Adam and I were lucky enough to have several friends and family members come visit us in Australia. I say lucky because for a single round trip ticket to Australia from the US, one could feed a small African country for a year and buy a Super Bowl ticket, so we were endlessly grateful for all the love going around. But something tells me we wouldn’t get this many visitors if we had moved to Idaho… When my parents came to visit, we wanted to give them a taste of native Australian food we had come to love, so we took them to the Red Ochre. You might remember our first trip to the Red Ochre from a few months ago. I am sure I have mentioned this before, but using native Australian ingredients is a relatively new concept in Australian cuisine. From my understanding of Australian history, when the British landed in Australia to make it a prison colony, they did not recognize the Aborigine people as a proper society because there was no obvious hierarchy of power, no class system that was familiar to the British. Therefore, they didn’t feel like they had to be nice to the locals (in fact, they did some down right shitty things, like killing them, raping their women and stealing their babies, but then again, I’m American, so who am I to talk?), and they certainly didn’t want to cook with indigenous ingredients. To this day, there is still a very, how should I put this, strong attitude towards indigenous Australians, especially from the older generations. So needless to say, not every chef uses native Australian ingredients in a contemporary cuisine, and I thought my folks deserved to experience it. We started off with an amuse bouche (one bite) of fig and blue cheese.
This was pretty good, but we had to actually order the amuse bouche (in the past, I have always had restaurants serve them complimentary)and it was nearly as much as a regular appetizer, around $8 AUD, if my memory serves me correctly. The mozzarella and smoked tomoto tart was much better, like a tiny little amazing pizza of love with a really buttery crust. I was only sad it was so tiny, because I could have eaten 4 and half of them, at least.
And of course, we got a trio of dips, you know, just because the first two appetizers were enough to barely feed me, let alone three other people. Then again, I never know if it is really small portion sizing, or if I am just used to the mammoth-sized food in the States.
For mains, my dad had the salmon wrapped in paper bark with lemon myrtle potatoes, which you can see in my old post here. No need to waste camera space! Adam tried the kangaroo platter, which was delicious. I love kangaroo–it tastes like a slightly gamier version of beef, sort of like venison, yet still delicate, not overwhelming like some game can be. It also came in a rich sauce that was slightly sweet and had a hint of chili in it, which went perfectly with the roo.
I decided to be adventurous and tried the emu wellington. I had tried emu pate before and loved it, so I thought I would give it a go.
This was my first time actually eating emu meat, and it was weird. It was tougher than I thought it would be (I think it may have been overcooked), it was quite gamey and just weird. No distinct flavor at all, other than yuck. Ah well. I tried. And then I traded with Adam for his roo. God bless husbands! My mom had a pork chop with muntrie chutney (muntries are tiny berry looking things that taste like apples with juniper berries) and it rocked. A nice thick chop, a sweet, tangy chutney, it just worked well together.
Here are my folks, posing at Red Ochre front of the Adelaide night skyline. It really is a great view, day or night.
I also took my parents to Cleland Wildlife Park, a great little place up in the Adelaide Hills that lets you hug a koala and feed the animals yourself, like kangaroos and emus.
It costs around $15 AUD to get in, and for an additional $15, you get to hug a lovable koala and have photographic evidence of it. This excited me.
This sign however? Not exciting. I had not lifted more than a bag of sugar in over a year.
This little guy may look like a rat, but it is actually a bandicoot. No they don’t hand out handi-wipes, and yes, I have seen kids on several occasions going straight from bandicoot land to meat pie land. Yum.
I liked this guy. He was massive when he walked, nearly as tall as me,with a beak and legs for days. He was a special guy.
I was a bit skittish at first feeding the kangaroos. Call me crazy, but I don’t like walking up to something taller and stronger than me and shoving food in its face. I have an older brother, and that sort of behavior gets you slapped upside the head.
My dad was much better, getting right next to them and petting them like the family cat.
The emus were the worst. Not only are they massive, but they also like to back their heads up before they take food from your hand, like taking a running start at it with their sharp, pointy beak. This explains why kangaroos are so much fatter than emus.
My parents trip just so happened to overlap with my birthday, so of course, we had to celebrate with food. We went to Abyssinian Ethiopian restaurant in Torrensville, just outside of Adelaide. I eaten there once before, and it was pretty good. I found that the food was spicy and similar to the Ethiopian I had tasted in Chicago, so I was a happy girl…until our very large group got into the restaurant with no air on a sweaty, 30 degree night(Roughly 80 degrees Fahrenheit). Oh wait. They had one fan. Which made it so much better. So much. But hey, at least the food was delicious. Now, don’t let the steam table shot scare you—they only busted out the steam table because our group was so big, we had to order “the banquet” and the second they brought the freshly made food out, we were all over it, so it didn’t sit there for a very long time.
We had yemisir watt, this spicy lentil dish I like to spread on every piece of injera bread to use as a condiment, and dinich alicha, a savory mix of potatoes and carrot, and of course doro watt, a spicy chicken stew, beef and lamb tibs,gomen (a tangy dish of collard greens) and quosta (another tangy dish of spinach), ugh! Just so much delicious food, I was truly one happy birthday girl.
Finally, we ended the night with the best present of all, a slice of my birthday pie, which was coconut cream. I had been craving a coconut cream pie for months and of course, Australia doesn’t make coconut cream pies. Adam had to research and find a recipe and figure out how to make it all on his own. And let me tell you, a custard is not easy for a beginning chef to make. It’s official folks–I have the best husband on the face of the planet.
~LTG! *********************************************************************** Red Ochre Restaurant War Memorial Drive North Adelaide, SA +61 8 8211 8555 Abyssinian Ethiopian Restaurant 126 Henley Beach Road Torrensville, SA +61 08 8443 4300
