w4j: We steal all the best stuff from them.

I thought a hush puppy might of been something like a hash-brown. I looked it up and well I was wrong.

I find it very funny how Americans say mocha(like moo-car/moo-ca). I was watching a tv show about how to pronounce items when travelling to America. Though I think Australians say the world maroon weirdly(we say it like marone).

I find it very funny how Americans say mocha(like moo-car/moo-ca). I was watching a tv show about how to pronounce items when travelling to America. Though I think Australians say the world maroon weirdly(we say it like marone).

I've never heard anyone here say it like "moo-car" or "moo-ca". Everyone I've ever heard in the US says it like "Moe-cuh". How do they say it in Australia?

~Riella

Maybe it was Canadian?. Australians tend to say mock-a(the below video will allow you to hear it as we say it).

I grew up on the Gulf coast in Florida, so hush puppies, fried fish and cornbread were staples in our area. I love hushpuppies almost as much as cornbread, though they aren't as versatile (cornbread is good in most soups as well as on its own; it's also very good if you put a slice of cheddar cheese in the middle of your slice while the bread is still warm).

Yes, there was a brand of shoes called Hushpuppies. In fact, I remember the first time I saw a billboard for the shoes. I thought it was an ad for a restaurant.

As Ithilwen said, most Americans say moe-cuh, at least in my experience.

Ooh! Accent videos could be fun. I could treat you all to my many accents.

Has anyone here ever tried Vegimite (which I'm sure I've misspelled)? I remember a friend of a friend visiting my college from Australia and bringing some with him. It was too salty for me, but not as terrible as everyone had been leading me to believe. I tried to make grits to complete the cultural exchange of foods, but alas, I had only the instant kind, which are much harder to get right than the normal stovetop variety. (For those who don't know, grits are another food made from ground corn. They are sometimes called hominy, and when you cook them up they make a thick concoction somewhat like oatmeal. People usually serve them with butter. I prefer mine with cheese, and my mom and her family grew up putting sugar on theirs.)

If we get started on grits...I may never leave this thread. Seriously. No breakfast is complete without that most wonderful of breakfast foods, another grand byproduct of corn. What they do is somehow process the corn kernels and take all of the sweet corn syrupy stuff out. After that they take the hulls off (or maybe I've got it reversed here) and I guess the corn turns into hominy which is softened corn kernels. They're still dry, just not rock hard like corn feed like one would give to farm animals. Now, this is the fun part. You take that hominy and grind it up into a sort of coarse powder. When you put it in boiling water the hominy soaks up the water and becomes....GRITS!

Grits are truly one of the *awesome* foods in the world. You can do so much with em' that it's insane. Schwinn listed just a few variants. I prefer mine with lots of butter and salt and pepper. Cheese grits are phenomenal and highly delicious, and my family will usually have theirs that way. Down south here they also have red eye gravy, which is where you take the drippings from bacon or country ham and mix them with some black coffee and put them into the grits, but I have yet to experience that variety. Also you can put in straight up bacon and eggs and ham and all sorts of things. One of the dishes that is popular in the Low Country in South Carolina is to put shrimp in one's grits and it's supposed to be quite good. Mmmm...grits...I love them with a sort of thicker consistency too, not too thick, but definitely not too watery either. Sort of like one would mix grout up to put between bricks, but delicious grout that you can eat out of the wheelbarrow.

If anyone is interested I can compose a short poem dedicated to grits in which I extol its abundant qualities, not the least of which is its wonderful taste. In the voice of Christopher Walken.

Note the bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce in the back there. That's made only 30 minutes north of me and every Carolinian has a bottle in their house somewhere at any time.

Note the bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce in the back there. That's made only 30 minutes north of me and every Carolinian has a bottle in their house somewhere at any time.

Oh dear; I feel that the legitimacy of my Carolinian-ness is suddenly on thin ice! We have no hot sauce in my kitchen. I shall have to try to remedy this, as it's not like we don't appreciate spicy food in my house, considering the liberal use of pepper and chipotle powder.

(This might be a little bit off-topic, but yesterday my mother picked up a half dozen doughnuts for a rare treat, and I saw on the label that they were baked right in your neck of the woods, SL. I found this to be extremely fitting since reading you waxing poetic about food often drives me to want to eat all manner of less-than-healthy goodies. )

Were they Krispy Kreme donuts? Did you get them Hot n' Now?

Were they Krispy Kreme donuts? Did you get them Hot n' Now?

We actually bought them at Food Lion in their bakery; whether or not they're Krispy Kreme with the Food Lion label, I don't know. I haven't had a Krispy Kreme in so long, I probably wouldn't be able to tell... oh dear. It seems that's another thing I need to add to my foodie to-do list.

shastastwin, I don't like vegemite(though your spelling is close enough due to it being a horrible spread). I am basically the opposite of the Australian stereotype. I don't like vegemite, I don't eat steak, I have no idea how to surf and have no interest in cricket. Also I haven't owned a pair of flip flops in 9 years(I am 19 so this is nearly half my life).

What accents do you do?. I do not attempt accents at all.

Speaking of Krispy kreme like starbucks they are only in the eastern states. I do not like the taste of donuts(some might think that is odd). It isn't the most horrible thing ever but not the best.

Some people like Vegemite, some don't. I enjoy the spread but I don't plaster it onto my bread/savoury biscuit. You need a liberal amount of butter and then a light spread of Vegemite.

Fauns, I love both steak and Vegemite but couldn't care less about surfing and the cricket. There are very few sports that interest me. I love to put garlic and soy-sauce on my lamb chops when I cook them. Have you tried that combination?

To be fair most Americans admittedly have at the very least a modest amount of their background info on Australia based upon the old Men At Work song Down Under.

And I love the song, and I wouldn't know Vegemite existed if not for the song. To be fair much of the song doesn't make sense and might need a good Aussie translator.

In the '80s there was an Aussie-themed shop not far from where I lived in St Paul. Partly due to that song (ah, the memories of the 80s) and partly due to having an Aussie neighbor when we were young, one of the things I purchased from that store was Vegemite. Rather an acquired taste. Unfortunately I didn't buy enough stuff to keep that store in business for long.

Garlic and soy sauce sounds like a tasty combination, Warrior, but I think I've only had lamb once in my life. I even grew up in what passes for sheep country in the northern US, though mostly for wool I suspect rather than for food.

W4J: I don't like the taste of lamb in general so I might have to pass on trying that combination. I believe my parents however do have garlic and soy sauce on lamb and enjoy it. Don't you hate it how a lot of the news is taken up with sports news rather than actual news?.

Shadowlander, Now I will have that song in my head for the rest of the day. As for some of the phrases in the song, I am just as lost as you on some of them. Generation y have kind of lost some of the slang and I am part of generation z(just).

Some people like Vegemite, some don't. I enjoy the spread but I don't plaster it onto my bread/savoury biscuit. You need a liberal amount of butter and then a light spread of Vegemite.

Fauns, I love both steak and Vegemite but couldn't care less about surfing and the cricket. There are very few sports that interest me. I love to put garlic and soy-sauce on my lamb chops when I cook them. Have you tried that combination?

I do sympathise about the sport obsession. It isn't as bad as it used to be pre-TV (1960) when Saturday afternoon radio was sport, sport and more sport, including incessant racing commentary. I once got a hiding for turning off the races, being tired of the drone. The only way you could avoid it was to retreat into a book somewhere down the back yard, or go to the cinema, which, in those days, often had Movietone news as well as a feature film and a cartoon or two. Sometimes, especially after 1960, I'd go to the "Shorts", which were all news and cartoons which I often preferred to films I didn't always enjoy.

We use soy sauce a lot, here, at any rate, and of late I've noticed Linseed & Soy have become very popular additions to bread and corn thins as well as honey soy potato crisp flavourings. Once a friend even used soy sauce to darken some paint that was the wrong colour. . Chinese cooking has become so popular throughout the years, that it has become almost mainstream, a change from the days when my grandmother warned me never to eat chop suey, basically an Australian or western invention. A visit to China taught me that fried rice, another Australian favourite, was not as popular in China as in Australia. Chinese often merely steam the rice.

W4J and Ilf, do you by any chance know of a lady called Flo Bjelke-Petersen? She even published a book of Australian cooking, based on the sorts of recipes compiled also by the Country Women's Association or in the Common Sense Cookery book we used in high-school domestic science. Recipes included pumpkin scones, rhubarb pie, trifle, lamingtons, pikelets, crumpets, jawcracker toffees & chocolate crackles, probably, and maybe some "nice" little party snacks made of slices of devon (polony or fritz to you) wrapped around a mashed potato filling & skewered with a toothpick.

These sorts of books taught how to cook chokoes, marrows and squashes, savoury mince, crumbed cutlets, rissoles, meat loaf, brawn, corned beef, cottage pie, meat pies, roast lamb (of course), not to mention the mint sauce, and a family favourite that I adapted to suit my own family - sea pie. You learned how to cook a rabbit, a staple for many people in the Great Depression, who, thanks to the rabbit plague, then got something to eat, and which also explains the name for the South Sydney Rabbitos NRL team.

My eldest daughter told us about a couple she once served for breakfast, who had tried to eat a teaspoon of Vegemite, just like that. No wonder they didn't like it. But I've heard eating Vegemite that way makes a good hang-over cure. I've eaten so much Vegemite that I've even been nicknamed Vegemite in my younger days, and it is still a staple & a good alternative to jam. Also Aeroplane Jelly, Kraft cheese (which I ended up disliking intensely), and Worcestershire sauce, an old favourite, & alternative to tomato sauce. We used to have caramel toffees called Columbines, wrapped individually in bright turquoise & magenta colours, jaffas to roll down the aisles at the matinees, and iced vo-vo's and princess biscuits, just like Dame Edna Everidge talks about on her shows.

I'd say that at least some Australians seem to prefer barbecues, mixed grills and pan or stir fried foods at home, rather than deep fried items like fish and chips, chicken pieces, chico rolls and souvlaki, which are available at canteens and fast food places. The trouble with deep frying is the amount of cooking oil or fat used to do it, what to do with the used cooking oil afterwards, and the very real danger of burns and house-fires due to unattended or inexpert deep frying.

I've tried kangaroo and emu, but couldn't quite manage crocodile, witchety grubs or anything more exotic than that, eg snake. On the other hand some aboriginal condiments such as wattleseed, bush tomato, pepperleaf and native mint are really good additives in cooking. Macadamia nuts are native to Australia, not Hawaii, but I'm not sure if passion fruit, pawpaw or mangos are from here or from elsewhere. Some native fruits such as lilli pilli, cumquots, or quandongs have also been used in jellies and jams.

I still love damper with golden syrup, pikelets, crumpets & even Anzac biscuits.

I do sympathise about the sport obsession. It isn't as bad as it used to be pre-TV (1960) when Saturday afternoon radio was sport, sport and more sport, including incessant racing commentary. I once got a hiding for turning off the races, being tired of the drone.

I wonder if other countries use the expression "to get a hiding" or "to give someone a hiding" - basically it's a beating given as a punishment (or sometimes just to attack someone). We use the expression in New Zealand too.

This reminded me of the scene in the modern "Parent Trap" where the English-raised twin is posing as the Californian-raised twin; when she says "You gave me a fright", the housekeeper is suspicious - I didn't know until I saw the movie that Americans only say "You frightened me" or "You scared me".

I still love damper with golden syrup, pikelets, crumpets & even Anzac biscuits.

I wonder if other nations use the word damper? I have made it over a bonfire, with a dough mixture slowly building up on a stick, as each layer is carefully cooked over the embers. I've also heard it called 'flapjack' - only to discover that in England this word means a sort of muesli/oatmeal bar.