of the car, too, like the one in the picture. I keep trying to climb into the driver's side.


See ya, mates.

Foodie Har! Har! Goes to Australia

What do Americans know about Australian food? Well, there's Paul Hogan's famous, "Put another shrimp on the barbie," or vegemite for the daring, or maybe meat pasties if you have a friend who lives there. Over the course of the next month, you and I are about to find out a whole lot more. And not just about the food, but also the weather, strange customs, and anything different and curious about Australia or the Australian way of life-- from the point of view of a 10-year old.


The reason is that I was convinced by an elementary school computer teacher to blog my trip so that the kids in his 4th and 5th grade classes can get a sense for this vast and far-away country. This may be a departure from the "mission statement" of Foodie Har! Har! but it just might be fun nevertheless. So, here goes.

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Today, Wednesday, November 26th, I will fly out at 10:30 at night for an overnight flight on Qantas, which is Australia's largest airline. The flight will take 20 hours and I will arrive in Australia on Friday, November 28th in the morning, or 37 hours later. No, I am not horrible at math. The missing piece of information is that the time zone I am going to in Australia is 17 hours ahead of our time zone on the West Coast of the United States, and I will cross the date line, which means that it's the next day there. If the trip wasn't hard enough already, I will also miss Thanksgiving altogether... that's probably why the flight was so cheap. Maybe they will have turkey dinner on the plane. I'll let you know next time I get to a computer when I land.


What do I plan to do on the plane all those hours? Watch movies, of course. Last trip I watched four movies each way... a good way to catch up on all the movies I've missed. Next in priority comes sleep. With my little half-doughnut pillow, I can sleep quite well and my neck won't hurt or get all twisted. Maybe I'll read. I'm bringing a couple of books to get me in the mood for the trip. One is In a Sunburned Country, which is about Australia and very funny, and the other is Julie and Julia about a woman who tries to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's famous French food cookbook in one year. She was a blogger and an inspiration to me as a fellow "foodie," roughly defined as one who loves really good food.




I'm including a map of Australia at the top so you can see where I'm going. I will land in Sydney and stay there a couple of hours, and then fly on to Brisbane, about 600 miles away, which is a short flight compared to flying across the Pacific Ocean, but is still farther than going from San Diego to San Francisco. Will I see kangaroos on the street? Are there wild koalas in the trees? I can't wait to see what will happen. I'll post and tell you more about it when I land.



The Australian Outcast

The Official Launch of Foodie Har! Har!

You’ve heard of fast food and slow food, even underground food, but what about fun food? I first stumbled upon this illusive form in New York while on a business trip much like any other and I must admit that it left me hungering for more. Ultimately, it became the inspiration for this blog: Foodie Har! Har! – A Light-Hearted Look at the World of Haute Cuisine, whose goal is to seek out and experience fun food the world over.

My first encounter with fun food was at Aquavit, a Scandinavian restaurant known for its infused vodka drinks, or aquavits. At the time I was in the municipal bond business traveling with a group of public officials to rate their bonds on Wall Street. To make the meetings more palatable, so to speak, our trips always included a dinner at a top restaurant, preferably with a Zagat food rating over 25 and a month-long waiting list.

For our large party, we were required to order the tasting menu, which paired each course with a complementary aquavit or other alcoholic drink. This would have been a winner, except that the food portions were extremely small and the beverages inversely generous. Within minutes, as everyone became soused, a group of loosely-associated business colleagues turned into what sounded like a fraternity party after emptying the third keg.

The first course was the soup, which consisted of two tablespoons of puree served in a large white bowl more appropriate as a serving dish for a family of four. While we were furiously trying to scoop up every last drop, someone in the group yelled out, "Does anyone have a squeegee?" This set the tone for the evening. Soon the lamb chop was renamed the "lamb chip", and the quarter-sized dessert chased by our fifth aquavit started a chorus of recommendations for where to get a good hamburger after dinner. I’ve forgotten most of the jokes and witty banter, but I do recall the laughter. You could have taped the evening for later use as a comedy laugh track.

I just had to ask myself, could food and dining be this amusing elsewhere?’ Together with another diner that fateful evening, we became The Outcasts and officially launched Foodie Har! Har! to investigate this hypothesis and let others in on the joke. The Outcasts love good food, and we will tell you straight when the food is to our liking, but we will also find every opportunity to lighten up the experience. Our hope is that restaurant owners and patrons alike will join in the hilarity. Who knows, the idea of fun food could take dining to a whole new level.


The Outcasts