Crazy American Food -- Thanksgiving Special

Americans eat a lot more Turkey than other countries (it is native to North America, after all). When they cook it themselves, they like to get it right; they always use meat thermometers and have a paranoid fear that stuffing will give them salmonella. This leads them to cook their turkeys for a long time but they hate when it comes out dry so they're big in to basting. Still, there's only so much you can accomplish by taking pan drippings and squirting them over the top of the bird. If only there were a way to make sure the meat inside stayed moist...

Yes, that lump on the side is a syringe. It's a bottle of buttery marinade that comes with a syringe to inject the fat into your turkey. Yum!

In other news, we're having Thanksgiving dinner with some friends from Cindy's department, other international students. Should be an interesting mix: one Chinese, two Columbians and a heap of Serbs, who've been sending us emails in Cyrillic. (So I'm looking for a joke that starts, "A Serb, a Croat and a Bosniak walk into a bar...")

Baconnaise

Not much has been happening for me lately but I'm always learning little things about America. Many of these encounters happen in the supermarket, so I decided to start taking photos. This will be part of an ongoing series.

Episode 1 - Baconnaise:

Actually, this one can't be found in normal supermarkets, we had to get it from Amazon. No, we don't really want to eat it but we've seen it on The Daily Show so many times that it seemed we just had to take some to France to shock those Continental Epicureans. We haven't even tried it but I'm quite disappointed with the description - it's kosher and vegetarian! What's the point?

But I do like the blurb on the jar, the creators used their prize money from America's Funniest Home Video to make "everything taste like bacon".

I've been to cities that never close down...

Cindy and I spent this afternoon with my new friends, the Australasian Association of IU. The international centre here put on a World's Fair and we had a stall. They were still looking for decorations when I went to my first meeting with the group last week so I volunteered Cindy's stuffed toys. We ended up taking a huge number of toy marsupials as well as a full-size didgeridoo and a very classy beach towel with a map of Australia on it. The group president declared proudly that our stall looked like a gift shop and I reiterated that it belonged to Cindy, not me.

Each stall was giving out food from their home country but I shouldn't have got my hopes up on hearing that our group had given the caterers a recipe for sausage rolls. The recipe we gave them was too vague so we ended up with American "Italian" sausage (i.e. pork with lots of fennel or aniseed) cut into discs. It wasn't bad, the Americans liked it. But maybe that was just by comparison with the Vegemite that we were also forcing them to try! So there was a few hours of passing out food and we got to try some food from the other stalls too.

Most of those international student groups are quite big and some gave musical performances. There was an interesting central-Asian drum group and an Afro-Cuban ensemble that gave me bad tinnitus. The highlight was troupe of Indian dancers. They were wearing bright costumes, holding batons, dancing in circles weaving in and out and generally having a fun time. I don't know whether it was the good rhythm of the music or the super-animated dancing but they had us all mesmerised and got fantastic applause at the end.

Talking Bob Dylan Blues #3

Bob Dylan was in town again so Cindy and I went to see him last night, the third time for each of us. This is what he played. (Including five songs from his most recent album, which is about three too many seeing as it's his worst since Under the Red Sky. But I suppose when you tour as often as he does, you have to keep updating the set list.)

What's more, Tom Waits was in town too. Bob invited him on stage to sing a song. Unfortunately Tom sang just one verse by himself, no gravelly duets. Still, it was enough to remind me of this video:

J'aime bien Tarzhé

We changed the clocks back last night so this morning Cindy and I went to Target bright and early to stock up on cheap Halloween lollies. (We also noticed that TIm Tams were on sale, so we ended up buying a ton of chocolate!)

But the best bit was at the check-out when I asked her to put them in a reusable shopping bag and I got a 5c discount! Apparently now Target gives you 5c off the total for every bag you bring yourself. It obviously doesn't cost them that much to give out plastic bags so I'm impressed with a PR exercise that might actually help the environment. I doubt that this carrot will work as quickly as the Australian stick approach but it's less likely to produce a revolt from liberalist Americans.