A trip to Oz: Food and Drink.

I am a bit busy at the moment, so this will be my last post about Mrs FEEG’s and my trip to Singapore to Australia. This time I will rant on about food and drink, of which we sampled much!

Firstly, when we arrived in Singapore, having had breakfast at 4:00 PM on the plane, we were so knackered and disoriented, we just had some Malaysian bar snacks and a couple of Tiger beers. The choice of food in Singapore reflects the make up of the place, much Malaysian, Chinese, Indian some Indonesian. There is, of course, still the British influence there. We had high tea in the Raffles Tiffin Room and a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar, although the production of these is rather automated these days.

Moving on to Oz, we found a huge and cosmopolitan choice of food. We even had one barbie, complete with steaks and prawns (not a raw one amongst them) at the Cairns Night Zoo. In one steakhouse in Melbourne, we had steaks that would have looked large in an Argentinian restaurant, beautifully cooked just as rare as we both like it, but very tender. Also, as a starter here I had a chorizo sausage which, in the words of Mrs Miggins of Blackadder fame, looked suspiciously like a horse’s willy (or was it Count Froufrou who said that?)!

Anyway, as Mrs FEEG and I are both of a somewhat carnivorous nature, we tried eating as much of the local wild life as possible (except dingoes, koalas and wichity grubs (not bugs), naturally!). We had kangaroo, crocodile, barramundi, and lots of beef, pig and lamb. Skippy and chips is really good, and I even had a camelburger at a camel farm. Mrs FEEG drew the line at that one. Also, in the quest for a balanced diet, we did eat a lot of fruit and veg, most of it local. There were all sorts of restaurants dotted about. We had Chinese, Thai, Indian, Australian, Greek, Lebanese, Japanese and probably a few I have forgotten. Anyway, suffice it to say I was put on lentils for a week when we returned to Blighty.

Now we come to drinkipoos. In Singapore there was plenty of Asian beers, Tiger as already mentioned, Singha, Kirin and so on. This was really appreciated as it is so hot and humid there. I was hoping to be proved wrong about the Englishman’s opinion of Aussie beer, but I am afraid that the only decent beer I had in Oz was a Guinness. All the major breweries seem to produce similar beers and I did not like them. I am quite prepared to believe there are microbreweries around that do brew decent beer, but I did not find any.

Wine, however, was another matter. I have always liked Aussie wine, but Mrs FEEG has been a bit sceptical about it. She is no more. We had some great stuff while we were there, and went of a couch tour of the Barossa wine region. This was fun, although we were a bit disappointed at the Wolf Blasse winery. The others we visited were great, although some of them were “boutique” wineries, in other words small producers who only make enough wine to sell locally. After we had returned to England, I went with my brother, nephew and a few of our mates to the Sunday Times Wine Festival in London. Amongst many great wines we tasted, all of our favourites was a Hickinbotham Shiraz Cabernet. It turned out that all visitors to the festival had voted for this as the best wine in the show.

One thing I was a bit surprised about was the price of food and drink. I know the Aussie dollar is fairly strong at the moment, and I did not have a problem with the prices as they were approximately the same as London prices. Other Brits, though, got a bit hoity-toity about the prices, although they were mainly from Oop North! 🙂

Anyway, weighing everything up, we really enjoyed our trip to Singapore and Oz and would like to do it again!