Vegemite, fish soup and cassava pie

from Wendy

Food fights

On the television this morning was a scene of children having a food fight. I said to Junior, ‘I don’t remember you kids ever chucking food around and at each other.’ He answered, ‘You never fed us enough. We wouldn’t waste any of it!’ Oh dear, I don’t think so. They all grew up to be over 90 kilograms and about six foot tall!

Vegemite

Then he said, ‘No one would swap sandwiches with us at school.’ I wonder why. Didn’t anyone else like vegemite and wilted lettuce sandwiches?
The Kraft company is having trouble at present, putting staff off. It makes Vegemite, the great Aussie food icon, which my brothers and I all grew up on, eating it on toast for breakfast for years and years.



White or brown sugar

In Fiji where there are four sugar mills, ordinary people eat a light brown sugar, and white sugar is rarely seen. When one Fijian guy came to Australia he stayed overnight at the YMCA and at breakfast was given steak. On the table was a container filled with white sugar, and he thought it was salt, so he just sprinkled it all over his steak. Hmmm. Rather sweet and people were watching, but he just kept on eating, not to miss out on a huge steak.


Fish soup

We were drinking kava the other night and T was telling us about the time he stayed in a very posh hotel. He and his partner had ordered fish. Well, in Fiji it is customary to drain the dish – even a large plate – if there is liquid or any kind of soup left. This was a restaurant with white linen tablecloth, etc. and T.s partner said, No, don’t pick up your plate and drain the soup. It’s not done here. So he saw a straw near his drink, so he just used that. The hovering waiter just raised one eyebrow. Later when the waiter brought the two dishes of icecream sweet to the table two straws were daintily placed into the icecream!

A muesli bar

The two Tasmanian miners who had been trapped underground for fourteen days told their story on TV last week For the first six days the only food they had was one muesli bar one of the men found in his pocket. They waited two days without eating, then broke it in half. They ate it very very slowly. Unfortunately one man dropped his piece into the rubble and couldn’t find it again. When the rescuers eventually made contact and a pipe was made, clean water, Sustegan, and eventually food was sent down to them in a pipe, while the rescuers carefully exploded the rock under them to make a tunnel to free them.




Cassava

A staple food in Fiji is called cassava which is a white root vegetable without much taste, and when raw is actually poisonous. It seems to be pure starch. One time I grated it, boiled it, to make a starch to add to dye for screen printing! We buy it in Geelong at a Chinese grocery, frozen, and it comes from Thailand I think. We eat it about once a week. It’s not as nutritious as dalo (taro). Cassava can make a tasty kind of cake though by adding sugar and coconut cream.