Cooking Culture Shock

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Bilby, Rom, and our other international friends:
Since I work in the food industry, I like to know the foreign terms and slang for food items. By any chance, could you explain to me, what the "footy" is? Some kind of local market? I think I know what the "meat pie" is, something like a pasty.

The 'footy' would be a football game. In NZ at least, pies and chips are pretty standard fare (although as a kiwi, I'm more likely to say 'at the rugby' :))

You have a kiwi shop, Bilby? How cool. Can you let me know how to find it? I'll send my grandma directions (she misses some things, she'll be thrilled).

I have an english friend who always said she wasn't homesick for her country - but for english food! There's a snack called 'hula hoops' that are apparently popular over there, and you can't get them here - she really missed them.
 
Oh and when we went to NZ we noticed ALCOHOL in the supermarket!!!!!! thats a no no round here lol

Isn't that the same as we get in a meat pie at the footy???LOL:ROFLMAO:

u eat the meatpies? :LOL:

yep footy = Football game, and no it is not the round ball because for some reason Australia we call Rugby, footbal and Futball, Soccer LOL

i don' t eat meatpies...or watch the footy LOL but i guess u could say they go hand in hand....bilby...eats mystery meat LOL
 
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Hey how come u have a kiwi shop and i don't..whats in a kiwi shop?
i want one! :D
 
When we went to India, I was going to make my meatballs that my bf loves and wanted his family to try. So i wanted parsley and parmesan.....they don't sell parsley and parmesan and didn't know what we were talking about. my meatballs were made out of goat meat and almost made me puke, me and my bf couldn't eat them..the goat was too strong lol we couldn't get the lamb at the butcher.

we actually brought our own spaghetti, stove top coffee maker and espresso coffee hehehe

the butcher was pretty cool, we asked for a chicken, so we picked a chicken, and the guy killed, plucked and clean it in like 2 minutes in front of us.

they also don't have big supermarkets, their shops are the size of the deli's we have here or smaller. my bf parents basically tell someone at the shop what they want and they get it delivered. Otherwise people ride around on bikes yelling what they are selling and if u want some u go out and tell the man to stop, it was really cool lol

 
my meatballs were made out of goat meat and almost made me puke, me and my bf couldn't eat them..the goat was too strong lol we couldn't get the lamb at the butcher.

We eat a fair amount of goat - but you're right, it is kind of strong. We only tend to eat meat from young does, but even then, I still notice the taste. I've found that adding something sweet (I drizzle a little golden syrup over my roasts, for example) seems to help - no idea why!
 
I love all sorts for meats and have tested all sorts of meats for meatballs (except for goat), but omg the goat was so overpowering, his dad kept saying eat eat and i was like i can't i can't :( . I love roast goat but...blahhh at the meatballs lol

interesting idea about the syrup!
 
My first husband was a Cajun from down on bayou, and when I moved down there with him, it was one dandy culture shock for a 20 year old yankee girl. There were a lot of people there who spoke very little English, and none among themselves. My in-laws and next door neighbors were a little more urbane, and helped ease me in to the culture, and everyone was very kind to me.

The bayou was across the road from us, and there was a fishermen who used to come by sometimes with burlap bag over his shoulder. He sold most of his catch at the docks, and peddled the rest on his way home. He sold mixed sized whole shrimp for ten cents a pound, and it was a real bargain. I got big ones to fry and smaller ones for gumbo. One day, he pulled a lovely fish out of his bag, gave it a smack, and said "Redfish, two dollar."

I had grown up with food from the Better Homes and Garden Cookbook, which was very tasty. But when I was introduced to the subtle, yet spicy flavors of Cajun food, I was thrilled. By the way, non of the food I ate there was "hot". I had a much more sensitive tongue for that sort of thing back then, and I never once tasted a dish down there that burned my tongue.

If you continued down the road from our place, you got into the swamp, and if you watched carefully, there was a small road that turned off to the left. At the end of that road, WAY out in the swamp, there was a tavern/restaurant, where the fishermen and their families hung out.

I was told by my husband to keep my mouth shut when we were in there, as they did not welcome yankees.
But, oh my...the frogs legs...turtle stew...turtle soup...gumbo!
 
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As Rom and Stassie have both said Allen, footy is football. In Oz, that can mean a variety of things - rugby league, rugby union, soccer or Aust Rules (AFL). Over in the West, where I am, AFL is the game. It uses a ball similar to gridiron's but there the game differs. We handball, drop punk, tackle, mark and kick for goals (but often only get points). It is a contact sport and a lot of the players are nimble and similar in stature to soccer players. This is the official site of the AFL opened to the history page if you are interested.
History - Official Website of the Australian Football League

A lot of Ozzies, abbreviate words to end in a "y" or at least a "y" sound, eg footy (football), barbie (bbq), Jonesy (Jones), unless it already ends in a "y" and then it just get short, like Gary will become Gazza or Gaz. That sort of stuff. That's why we normally talk about the footy and not the football or Aussie Rules.

A meat pie is a puff pastry tart filled with a meat stew with a puff pastry lid.
Mrs. Macs :: Bakewell
The meat should be good quality but commercially often isn't. To market a pie as 'meat' means that you may be getting snouts, ears, tongue roots, tendons and blood vessels as well as the muscle part of the meat. Naming therefore is a big indicator as to what you should/could be getting.
CHOICE - The great pie gamble — meat or gristle?

A meat pie is traditionally had with tomato sauce (ketchup) and there is a lot of conjecture as to the correct way to do this. Some spread it on the top of the pie and some make a whole in the lid and pump the sauce in. In Adelaide in particular, they also serve a meat pie with a pea floater. Pie floater - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Thankfully, I live in Perth!

Stassie, the place I was thinking of was in Wanneroo Road, across from Dog Swamp. Can't seem to find a mention of it now, so it may have shut down or relocated. But here are a couple of Kiwi food sites for Perth instead:
products
Kiwi Kwic Snacs Softdrinks
Shopping - Aussiemove.com
 
Bilby, Rom, and our other international friends:
Since I work in the food industry, I like to know the foreign terms and slang for food items. By any chance, could you explain to me, what the "footy" is? Some kind of local market? I think I know what the "meat pie" is, something like a pasty.
Australian slang dictionary

This list is a bit more ocker than most of us speak but you will find some of the terms in common use. Even if one doesn't say the word/phrase, we still know what a lot of them mean. I don't think all of these are limit to Australian and probably originated in other lands. I should warn that some of the language is not polite! And some of the descriptions a tad graphic too.

I missed the pastie comment before. A pastie is made with plain pastry, not puff and contains beef mince and vegetables without the gravy. The meat pie in its basic form is beef mince or beef chunks in gravy. The variations are now a lot greater and there are even gourmet pies, like seafood, lasagna, crab and chilli, stroganoff, etc.
 
Let me state that I live in Connecticut that has NOTHING!!!!!

I used to live in California. I would love the Dim Sum places, the Mexican place (AUTHENTIC Mexican, including HEAT!!!!!! Ouch) and Thai and Japanese ... and I'd love to find a Filipino Restaurant too. HERE IN CT that is. Doesn't do me any good if it's in California. LoL Oh geez, I'm not even hungry and my mouth is watering again.
 
There's a quaint Middle-Eastern quarter here in Bangkok that's more popularly and mischievously called by expats as Soi Bin Laden (soi means street in Thai.) The place gets crowded with people of various ethnicities many of whom wear traditional garb and headgear. There are countless Middle-Eastern/African restaurants here: Egyptian, Persian, Turkish, Ethiopian, etc, including Indian and Uzbekistan among others. You can sip thick sludgy Turkish coffee at outdoor cafes while puffing languidly on fragrant hookah pipes. A common sight are little sidewalk stalls selling anything from trinkets, souvenirs, and T-shirts to falafels and shawarma.

One time I queued up at a shawarma stall that was roasting densely packed slices of marinated meat on a vertical rotisserie. A white guy ahead of me, obviously a tourist, pointed at the roasting meat and asked the seller if it was pork............which startled me. He repeated the question because the seller ignored him at first. He had a strong American accent. Good thing the seller was a Thai employee and not the Muslim owner... He was told it was beef and I think he left not realizing his faux pas...

It works both ways. When we travel to a place very different from what we're used to, it can be that the people there get culture shock from us as well :)
 
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As an expat kid I got pretty used to my mother struggling to learn local dishes of where we lived and to beable to pull together a few comforting 'home style' meals for times we were homesick or ill. I lived across lots of places until my early teens, so that was a good training.

Last year, moving to Italy though I was the cook. Italian food is hardly alien though, and my DH is Italian too, so that helped. Butchery cuts are subtly different, which was a surprise.....and new vegetables were fun: I would ask older ladies in the supermarket what the best way to cook them was, or ask Urmanic13 here! Also on Urmanic's advice I started geting an excellent Italian food magazine, which is super as it has so much seasonal cooking in it. I fully ntend to take year long turns of subscribing to cookery magazines from different places now to get more authentic inspiration. :)
 
Bilby, Rom, thanks for the head's-up on slang and local terms. I would have never guess that "footy" was short for a football game.
 
This reminds me, our exchange student from the former East Germany ate French fries with mayo, and our student from Slovakia said they eat ketchup on spaghetti there.

very common here... french fries with mayo :sick:
and ketchup on spaghetti is very famous with kids...
I don't like it anyway.. either mayo (what for do you need it? Even in salads it's just horror) nor ketchup on pasta...
it's so easy and fast to make a great sauce..

culture shock:
I was quite shocked over in the US that they don't have real bread, white tasteless potatoes only and no quark...
I would really miss these things..
 
I love mayo on chips, never, or very rarely would have it on salads out of the jar rather than homemade but would have it over ketchup with chips, Cara!
 
Sounds like Shock & Awe(some) to me Miss Connie!!;)

It was Indeed, Uncle Bob. I think everyone should have to live somewhere for a while where they are the outsider.
I was in the doctors office one day with my baby, and there were five or six other mothers there with their children. They were chattering up a storm, but I couldn't make out what they were talking about. Every once in a while, they would stop talking and look at me. I didn't know if they were trying to include me in the conversation, or talking about me, so I just smiled and nodded.

When we first moved in, the neighbor warned me, "Don't you be lettin le bebe be playin outside without you watchin her, or gator will get her."
I thought he was just pulling my leg because I was a yankee. Then, a few days later, I was washing dishes and looking out the kitchen window, when a BIG old gator went sauntering through the yard.
 
I've never lived in another country, but even moving about 35 miles east (from eastern Connecticut to Rhode Island) exposed me to a lot of food-related things I had never heard of before. I still remember the first time I went grocery shopping with my boyfriend (a lifelong Rhode Islander) and he put a bottle of coffee syrup in the shopping cart. Since I had no idea what it was, I asked him and he explained that it's something you put in milk to make coffee milk--it's actually rather good even though I don't like coffee.

I might just be showing you all how sheltered I am, but I had also never heard of putting vinegar on French fries until I moved here. It seemed really weird at first, but I suppose it doesn't seem so strange anymore--personally, I'll stick to eating them plain or with ketchup.
 
I might just be showing you all how sheltered I am, but I had also never heard of putting vinegar on French fries until I moved here. It seemed really weird at first, but I suppose it doesn't seem so strange anymore--personally, I'll stick to eating them plain or with ketchup.

I've been with Buck over 30 years and I still think it's a bit unusual that he puts malt vinegar on his fries. He loves that.
 

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