This is the first of a month's worth of blogs to catch up on all the busy things Ali and I have been up to lately. I guess it's one of those situations in which you're too occupied doing stuff to keep the blog on. Enough whingeing, here's the news:
A nice little Australia Day party was held in the apartment a month ago to celebrate all the greatness of Australian culture and achievement, and for the purposes of introducing Ali to some of my work colleagues and showing off the house. We managed to keep people distracted by painting up a traditional venetian mask in Aussie flag colours (just in time for carnevale!) and passing around the unofficial Australian Citizenship test (if you haven't done it yet let me know and I'll email it to you). Being mostly chemists, they came up with the other standard definition of "mole". Anyway that was just a primer before the food came out...
A proper selection of Australian food was of the utmost priority, the only problem being that we didn't have an oven available! That cut out all the favourites (you know, pavlova, pies, roast barramundi, Anzacs, roo tail...) so we had to improvise. Our Aussie culinary experience consisted of vegemite on toast, Cheese-Ham-Pineapple stacks (which were a bit too much because we foolishly used Gruyere in the absence of plain old cheddar), Macadamia nuts, Garlic prawns and Chocolate crackles, accompanied by Coopers Pale Ale and Stouts (found on the website of a beer shop in Milan!). All that was finished up with some Tim-tams posted by my parents, but sadly we didn't have Milo to drink with/through it.
A bit of poetic license was applied to the chocolate crackles, which we re-named "roo-poo" given the similarity in colour if not size. They came out a lot more chocolatey than we wanted because you can't get Copha in Italy and we couldn't find vegetable shortening so we had to use a chocolate-butter substitute...so they were more like chocolate crackle brownies in the end, but tastey nonetheless. A bit of a shock to have leftovers but they were all eaten the following Monday by Ali's italian language schoolmates...
Ali and I were pretty happy with the spread but it's funny that just one month later we've learned so much more: that you can get Copha, Tim tams, Coopers, Little Creatures and Milo online from shops in the UK; that you can buy kangaroo from the London Borough markets; that the Italians have a creation similar to chocolate crackles but using molten mars bars instead of chocolate/butter/copha type coagulating agents, and that italian toasters do a really crap job of making toast. On the flip side, we're now very happy to be able to say that our government has apologised to the stolen generations and ratified the Kyoto protocol and moved to advance other similarly intelligent and morally decent initiatives.
Since Australia day we've "cooked" ceviche, tried out Venice's only Argentinean restaurant, experienced Venice's Carnevale, gone to the UK, Ali finished her language course and started working and last weekend I did some cross-country skiing! Hopefully it'll all appear in blogs soon.
Ciao, Paul.
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