For our twelfth meal, we dined down under! Australian cuisine is evidently much like American, but I tried to pick distinctively Aussie dishes.
The most iconic Australian food is apparently chicken parma (chicken parmesan), which is served in every pub -- but I couldn't bring myself to do an iconic Italian dish and call it our Australian dinner. So I went with the second most iconic Australian dish, an Aussie original: meat pie with tomato sauce, what the locals call "a dog's eye with dead horse." Despite the unappetizing moniker, it was quite good!
This was the simplest meal I've made thus far, since a lot of the items were pre-made, but a few elements were time-consuming. The tomato sauce was simple to prepare, but simmered for 3 hours before being pureed into a thick sauce. It has an interesting flavor-- sweet, with notes of clove, allspice, onion, peppercorn, and cayenne. The most surprising ingredient to me was the green apple!
I was sick this week and still feeling kind of run down today, so I used store bought pastry for the pie instead of making it from scratch, as I would normally do. It was still good though! These were very tasty but the meat filling was very rich and hearty, neither of us could finish ours. They paired well with Foster's beer.
We tried that most traditional of Australian flavors -- VEGEMITE (a yeast concentrate spread) -- shown on toast in photo above. By god, it was terrible! Haha. No disrespect to our Aussie friends -- I'm sure it's a taste that grows on you. I used a small amount of it in the meat pie, where it lent a pleasantly subtle umami flavor -- but on its own it was like eating bitter tar. We also had a salad with beetroot, which is apparently ubiquitous in Aussie cuisine.
For our final foray into Australian flavors, we tried Fairy Bread! A staple of children's parties, Fairy Bread is buttered bread covered in 'hundreds and thousands' (or what we would call nonpareils... or simply sprinkles). It tasted exactly as you would imagine. :) But it was too cute a novelty not to try.
For our entertainment, we watched a very charming comedy called The Castle, about the Australian dream -- every person getting their fair shot, and a chance to own their own piece of property. We've been trying to keep it fairly light with these films, so I chose not to screen a movie about the nation's fraught relationship with their Aboriginal peoples -- apparently it's an ugly history, similar to the US/Native American story. It has been enlightening, when selecting these date night films, to see what crises consume the psyche of different nations. (For Hungary's date night, for example, I opted against various holocaust films.)
I've long wanted to visit Australia, because my favorite TV show, Farscape, was filmed there. Hopefully one day!
When? October 24, 2020
Who cooked? Lauren
Australia Stats
- Population: 24,898,152 (more people than Florida, but fewer than Texas!)
- GDP: 1,235 (19th in the world)
- Life Expectancy: 83.3 (excellent! 7th in the world. Although there are significant health disparities-- in 2016, the Australian Indigenous population’s life expectancy was about 10 years lower.)
- Founding Date/Age in 2020: 1901 / 119
- Official Language: English (de facto)
- Largest producer of wool, bauxite, lithium, titanium, zirconium, tantalum
- Largest uranium reserves
- Best performance at Rugby League World Cups (men)
- Winner of most Cricket World Cups (men)
