I wonder if I should be concerned that almost all of my posts are about food. Hmm.
Well we went to a farmers’ market on Saturday that I’d been wanting to go to for a while. It’s called Eveleigh Markets and it’s in the Newtown/Chippendaleish area. It’s only open on Saturdays, and then only from 8am to 1pm (oh Australia, you so crazy!). Anyway they have a pretty sharp-looking website and I thought it would be fun to see the Australian equivalent of the Union Square greenmarkets, where producers from around the local area come into the city with their awesome seasonal produce and organic meat and dairy products (do I sound like a yuppie yet?) and also a few people with jam or baked goods or things like that. I get really alarmingly excited about farmers’ markets because I like to cook and (despite my self-deprecating knock about yuppies) I’m really obsessed with learning about food production and impact etc.
Well, the Eveleigh market was sort of the reverse of the Union Square market. They had a bunch of finished products like jams and whatnot, and a lot of what seemed like just regular cafes with booths doling out coffee and snacks, with a couple of actual farm booths interspersed. It was a place for people to take their dogs and kids on a Saturday morning and sit down and have breakfast, not really a mecca for buying and learning about fresh local ingredients. Well, they did have a lot of meat operations available, so I guess if you wanted eggs or meat, you’d be flying high. And they had a barbeque joint frying up meat which smelled delicious. So I guess I’d say, recommended for a fun brunch, less so for ingredient shopping (except meat). I’m still hoping to locate a knock-out farmers’ market in Sydney (and hopefully one that isn’t mystically open for one hour a month like some kind of Hogwart’s Express). I need to try out the Paddy’s Market one - although from what I’ve heard I’m worried that it’s not so much about local farmers - and possibly the Pyrmont one - although I’ve heard things that make it seem similar to the Eveleigh one. Maybe we’re just spoiled in New York?
Due to the resounding popularity of my musk stick post, I decided to take a closer look at some of the other unfamiliar candy populating the grocery store shelves. I took the husband to IGA so he could point out what he thinks are the most unusual Australian candies, but I have a sneaking suspicion that he really just pointed out the ones he thinks are the most delicious.
Anyway, here is the loot:
Wine gums: a gummy candy with an illustration on the front of the package showing candies that say “PORT” and “CLARET” on them. This is obviously really weird - aren’t gummy candies usually marketed towards kids? And isn’t wine… not for kids? Is this a gummy candy with sophistication? And most importantly… do they taste like wine, and how gross is that?
Clinkers: “Find your favorite centre.”
Sherbies: an insane orange guy saying “Party in your mouth.”
Chicos: a candy of questionable political correctness. The package depicts a baby bursting with “delicious choc flavour.” Good work, Australia.
Picnic bar: because T wanted one.
There were other interesting candies available, like the chocolate-covered gummy worms, and the bullet candies which I’ve heard are pretty good, but we didn’t really want to spend more than $13 or so on this project.
So let’s get down to business. First we opened the Clinkers, which I think we mainly picked because T did not doubt his ability to finish them off if I didn’t like them. They’re ok, they reminded me of an Easter candy. They’re pieces of hard candy with a foamy/powdery consistency covered with milk chocolate. Despite the “find your favourite centre” tagline, there are only three available flavors, yellow (banana), green (lime), and a pink one. I don’t like banana flavors and lime with chocolate was a bit weird. I didn’t bother eating enough to find a pink one.
Then we opened the wine gums. I was really excited to find out how weird they are and how (and why) they translated the taste of wine into a gummy candy. It turns out that they come in traditional gummy candy colors, only a few of which could be interpreted to be wine-like at all:
They say things like “PORT,” “CLARET,” and “SHERRY” - apparently these are the wine gums of fancy old men. They don’t discriminate when it comes to color - green is just as likely to say “CLARET” as anything else. And the kicker? They taste exactly like every other gummy candy in the world. There is nothing wine-like about them at all, other than the name and the words. Who thought of this marketing idea, and why?? Confusing!
Then we opened the Sherbies. They are pieces of orange taffy supposedly containing a fizzy orange powder, although the powder is sort of hard to detect. The Sherbies helped us sort out an American English/British-Australian English linguistic snafu. He kept telling me that there was sherbet inside, and I kept saying that maybe it was sherbet-flavored but there was no way there was sherbet inside, until we checked out Wikipedia and discovered that British/Australian English uses “sherbet” to refer to a fizzy powder you can use to make a Kool-Aid type drink, while American English of course uses “sherbet” to refer to sorbet. Fascinating.
The Chicos are, in my opinion, totally gross and wrong. They are chocolate-flavored gummy candies shaped like babies or little boys. Aside from the weirdness and inappropriateness factors of this candy, I am just not a big fan of chocolate-flavored things that aren’t chocolate. Why not just eat actual chocolate? You’re already eating candy.
The Picnic bar is pretty good if you’re into candy bars. I’m not too crazy about milk chocolate in general and I don’t like caramel, so I’m at a big disadvantage when it comes to liking that sort of thing. But it’s basically one of those wafer sandwich cookies that are long and thin, covered in peanuts and caramel and coated in milk chocolate. So yeah.
Well, that’s probably all of the Australian candy reviews I’ll be posting for quite some time, since I’ve just eaten enough candy to be sick of it for an entire year. Although I did buy another package of wine gums…
I saw this package in our grocery store and it caught my eye:
Musk sticks? It’s claiming to be a candy, but a candy flavored with something a deer excretes from its butt. I was curious, but not curious enough to try some, so I mailed a package to my parents as a joke.
My mom just told me that she’s been carrying them around all weekend, offering them to everyone at her Memorial Day shindigs, trying to get someone to like them. The collective verdict is that they “smell and taste like potpourri.”
I guess I can’t knock them, not having tried them or anything, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I can’t recommend them either.
Ice cream makers in Australia need to get a grip. I say this because somehow, no one here has figured out yet that ice cream can have stuff in it. I’m not even that big on ice cream, but I find myself paying more attention to it now that I know I couldn’t even theoretically, if I wanted to, go out and get a pint of something that’s half-ice-cream-half-brownie.
You see, I am literally only interested in ice cream when it has tons of brownies and/or cookies and/or cookie dough and/or moose fudge prints involved. And it is not possible to buy ice cream here that takes this concept beyond “chocolate chip.” Oh, no, wait, they also have slightly larger chocolate chips.
Ok, to be completely honest, they also have cookies ‘n cream. But that is it. Nothing more adventurous than that, just six different brands of plain vanilla and plain chocolate. It’s sort of weird. I mean, does nobody here actually like things in their ice cream, or is this just a glaringly obvious business opportunity?
Get with the program, Australia.
Yesterday was Sunday so we mobilized ourselves and went to the Museum of Sydney. It’s basically a local history museum, and I found it to be pretty interesting. For one thing, I learned that the First Fleet involved like 11 ships. I’ve heard about the First Fleet (being the first colonization of Australia by the British) and although I obviously realize that a fleet involves more than one boat, in my mind it was sort of like a little Mayflower, just with convicts.
I didn’t want to take a picture since usually museums frown on that, but someone else on the Internet was much braver than I am.
These colonizers did not mess around.
Then we went walking around the Rocks (historical/touristy neighborhood near Circular Quay) looking for a pub to have dinner in. The markets were on, although we didn’t really browse since we did that a few weeks ago and our real mission was to find a suitable pub. But I did take a picture to capture the atmosphere - I don’t like taking pictures of crowds because I don’t want to be weird, but only two or three guys appear to be staring at me wondering why I’m taking their picture. Next time I’ll get T to pretend to stick his head in there.
Markets, the Rocks
Anyway this story has a terribly sad ending because we never found a suitable pub. Everything was either closed or else the menu didn’t really get beyond steak, sausages, hamburgers, meat pies, and fourteen other things involving meat. I’ve decided I have to put my foot down because I generally don’t enjoy eating meat and I’ve been just happening to eat a ton of it since we got here since that is about what there is to eat in a lot of situations. And I’m getting a bit “meh” about the usual alternative option at pubs, which is fish and chips. I do like fried fish, but I feel like eating a big pile of deep-fry on a regular basis is probably not the best idea.
The good thing is that occasionally, the rare place that offers veggie burgers will have this awesome kind of veggie burger that I hadn’t experienced before we got here. They are breaded and crunchy on the outside, which I suspect is probably not any healthier for you, but they are yummy. They seem to be referring to those when they say veggie burger and they always call the other kind lentil burgers (and in restaurants they weirdly always serve them with some kind of yogurt).
So we came home and ordered pizza. Pizzas here are much smaller, more like a pizza for one or two people than an entire family type thing. Everyone here always wants to talk about how hilariously huge the pizzas are in North America (people, you’re not supposed to eat the whole thing by yourself!). Also, you can’t just be like “Can I get half pepperoni half cheese” - they like to glam up the idea of pizza by only offering set combos with names, such as the “Godfather” or the “Mamma Mia” or whatever and each one has like ten things on it. Then they chop all of those things really small. At first I was not that excited about pizza here because I resented the glamorous gourmet treatment and I just wanted a plain piece of Sicilian with maybe some vegetables on it (I sacreligiously do not like the flat NY style pizza), but I’m ok with it now and ordering pizza is my new guilty pleasure. Although when I compare this pizza in my mind to even chain pizza from the US… well. Wait a minute… since when did I even care that much about pizza? Hmm.
Btw the Australian version of Domino’s hilariously offers a “7 Meats” pizza. I’m sure if they were really trying, they could have gone to Wikipedia and discovered at least three more meats to throw in there.
