Australian Meals

Hi,

Though I'm in the States now, I grew up in Australia (Canberra). What I love about Australian food is the pumpkin. In Australia, it's more of what you Yanks would call a winter squash--though the taste between American winter squash, American pumpkins and Australian pumkins is very similar. We used to start with a pumpkin soup (once in awhile it would be cream of tomato soup) and maybe also a salad. Aussies love beetroot (that's beets to you), so there'd be some shredded beetroot in the salad. (We even ate beetroot on burgers and on all our sandwhices--yum!) A lot of our sodas had passion fruit in it, so that might be a beverage idea. I'm a vegetarian right now, but as a kid we used to have lamb (either roast, medallions, chops, leg, etc.) with chunks of potato and pumpkin served as avegetable--everything would be covered (though not smothered) with gravy. Sometimes we'd also have a broiled tomato. (Just cut a tomato in half and broil it--you can drizzle oil or butter or sprinkle with breadcrumbs if you want.) We also ate lots of fish and chips. For desert, we'd have Pavlova or trifle or ice cream sundaes with spearmint sauce (something American's don't seem to eat) or Sticky Toffee Pudding (a kind of cake with a brioled brown sugar topping). Oh, and don't forget the tea! Orange Pekoe is the closest thing I've found to what we used to drink. Hope this helps!
Steph