Australia Trip Part III: Food and Wine

So as I mentioned before, Australian has excellent food, but not so excellent cuisine. There's nothing really distinctive or unique about Australian cuisine--it's pretty similar to English and American cuisine. But I found the quality of food to be quite good. Though the fancy Australian restaurants were about the same quality as fancy American restaurants, I thought the simpler foods were of much better quality than their American counterparts. For example, a quick sandwich at random snack shop would have really good bread (always freshly toasted), organic deli meat, fresh tomatoes and lettuce, and a nice slice of brie or other flavorful cheese. Good enough to make you forget that it cost $8 (like all the other lunchtime fare you could get).

Three foods stood out in particular:

-Seafood: Australians put a strong emphasis on the quality and variety of their fish. Fish and chips could be made from any number of different fish, like cod, barramundi, trevalla, flake (shark), salmon, etc. And of course, there was some unique stuff too, like the "bay bugs" (shown above). Pretty similar to lobster, but definitely a different animal.

-Coffee: I'm not a coffee drinker, so my opinion here probably shouldn't matter here. But pretty much every cup of coffee I had at breakfast was really good. I rarely drink coffee, but I pretty much had a cup every morning while I was there.

-Scones: I only mention them because they're significantly different (and better) than the American versions. I had a scone in a coffee shop, and it was much closer to being a buttermilk biscuit than a typical scone. So good. I later found that the best way to eat them was by topping it with jam and whipped cream. Sounds good to me...

Another fun food-related thing we did was to take a cooking class at the Sydney Seafood School. Located at the Sydney Fish Market near Darling Harbour, it holds several classes each week, and we decided to enroll in the Thai cooking class, which began with us buying ingredients in a Chinatown grocery store and ended with us cooking and feasting upon four different Thai dishes at the end of the day. We learned quite a bit about how to balance the different Thai flavors, and we ended up making some really good seafood dishes: Tomyum soup with prawns, red curry with fish fillets, grilled squid salad in fish sauce, and fresh Thai fish cakes. It was a lot of fun (especially the eating part of it).

We also indulged in some of the local wines at nearby Hunter Valley, a wine region located a mere 2 hour drive away from downtown Sydney. Wines were really drinkable and for some reason they offered a large selection of sweet and semi-sweet dessert wines. No surprise here--Wacky Chinagal liked these the best.

People in wine country always seem to be friendly, but the people in Hunter Valley were super nice, and we really enjoyed getting to know the locals. This guy we met at the Peterson's Champagne House had cool mustache.



More Australia stuff to come...