Azizi,

I don' think you ever need to explain what you mean, because your heart shows through in everything you say.

I was thinking about avocados the other day. I never even saw one until the mid 70's when I was sharing a house with some other people. One of them told me how he liked to prepare avocados because I said I had tried a bit and thought it was a bit ordinary.   He mixed some up with a little olive oil, lemon juice, salt & pepper and put it on hot buttered toast. It is still one of my favourite treats.   The olive oil is essential because the olive flavour and the avocado flavour go so well together. Sometimes I mince a small clove of garlic and put in it as well, and sometimes I mix a bit of sour cream in too. It doesn't have the bells & whistles of guacamole. The avocado is the star ingredient, not just one of the chorus line.

The reason that having that first avocado experience was so memorable is that my Mum always had good meals prepared for us, and we never went hungry, but what we had was the classic Australian cuisine of meat and 3 veg, and dessert. (She was involuntarily made to be the cook and housekeeper on her family's chicken farm before she was married, so she actually didn't like cooking & cleaning much, but she was very good at it.) She made sure that we ate a good balance of food, and made it interesting for us, like when we were kids she used to hide a dollop of peanut butter in the mashed potatoes, and when she made pikelets (little thick pancakes) she would always make a letter 'A' for my sister Anne and a letter 'H' for me.

I remember once Mum brought home a packet mix which had ingredients (supposedly) for making a pizza. There was the flour mix to make the base, and a little packet of tomato sauce mix, and a little packet of what I later found out was Parmesan cheese but which smelled and tasted foul. A failed experiment.

If we had ever had a real pizza Mum would have made one up for us, just by knowing what it looked and tasted like, but the first pizza place I ever went to was about 10 or 15 years later in Sydney. There wasn't one in my home town at that stage, either.

Zucchinis became more common in the 70's too, and the Italian influence on Australian cuisine can never be underestimated. There is a television show in Oz called
Secret Recipes , where a French-born Oz chef goes to different Oz people's places, from different cultural heritages, and finds out their favourite recipes by watching them cook. To me it is a true reflection of Oz, because we have so many people from different cultural backgrounds and it all mixes in to make a cultural whole which is Oz, and that is reflected in what people eat.

There is a street of cafés in Hamilton, a suburb of Newcastle where I live, and you can walk down that street and see so many different cultures and so many different varieties of food. It's the way Oz is, for me. Not homogenised where everything is blended so much that everyone loses their individual identity, but mixed together, retaining their identity and contributing to the whole social fabric, making it a rich cultural experience.

Thanks for this thread, Azizi.

Helen