Check out Episode 2 of the new food podcast,
Chicken 'n Waffles!

Oh Australia. You and your fried chicken snacks have captured my heart.

On my last day in Adelaide, I was sitting in a taxi on my way home from the Central Markets, taking in my last views of Victoria Square, King Williams street, and downtown Adelaide...and that is when I heard the Japanese love jam rocking on the radio and my enthusiastic Indian cab driver singing along. I say "love jam" because the words "love song" were simply not strong enough to describe this tune. These were clearly Japanese people in love and jamming like their lives depended on it. It was intense. It was a fricking love jam.

Follow up:

There I was, an Illinois girl coming from a farmers market in Australia with an Indian taxi driver rocking out to a Japanese love jam--this truly defined my year and half in Australia. All at once, Australia is so international and yet so similar to suburban America.

Take these fried chicken snacks, for instance.

Fried chicken snacks!

I am in Australia, which to most people in the U.S., is this far away land of international magic. But Adelaide is like a really big American country farm town that has a few tall buildings and a really great farmers market. But I managed to get these fried chicken snacks in Chinatown in Adelaide. That's right, a big country town that has an Asian section. But in that Asian section, I found these fried chicken snacks, which were clearly from Asia, but represent a food that is definitely American. Whoa. I know. Complex. My head hurts.

Even vegans can eat these delicious snacks of fried chicken!

So it is with these thoughts that I left Australia. Australia is a beautiful, almost unbelievable country filled with some of the rarest sites and nicest strangers you will ever meet. It is so familiar and yet so different.

And the food--oh the food! Restaurant-wise, cheap food is hard to come by unless you go for ethnic cuisines, at least in Adelaide, which I feel is much more representative of suburban Australia than say, Sydney or Melbourne. Asian food is super cheap, but that is about it. But the best Australian restaurants I have been to really focus on local, seasonal simple cuisine. Oh sure, there are trendsetters in the bigger cities, and even one or two in South Australia (Maggie Beer and Cheong Liew among them). But my favorite food was simple Australian food (which is really British with a hint of native Australian ingredients and also a few Asian influences) that was grown with care and tastes delicious. Eating a nice steak or snapper off the barbie, gourmet pies filled with veggies and topped with a melty, crispy haloumi cheese, or tucking into a nice soft pavlova rolled with a wattleseed cream and passion fruit sorbet--it was all simple and delicious.

Many people have written me asking about Uni Adelaide/Le Cordon Bleu's masters program in Gastronomy. In my personal opinion, it is a great and rare program in the world. Only a few programs in Gastronomy exist around the world, two that I know in the U.S. But I found Uni Adelaide's program to be really well-rounded and exactly what I was looking for: an academic program devoted to the study of food and culture. There was one class that was devoted to writing restaurant reviews, food movies and food art reviews, but the rest of the program was more practical. The first class goes over the history of gastronomy as it started in France and shifted over to America and other countries, and discusses the different aspects of food writing. The next class teaches more modern views and styles of gastronomy by going over topics such as genetic modification of food, childhood obesity, pretty much any issue that relates to food in the modern world. I loved this class. There is an elective class that is usually about gastronomic tourism or food science. All of the classes require you to write an essay a week with one major essay at the end of each class, so you are not only learning about gastronomy, but giving it a shot yourself. You also have weekly lectures and tutorials. A good tutorial (based on who is teaching it) will review over one of the weekly readings and teach you about the argument the writer is making, the forms of support being used in the paper and whether it was successful enough. It also gives the class a chance to discuss their thoughts about the paper together. I loved this part as well, and learned a lot about how to properly form an argument and support it.

The entire time, you read heaps of articles and papers about food, from all areas of study, including science, social science, anthropology, communications, cultural, etc. Some talked about 16th century British food used as a form of medicine, some discussed the "McDonaldization" of the U.S. You are exposed to so many different forms of food writing, from journalism to academic to advertising, you really have a good understanding of the different forms of writing you can accomplish when you finish the program.

It is a great program, and doing the program in Australia is definitely part of what makes the program great, because you get to see a lot of what you learn in action. This was especially helpful when it came to gastronomic tourism, because South Australia has so many wine regions and gourmet food producers. At the end of classes, you have the option to write a 15,000 word dissertation. If you finish it and pass, you get the masters degree, if you opt out, you earn a masters certificate.

I'm sad I am leaving, but I am so excited to know there is another place in the world that I can visit and have it actually feel like home. Australia, I love you man. Keep in touch. And I promise to figure out how to smuggle you in some REAL bacon before I return. It's gonna blow your mind.

Adam and I on our last day in Australia, on a ferry to Sydney.

~LTG!