Care packages

My sister L (SL) sent us a care package, because she is lovely and wonderful. Unlike Australia Post, who, after making one attempt to deliver it when I wasn’t home, whisked it away to a post office in the next suburb over, rather than the one which is a 3-minute walk from my house, and refused to re-deliver. This left me, in my carless state, in a slight quandary as to how I should proceed. I called SL first, for more information.

“How big is it?” I asked.

“Big,” she responded. “Too big to carry on foot, or probably on your bike either.”

Based upon that report, I didn’t particularly feel like trying to wrestle it on to the bus, either, so after further discussion and consideration, I came up with a plan. I borrowed DP’s field pack, packed a box cutter in my handbag, and cycled off up the road. I figured if the box was as big as I feared, I could unpack it at the post office, stuff the contents into the pack, break down the box, and be on my way.

As it turned out, DP’s pack was big enough to contain the box without any box-cutter machinations, thankfully; I wasn’t looking forward to freaking out everyone in the post office. (Or maybe it’s just me who is permanently slightly freaked out by box cutters?)

Note the identifying ribbon – a gift from Miss B. I love thinking about the incongruous places that ribbon has been.

After a somewhat painful but mercifully short ride home with the loaded pack on my back, I extracted the box from the pack and tore into on the kitchen table.

 

And, lest anyone think that I harbor any delusions about presenting myself here as a foodie or food snob of any description, allow me to share with you what SL knew – without asking – we would really, really want to get.

 

Hope your weekend is filled with all the things you like best.

Fizzy drinks

It’s been almost exactly ten months since I kicked my Pepsi habit. It’s going well: I haven’t cut myself off totally, but I don’t really keep it in the house anymore and I order it less and less when I go out to eat. The less I drink it, the sweeter it tastes and the less I like it.

As I’ve gotten some distance from my fixation, I’ve learned that what I really crave from Pepsi is the fizz. So I’ve been focusing on ways of getting that without an unwanted heaping dose of HFCS thrown in. (Since I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth, I don’t miss the sugary part, and now that I’ve isolated the carbonation I’ve discovered that by itself it is not sweet at all, which makes me like it even more.)

Superlative snacking

I can hardly begin to quantify the number of things I learned about cultural diversity and human nature during my years of living overseas, but I must also confess that many of the most memorable lessons are less than profound. Prominent among these is my recollection of the first time I went to the movies (or should I say the cinema) in England. Having bought my ticket, I went to the concession stand and requested popcorn.

“Salt or sweet?” inquired the helpful person standing behind the counter.

Tonic detox

If you don’t know me personally, here is an embarrassing fact about me you probably also don’t know: despite all the time I spend baking my own bread, making desserts from scratch, and buying one-ingredient food items, I can count on two hands the number of days I have gone in the past quarter-century plus without consuming tonic (aka soda, pop, fizzy drink—using “tonic” to describe a carbonated beverage is the linguistic stamp of an old-school Bostonian of a certain age, FYI). Specifically, Pepsi.

UK recap

I’m back in the US, jet lagged and still recovering from four solid days of meetings and thinking and face-to-face social interaction. I’m glad to be back, but I had a great trip—and was reminded in about equal measure of the things I miss, and don’t miss, about living in the UK.

Worlds collide

Every so often, something happens to make me remember that the world isn’t quite as big a place as it sometimes seems when I contemplate the three-day odyssey involved in getting from, say, Canberra to Boston. Or vice versa.

I’m not talking about the juggernaut of corporate globalization, where you can find the same fast food and sports and children’s entertainment icons wherever you go, to the point where you start to wonder why you bothered to travel in the first place. I’m talking about little, quirky, personal things—like seeing the same 1984 Toyota Camry hatchback that was my first car 16 years ago: it and its Boston counterparts long since devoured by harsh winters and road-salt rust, but still going strong in Canberra’s relatively mild climate—that make me feel, for a full second or three, as if I’ve been thrust through a hole in the space/time continuum and I’m not exactly sure where I am. You know that feeling you get when you wake up in a strange place? Like that, only when fully awake. College sweatshirts; secondhand books; the WGBH logo at the end of a program on Australian TV; sometimes even a particular quality of light or air is enough to bring about this mental vertigo, part happy recognition, part homesickness. It used to happen in England, too, but the greater sense of disorientation in Australia (the distance, the reverse-seasons thing) has exacerbated it.

It happened today when DP walked in after work and dropped a Hershey bar with almonds on my desk. There are quite a few types of American candy readily available in Australia, manufactured specifically for the Australian market (usually in China), but Hershey’s isn’t among them. There’s a small grocery store in town that has a selection of stuff imported from the US; DP passes it on his walk to work, and stops in when he or Miss B is craving Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He spotted this, remembered it was my one of my favorites, and bought me one.

Where am I again? And what month is it, anyway?

(photos: album cover, Getting Friendly with Music, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra: exhibition of obscure album covers, Canberra Museum, June 2009; The Office (US) inspired graffiti, electrical box, Canberra neighborhood; the iconic Converse All-Star logo, Canberra shoe store; Hershey bar with almonds at the end of its long journey from Hershey, PA, USA)

Habit forming

I posted here a while back about how junk food is peculiar to where you are. I’ve also noticed that this is true of ethnic food, to my woe: first I spent nine years lamenting the complete absence of scallion pancakes in British Chinese restaurants. Then I went back to the US and found that poppadoms and pickle are not in fact the universal default starter in Indian restaurants (much to Miss B’s and my chagrin).

So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that pizza, perhaps the most ubiquitous ethnic food of them all, doesn’t seem to have much of a presence here in Canberra. Oh, don’t get me wrong: you can get pizza, but it’s not a given item on every Italian restaurant menu, and the big food court at the main shopping center doesn’t have a pizza stall. A kebab stall, a sushi stall--and no pizza slices?!

During our recent extended stay in Boston, we quickly fell into the habit of Friday night as takeout night. DP and Miss B always, always opted for our local pizza takeout. I got bored with this after a while--when you have a toddler you seem to end up eating a lot of pizza--and switched to Thai takeout from across the street. I left Boston thinking I didn’t care if I never saw another pizza. I rapidly changed my tune when it started to look as though that might actually be the case. Unable to find any pizza (eat-in or takeout) worth going out of my way for within a one-mile radius, I turned to the last resort of the hungry expat: figure out how to make my own, so the Friday family pizza habit could continue.

Since I had already gotten back on the breadmaking bandwagon by this point, I was already partway there. I use the same dough for both, and just cut off a sizeable chunk of whatever’s in the fridge to make a crust with. I then stretch it out (laboriously and clumsily—how do the guys in Bertucci’s make it look so easy?) to fit on a round baking sheet which I have greased and floured (some people use semolina here, and I would too, if I ever remembered to buy any), coat it with pizza sauce (see below), dot with pepperoni slices (or other topping of your choice), and sprinkle with mozzarella cheese. Bake in a very hot oven for 10-15 minutes, and maybe run under the grill/broiler for a minute if you want to get the cheese just so. Don’t let it burn.

This is another one of those things that you will totally impress yourself with, just by making it. I pulled my first one out of the oven and said, out loud, “Wow! That actually looks like a pizza!”

As opposed to....?


Zesty Pizza Sauce
2 T olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
¼ t red pepper flakes (more if no one in your house is liable to say, "Too spicy!")
1 can tomato paste, or a few good squeezes/scoops from a tube/jar of same
1 28oz can (or 2 400g cans) tomatoes

Heat olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pan and sauté garlic and pepper briefly. Add tomato paste and let cook for a minute or two, then dump in tomatoes. If you are using whole ones, try to squish them a bit. Keep the pan at a fairly high heat, as you want to evaporate all the liquid and make a very thick tomato sauce. This means that you will end up with tomato sauce splattered all over your stove. You can partially cover the pan to limit this, but it will take longer to cook the sauce. Cook until you can drag a wooden spoon across the bottom of the pan and see a trail. You can jazz this up with other flavors too. This makes enough for at least two pizzas; I freeze the rest in the hope that one Friday I’ll have dough in the refrigerator and sauce to defrost, and dinner will be really quick and easy. Maybe by then it will also take me less than 40 minutes of dough-wrassling to produce a believable crust.

Going native

In addition to trying to recreate my own little food comfort zone (see previous post), I am also taking the opportunity to try some of the characteristic foods of my new host country—one of the perks of international travel. And the Australian food item that I have heard the most rhapsodizing about, hands down, is Tim Tams.

I bet you thought I was going to say Vegemite, right? Well, I’ve heard plenty about Vegemite too, but not in quite the same strain of fulsome desire as Tim Tams. I mentally classify Vegemite with Marmite and peanut butter—sticky staple foods that are delicious and comforting to those who were brought up on them, but equally likely to taste disgusting to those who were not. I’ve never heard anyone longing for Vegemite on a chat show.

If my own experience is anything to go by, the staple foods are not what you really, really crave when you are far from home—not least because you can often track them down in specialty or expat shops, if you’re willing to pay the price. Or maybe find a reasonable local substitute. No, what I really miss abroad is junk food, which I have found is still pretty localized and idiosyncratic, the globalization of nearly everything notwithstanding. As a professed chowhound and whole foods wannabe, I’m embarrassed to admit that the food items I am most likely to request for myself, from visitors or senders of care packages, are Cheez-Its and SweeTarts. So I can completely understand, theoretically, why a full-grown Australian would confess to an international TV audience how much they missed a cookie. Even Americans have told me I had to try them. Anything that gets that much hype is a no-brainer to at least taste. I bought some as soon as I had room on my shopping list for a few non-essential items.

So what kind of cookie are Tim Tams, anyway? They are a cakey chocolate sandwich, with a layer of chocolate cream in the middle, and the whole thing is covered with a coating of chocolate. So, very chocolatey. Despite this, my verdict is only: pretty good. They're really a little sweet for me. I’ll finish the package, and maybe even buy them again, but I don’t think I’d pick them over my enduring favorite adopted cookie (from the UK), the dark chocolate covered HobNob.

Not that I’ll be mentioning that to any Australians. I think it might be grounds for deportation.