Salsa, curries, and sports involving footballs

One of our goals for our time in Australia is to learn how to cook Indian food. This may seem a bit odd, but if you go to a grocery store here, you’ll understand why. In the US, if you want to cook Indian food, there might be a few options at the store. However, there are pretty good options if you want to cook Mexican food. In Australia (and probably everywhere else outside of the Americas), it is the opposite. There is an incredible selection of Indian food products, and really terrible Mexican food options.

At home, burritos is one of our go-to easy meals, so when we first got here, we got all the fixings for burritos, including some salsa. What a mistake that was. The salsa here is like ketchup with a few vegetables, except it is Australia’s version of ketchup. It is awful, really awful.

On a side note, the salsa had been sitting in the fridge since we got it since we didn’t know what to do with it. Fortunately for us, the Super Bowl provided a great opportunity to use up the rest of the salsa. We made seven layer dip for our Super Bowl watching party, which actually tasted pretty good even though we used the ketchup salsa and avocado delight spread—whatever that is. It had 12% avocado, and the pre-made guacamole only 8%. (Avocados are soooo expensive here right now – at least $3 each, and sometimes more than that). We of course couldn’t find tortilla chips, so we instead ate the dip with chips that tasted like Doritos and the Australian version of Sun Chips.

Watching the Super Bowl was kind of a surreal experience. It started at 10am on Monday morning, and so we went into my office to watch it there. Brad, a Ph.D. student here from the US for a year, managed to rent out the conference room with the TV, so we gathered there to watch. It was strange enough watching the game in the middle of the day at work, but the oddities didn’t stop there. The game was on a bit of a time delay because the US commercials took much longer than the Australian ones. So, during the extra time, the Australia sportscasters were either discussing the game, which was pretty much hilarious, or analyzing the Super Bowl commercials, which was also hilarious. (Every once in a while, they would show about 3 or 4 of the US Super Bowl commercials and then try to explain them.)

There were four of us from the US watching the game, and then a bunch of Australians. Although some of them had vague ideas about the rules of football, it was a new experience for me to feel like I was the authority on the game. Actually, it was pretty easy to explain the game because there were hardly any penalties at all, which are often the most confusing part. However, I can’t say that the Australians fully appreciated the significance of the Saints’ onside kick to start the second half. Right now we’re trying to watch Aussie rules football (called footy, which refers to both the sport and the actual ball), and given how confused we are, I have some additional sympathy for the Australians watching the Super Bowl. Cricket was supposed to be confusing, but turned out to be pretty easy to follow. Footy, on the other hand, seems impenetrable at the moment. It seems to combine elements of basketball, volleyball, ultimate Frisbee, soccer, football, and rugby. There are four posts, no pads, and 18 people on a side. Whistles blow all the time, but play does not stop. Kicking the ball, however, is actually a critical part of the game and scoring points, unlike in American football. At any rate, I was happy for the Saints and New Orleans to win, but I definitely did miss the Super Bowl parties in the US.
But back to the important part: the food. We told our neighbors, Liz and Ryan, that we were going to make an effort to learn how to make Indian food while we were here. They were nice enough to bring us a few Indian spice kits from a place they know in town, and gave us some recipes to try. Ryan’s parents are Indian, and he and Liz have a lot of practice making curries.

Tonight was our first attempt at making chicken curry with the spice pack, except we substituted kangaroo—for the chicken, not the spice pack. : ) I told Dave before he started making the dinner that Liz had warned us to use about half the amount of spice the recipe calls for because otherwise it might be too hot. Part way through cooking, Dave asked me if the recipe meant the spice pack when it said curry. He thought it just meant the curry spice (from the jar and not from the spice packet), so he had added some of that. I told him that it meant the spice packet, and then went back to my reading, thinking he would just add a little of the spice packet, and we’d be fine, since our curry from the jar isn’t spicy.

Well, somehow we had a bit of miscommunication because when I told Dave to use half the amount of spice that the recipe called for, he thought I meant to use half of the packet. So after adding curry from our jar, he then proceeded to add half of the spice pack, instead of the two teaspoons that the recipe calls for. As you can imagine, half of the packet makes for some pretty spicy curry—probably at least 5 to 10 times the amount called for. I ate mine as quickly as possible, blowing out the heat that seemed to be overtaking my entire mouth. I finished and thought I’d cool things off with a little rice and soy sauce. Except that my mouth was still so hot that the soy sauce tasted spicy. I resorted to a few bites of plain rice to try and sooth my mouth.

Dave took the opposite approach and has just finished his meal after laboring through it for about 30 minutes and consuming several liters of water along the way. But, he must be hungry because he’s just told me he might go back for some more. Oh gosh. One thing’s for sure—he can have all of the leftovers.

Anyways, we’ll let you know how our next attempt at cooking Indian goes. Hopefully a lot less spicily, though I suppose it makes up for the ultra-mild ketchup salsa. And, we’ll let you know if we ever figure out how they play Aussie rules football.