Working with David, Dana, the band and crew was a dream. They're all incredible musicians, sweethearts and a total hoot; I'm a lucky duck and I know it. The last eleven days have been a complete cyclone of activity -- from run-throughs to press engagements, plane to hotel to van to venue, from running on fumes to being fueled by groove lock and audience energy. I've loved every second. David was chronicling the trip in real time (where he found the time or energy I have no idea), so if you want to know what happened when it happened, his entries are a good place to start. (Don't miss the lesson on milk flavored milk.)
Before I left, someone told me that Adelaide is like the Cincinnati of Australia. On first glance, this trite summation didn't seem too far off the mark -- there are large rectangular buildings in inoffensive office tones of flat beige paint, salmon stucco, aqua glass and gray cement; perfectly spaced deciduous trees marking meters along the sidewalk; convention centers and wide roads. Adelaide looks like any smaller, younger American city with suburban sprawl -- San Jose, Dayton, Irvine come to mind.
Of course, Cincinnati does not host the second largest arts festival in the world, with a mad three week influx of visual art, writers, world music, fringe theatre, and opera in town for the Adelaide Arts Festival, Womadelaide, and the Adelaide Fringe Fest. We're like international locusts descending on a little desert village, wreaking brief art carnage, then taking back to the wind and dispersing to our home nests. And Adelaideans (as I believe they call themselves) are totally game and lovely people for inviting the swarms.
So for a few weeks, the small city of Adelaide is crazy busy and exciting. Sadly, I was never really able to discover where the nighttime action was -- most of my time was spent at the venue, in the hotel apartment kitchenette or at Adelaide's famous Central Market.
Central Market is a huge complex in the heart of town with 250 vendors selling the best in locally produced meats, fish, fruits & vegs, honey, baked goods -- pretty much anything you can put in your mouth and eat. I loved the passive-aggressive signs for the local produce taunting, "I'm from South Australia. Are you?" I got so carried away at the first shop that I had to buy a Sunset Park style granny cart so my shopping bags wouldn't cut off the circulation in my arms.
The most striking thing about food shopping in Adelaide was the assimilation of Southeast Asian cuisine into the cultural consciousness. You can buy fish sauce and curry pastes alongside crumpets and crisps at the 7 Eleven equivalent convenience stores. In the bustling Asian grocery store, people of all ethnicities shop for gorgeous ingredients like laksa paste, kaffir lime leaves, thin and pointy chartreuse chilies, and galangal with authority and gusto, not with tourist pussyfoot. It seems like Malaysian, Indonesian, and Thai cuisine is to urban Australia as Mexican food is to the American southwest.
The cuisine also reveals that Australia is still part of the commonwealth. One of the stories David tells during Here Lies Love is about how Filipinos have a saying that because they were colonized by the Spanish and the Americans, it's as though they spent 400 years in a convent and 100 years in Hollywood. How has being a colony of England affected Australian culture and cuisine? The climate and resources are so different in this part of the world. Ubiquitous Aussie meat pies (filled with gravy and beef, which you are apparently supposed to slather in ketchup, aka "toe-mah-toe sauce"), pasties and crumpets have got to be an old world legacy.
"Full-on" breakfast is a delicious English style breakfast with major staying power -- bacon rashers, fried mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, and eggs over toast. Lipton tea comes "white" (with milk) in British strength. And no matter how you people protest the differences between Vegemite and Marmite, there's nothing even remotely like yeast extract commonly found the American kitchen.
But Australia is still very new world and reminded me more of Canada than Britain -- a kind of Twilight Zone, alternate dimension of America. The surrounding wine country we drove through to get to the beach could have been northern California or inland southern california with its bright sun, dry dirt, low shrubs and eucalyptus trees. But every once in while we'd see some "What's wrong with this picture?" detail, like a waist-high kangaroo in the brush, slack power lines hanging with the weight of a flock of brightly plumed parrots, long black hook-beaked white ibises pecking in the squat golden straw.
On the way back from Middleton beach, where we surfed in the rain and managed to avoid the fabled Adelaide great white sharks, we were trying to figure out where to stop for a bite on the way back to Adelaide. We stopped for resto advice and a wine tasting at the Victor Harbor winery in the Fleurieu Peninsula. I tried Semillon for the first time, a popular South Australian white wine varietal that was crisp with a little sweetness. I don't know from wine, but Graham, drummer extraordinaire and an authoritative oenophile, enjoyed the Port Victor enough to bring a bottle home.
My one meal out (aside from second breakfast at Central Market) was at a restaurant called Oscar's in McLaren Vale -- the Australia Rough Guide describes it as a "Mediterranean" pizza and pasta joint, though it was about as "Mediterranean" as a wallaby. In fact, the menu had weird multi culti ambition. Thick crust "pizza" came in varieties that would probably raise Adam Kuban's hackles, such as "Thai" with green curry, chicken and bean sprouts or "Moroccan" with drippy braised lamb and tsatsiki. My lasagna could have been thrown together at the pizza joint on my Brooklyn corner, which is not to say it was inedible -- I have to admit I have a soft spot for that kind of underseasoned, overcooked aspirational Italian pabulum. And we really loved the generous tub of chicken liver pate with sweet apple chutney and pesto brushed flatbread triangles.
The best meals I had were made in our hotel room kitchenettes. Perhaps I was remiss in my duties as a travel/food writer by not going out to more restaurants. But what better way is there to experience a city than to cook the food as the native dweller does? And when it comes to raw materials, Adelaide's resources are enviable. I made breakfast every morning and ate it on the balcony, overlooking the not so idyllic rooftop of the parking garage next door. But I can't complain -- the sunshine and clean breeze made my tea, orange juice, and everything else taste even better. Breakfast one morning with Mauro featured maroon fleshed local blood plums, gorgeous plated up with sweet SA strawberries. Small avocados were 3 for $3 AUD (about 3 for $2.50 US) with a buttery yellow ripeness that would rival those in the best Mexico city barbacoa joint. I sliced them up along with local roma tomatoes and layered them on a hot sliced croissant, topped with fried Kangaroo Island free range eggs, the orange-yellow yolk practically leaping off the egg white.
For our potluck lunch, Graham seared up to medium a local loin of 'roo which was darkly gamy like venison and surprisingly tender. He sliced it up and served it alongside his "bachelor's pasta" -- an aptly named dish of pasta, butter, chopped garlic, beaten egg and cheese best eaten straight out of the pot. Tim made a spicy vegetable curry with market potatoes and broccoli that I would love to have a thick bowl of right now. David brought tubs of meaty marinated octopus arms, while Peter heated up a gorgeous deep dish vegetable quiche in the little oven, all from Central Market vendors. Dana's Bronx-born husband Raphael made his grandmother's gravy recipe, a caper and olive confettied marinara with pork and basil sausages that I'm still dreaming about. Right now. (It's 4:30 a.m. I am zonked by jetlag and STARVING thinking about this food.) Southern hemisphere pineapples were $1.50 AUD and up, juicy and sweet
with that natural hint of coconut sometimes missing from the Costa
Rican imports we get here. I hacked one up into a bowl of fruit salad and brought a plate of local cheeses, including a button of Edith's Goat Cheese, an ashed, brightly flavored white puck.
But my favorite food night was Monday night after the gig, when I invited the cast and crew over for dumplings chez moi. I had spent the previous night filling and folding 100+ pork dumplings (and a few stray chicken dumplings) with various herb combinations while watching CSI and Law and Order. We opened a bottle of Tasmanian 2004 Taltarni brut tache and a couple of bottles of still red and white. Mauro plugged in his portable iPod speakers to add to the general caucophany of 15 people with wine glasses and bottles of beer chatting in a little living room. The fresh air flowed in through balcony's wide open sliding glass doors as plate after plate of boiled and fried dumplings were turned out and jumped on. I even managed to set the smoke alarm off, which is always the sign of an interesting dinner party. I know it doesn't sound very rock 'n' roll, but I fried and boiled and served and got tipsy on pink bubbly and thought, yeah, a girl could get used to this.
