Warrior 4 Jesus wrote:Some people like Vegemite, some don't. I enjoy the spread but I don't plaster it onto my bread/savoury biscuit. You need a liberal amount of butter and then a light spread of Vegemite.
Fauns, I love both steak and Vegemite but couldn't care less about surfing and the cricket. There are very few sports that interest me. I love to put garlic and soy-sauce on my lamb chops when I cook them. Have you tried that combination?
I do sympathise about the sport obsession. It isn't as bad as it used to be pre-TV (1960) when Saturday afternoon radio was sport, sport and more sport, including incessant racing commentary. I once got a hiding for turning off the races, being tired of the drone. The only way you could avoid it was to retreat into a book somewhere down the back yard, or go to the cinema, which, in those days, often had Movietone news as well as a feature film and a cartoon or two. Sometimes, especially after 1960, I'd go to the "Shorts", which were all news and cartoons which I often preferred to films I didn't always enjoy.
We use soy sauce a lot, here, at any rate, and of late I've noticed Linseed & Soy have become very popular additions to bread and corn thins as well as honey soy potato crisp flavourings. Once a friend even used soy sauce to darken some paint that was the wrong colour.
. Chinese cooking has become so popular throughout the years, that it has become almost mainstream, a change from the days when my grandmother warned me never to eat chop suey, basically an Australian or western invention. A visit to China taught me that fried rice, another Australian favourite, was not as popular in China as in Australia. Chinese often merely steam the rice.
W4J and
Ilf, do you by any chance know of a lady called Flo Bjelke-Petersen? She even published a book of Australian cooking, based on the sorts of recipes compiled also by the Country Women's Association or in the Common Sense Cookery book we used in high-school domestic science. Recipes included pumpkin scones, rhubarb pie, trifle, lamingtons, pikelets, crumpets, jawcracker toffees & chocolate crackles, probably, and maybe some "nice" little party snacks made of slices of devon (polony or fritz to you) wrapped around a mashed potato filling & skewered with a toothpick.
These sorts of books taught how to cook chokoes, marrows and squashes, savoury mince, crumbed cutlets, rissoles, meat loaf, brawn, corned beef, cottage pie, meat pies, roast lamb (of course), not to mention the mint sauce, and a family favourite that I adapted to suit my own family - sea pie. You learned how to cook a rabbit, a staple for many people in the Great Depression, who, thanks to the rabbit plague, then got something to eat, and which also explains the name for the South Sydney Rabbitos NRL team.
My eldest daughter told us about a couple she once served for breakfast, who had tried to eat a teaspoon of Vegemite, just like that. No wonder they didn't like it. But I've heard eating Vegemite that way makes a good hang-over cure. I've eaten so much Vegemite that I've even been nicknamed Vegemite in my younger days, and it is still a staple & a good alternative to jam.
Also Aeroplane Jelly, Kraft cheese (which I ended up disliking intensely), and Worcestershire sauce, an old favourite, & alternative to tomato sauce. We used to have caramel toffees called Columbines, wrapped individually in bright turquoise & magenta colours, jaffas to roll down the aisles at the matinees, and iced vo-vo's and princess biscuits, just like Dame Edna Everidge talks about on her shows.
I'd say that at least some Australians seem to prefer barbecues, mixed grills and pan or stir fried foods at home, rather than deep fried items like fish and chips, chicken pieces, chico rolls and souvlaki, which are available at canteens and fast food places. The trouble with deep frying is the amount of cooking oil or fat used to do it, what to do with the used cooking oil afterwards, and the very real danger of burns and house-fires due to unattended or inexpert deep frying.
I've tried kangaroo and emu, but couldn't quite manage crocodile, witchety grubs or anything more exotic than that, eg snake. On the other hand some aboriginal condiments such as wattleseed, bush tomato, pepperleaf and native mint are really good additives in cooking. Macadamia nuts are native to Australia, not Hawaii, but I'm not sure if passion fruit, pawpaw or mangos are from here or from elsewhere. Some native fruits such as lilli pilli, cumquots, or quandongs have also been used in jellies and jams.
I still love damper with golden syrup, pikelets, crumpets & even Anzac biscuits.
I shall have to try to remedy this, as it's not like we don't appreciate spicy food in my house, considering the liberal use of pepper and chipotle powder. 
)
Unfortunately I didn't buy enough stuff to keep that store in business for long. 
I was able to guess by context what 'get a hiding' was, but it wasn't a familiar expression.
