Can you smell what the Oz is cooking?

I think it is time for a post about the thing that you all REALLY care about. Food. Delicious, nutritious, and otherwise.

Let’s start with the epically awesome Tim Tams. I know I have described the wonder that is the Tim Tam Slam with hot chocolate, but did you know there are other varieties of Tim Tams? The best, in my opinion, is the double coated ones. The extra chocolate makes it perfect, the inside gets gooey and you can still hold onto it. Erin loves the dark chocolate ones. There are also these things called Tim Tam Crumbles. These Tim Tams are things like Cookies and Cream, and are a little slice of awesome. While still wonderful with hot liquids, they are just as good on their own. A third category of the delicious cookies is the ones with stuff inside them. These include caramel and a hazelnut one. The problem with these is that when refrigerated, the gooey stuff becomes really hard to bite through. I am not much of a fan of the consistency of the goo, when it melts the chocolate is very malleable but the caramel and hazelnut cream stay about the same. It isn’t as melty.

Did you know that in Australia they call cookies biscuits? I think biscuits as we know them don’t really exist here, they didn’t have them at the KFC (KFC in Australia, I’m still shocked) here, and if any place would have biscuits KFC would. Some other fun names for things include tater tots being called potato gems (hee hee, I’m keeping that once I get back. Potato gems…) and French fries being chips.

Speaking of chips, fish and chips is flipping everywhere here. You would think this was England! Pretty much every restaurant has fish and chips, and I have seen several places dedicated solely to sole and other fish. I’m pretty content, as it is usually delicious. A restaurant on campus called 2nd Degree has fantastic fish and chips, nice and light and just the right size for a lunch.

Other places to eat are severely Asian geared. There is a huge Asian population in Australia, and they brought their food from each of their countries. This is fresh-off-the-boat (Kylie said it so it’s not racist) food, as real as you are going to get outside of the actual country the food came from. What is very weird is that many of the places felt the need to take on two types of food. There are Chinese-Malaysian places, Vietnamese-Chinese, Korean-Sushi. Each place obviously has their specialty, but they have food on their menus from both. I am really craving some Rice Café bastardized terrible fried delicious Chinese. They don’t really have bastardized Chinese food here, probably because the Chinese actually live here. Imagine that.

When you ask for lemonade to drink, here you get Sprite. It’s actually rather refreshing. I haven’t figured out what they call real lemonade, yet but I’m enjoying the Sprite-lemonade. When I went to London it was the same way, so I think the US is just weird with our lemonade lemonade.

Here you have to pay for ketchup. Yeah. I know. Those of you who know my eating habits know that ketchup forms the base of my food pyramid. This is either a large hit for my wallet or my diet; I’ve chosen to even it out. A ramekin of ketchup will run 25 cents to 50 cents, depending on where it is and what the size of it is. Some more casual places with the little packets of ketchup will give the first free, then you have to pay for the others you want. Feel free to begin making jokes about how you’re surprised I haven’t starved yet.

What they do have, however, is ketchup chips. What. The. Hell. Apparently they are pretty big in Canada as well, how do we not have these in the US?! I have yet to try them, they sound pretty nauseating but I figure I will give them a try along with the Cheese and Bacon Cheetos that keep calling my name.

Another interesting flavor they have is sweet chili. Holy crap, this flavor is fantastic. It is a sauce or a chip flavor, and it is fantastic. It is sort of like a zingy sour cream and onion flavor, which sounds disgusting in theory but is magical in practice. How this has not crossed the ocean, I will never know because it is my new favorite chip flavor. Better than barbecue, better than sour cream and onion, better than popcorn.

One thing that is very interesting is the variety of textures the Aussies like to play with. They have twice as many candy bars as we do, Cadbury is huge here. There are lots of chocolates that are very different than the Hershey’s bars we have. I tried a candy bar called Aero, which was essentially lots of very tiny bubbles of chocolate coated in a layer of chocolate to give it a solid appearance. If you hold it in your mouth, the thin layers of chocolate inside forming the bubbles will melt and you can actually hear and feel them popping. Its very light and easy to eat and crazy interesting.

Last night I had a candy bar that was shaped like a Twix, but inside were very thin tiny long strips of chocolate. It was crumbly and like nothing I have tried before. Very tasty, and when it melty very creamy. Cadbury has some good stuff man; we in the States are missing out. I have a list of about four other candy bars that I’ve never even heard of that I want to try.

Another delicious Aussie sweet treat is something called a lamington. Basically it is a sponge cake coated in a thin layer of chocolate then covered in coconut shavings. I’m not a big coconut fan, so I didn’t much like the texture that it added, but the flavor is just light enough to balance the chocolate and cake. The cake is fluffy and delicious and you could eat a vat of it and still have room for more. And since it is mostly air, it doesn’t really count.

There is this chain of fantastic bakeries around Brisbane (possibly further, I haven’t been enough places to tell) that has fresh baked delicious things every day. They are made in house and they have muffins and donuts and sausage rolls and it is all fantastic and reasonably priced. The muffins are what stick out in my head. The flavors are all very subtle, just enough. Even the triple chocolate muffin is not overwhelmingly chocolaty as one would expect it to be.

Well that is about it. What? You say I left something out? Hm I don’t think so. Oh. Wait. I suppose I can’t have a blog post about food without talking about the food of all foods. The stereotypical Aussie treat. Vegemite.

Yes I have tried it. Twice in fact! I forgot what it tasted like the first time as I only had a bite, so for the sake of this post I made myself some toast, slathered on the butter, and spread that Vegemite thin, just the way it is supposed to be made. It isn’t as bad as you are led to believe. I’m a pretty picky eater and I probably could finish the piece if I set my mind to it. It has a salty, strange flavor that isn’t, in my opinion, bad at first. The lingering aftertaste is what I found to be the nasty part. I ate a cookie to wash it out. The lingering taste is a much lesser form of the smell of the stuff. Stale butt, that is the smell. If you are ever presented with a jar of Vegemite and want to know what I’m talking about, don’t take a huge whiff. You will probably die.

That’s it so far (that I can think of and wanted to make note of anyway). I have yet to try Roo, though I have heard good things. It’s on the list! I keep saying that like there is an actual list. There isn’t. But if there were, trying kangaroo would be on it.