Tasty Food

That creepily ambiguous box 'o grub sums it up nicely.  There is lots of Tasty Food here!  And I'm doing my best to eat it all.  Here's a sampling of our culinary adventures:

Bulani

Holy crap, you guys, bulani is one of the tastiest things I have ever eaten.  If you've never heard of bulani before, hold on to your hats.  Allow me to blow your mind and tastebuds.  It's an Afghani dish that is stuffed with potatoes and crack cocaine.  So.  Unbelievably.  Good.  It's like a quesadilla made by the hands of angels.  Then dipped in crack cocaine.

If you're lucky enough to live in a place with an Afghani restaurant I implore you - run, do not walk, towards the bulani!  I'm barely ashamed to admit that Martin and I ordered an extra serving of bulani for dessert......before ordering dessert for real.  So good!

Sour cream + sweet chili sauce

Sweet chili sauce is to Australia what malt vinegar is to the UK, and what salsa is to the US (because people like to say salsa -Jerry Seinfeld).  It is the beloved condiment.  And mixed with sour cream it is divine!  Genius, too.  Why have 1 dipping sauce when you can have 2?

Sour cream in Australia is incredibly thick.  It's dang near a solid, but I've never met a sour cream I didn't love.  Mixed with sweet chili sauce it goes to a whole new level.  It is the yin and yang of deliciousness.  So awesome with chips fresh out of the fryer [the dirtier, the better]!

(I'll explain those big 'ol balls in a future post.)

Hot rock

This is a fun dining concept: Raw meat + a 400 degree slab of rock = cook your own dinner.  I wouldn't recommend hot rock dining on a steamy evening, because sitting over a rock that is several hundred degrees is a sweaty experience.  It would be great in a North Dakota winter!

I had chicken satay skewers and Martin had a tuna steak.  Tuna requires 1/100th the cooking time of chicken, so we weren't really eating in tandem but I enjoyed it.  I'm not sure if Australia invented this but I've never seen it anywhere else before.  Gimmicky, but fun.

Philly cheese steak

Would you believe I've never had a Philly cheese steak before?!  And I've been to Philadelphia!  Albeit as an idiotic 16-year-old who didn't know that was the one thing you had to do there.  So I made up for lost time roughly 10,000 miles away, though sadly, there was ne'er a jar of Cheese Whiz in sight.

Guzman y Gomez

Do you like Chipotle?  When eating Chipotle do you ever think, "Man, I really wish I had paid double for this burrito, and I also wish it was half the size"?  Oh you have?  Well then Guzman y Gomez is the place for you!

Don't get me wrong, Guzman y Gomez is delish, and at the rate they're popping up all over the country they're doing damn well.  But it ain't cheap, and the burritos ain't huge.  Such is life in Australia.  I haven't eaten at their competitors Mad Mex and Burrito Bar enough to make the declaration about which is best.  I am just grateful to be in a country where you can get a burrito at all.  Some places are not so lucky.

I'll make a separate post about traditional Aussie food.  There is some wild (literally and not) edible stuff down here that the culinary world needs to know about!