Boingy-boing... Sizzle... Yum!

Australia is really a very interesting country. Its people are a proud people: the people are proud of their identity, their accomplishments, and their nation. And if you hadn't realised yet, they're also the only country that's also a continent. Here, the weather varies from state to state. It could be snowing on one side of the country, and blazing hot on the other side. Here, in this beautiful place, you can find all sorts of flora and fauna, often one of a kind, native only to this part of the great big world. Australians are a strong people, and their ancestors have fought fierce and hard for everything they now have and own. Australians are also a very funny people, and their sense of humour and irony can't really be surpassed by any other nation.

Today, for dinner, they served us kangaroo.

You can stop choking/screaming/crying/laughing now. I'm not kidding. It was all because here at IH, they have this special event called Around the World in 7 Dinners, and as you can deduce, we'll basically have 7 dinners celebrating the unique cuisine of each continent. Tonight was the first one, and the kitchen served us cuisine from the Pacific, i.e. Australia, New Zealand, etc. Well, actually the kitchen served them, because my lecture dragged on until 7 p.m., so I had a late dinner. My first reaction when I collected my late dinner from the fridge was laughter. Why? Well, maybe I should explain first what happened after lunch. I'd gone to put down my name on the late dinner list, and I'd checked what the options for dinner was, and I'd squealed with excitement when I realised we were having kangaroo for dinner! Well, they were actually serving a whole bunch of meat (beef, chicken and kangaroo), but all I really wanted was the kangaroo, and if I'd put down 'meat' on the list, I would have ended up with too much meat (which I prolly wouldn't have finished), so all I put down was 'Kangaroo!'. With an exclamation mark cos I couldn't contain my excitement, that was how excited I was. So when I collected my dinner, I burst out laughing when I realised they'd written down 'Kangaroo!', with the exclamation mark, on the label of my late dinner. Hilarious!

Of course, the late dinner was supercold, so I had to dump it into the microwave for a minute, but it was still cold, so I popped it in for another minute, took it out, but it wasn't warm enough for me, so I set the microwave for yet another minute.

It finally came out, and I couldn't resist taking shots of this historical meal! I suppose I should try to describe the kangaroo meat. It's really dark meat, darker than any meat I've ever seen (or maybe that's just because they cooked it in some dark sauce). Actually, you should just picture beef. It looks exactly like that, just slight changes in the colour (yet again, maybe that's just because people here like their meat raw). It tastes like beef too, but it's less tough. It has a pretty distinctive taste (mine had a faint taste of urine, like eating kidney, but my friends said theirs didn't taste like that, so maybe it's just my portion of meat), but it's really got a pretty interesting flavour. The meat was quite tough though (just like beef) and needed some sawing back and forth with my knife. I really enjoyed my meal tonight: they served the kangaroo meat with white rice, a potato, green beans, and sweet potato (most of which I didn't finish). They cooked the kangaroo with some dark spicy sauce, that can pass off as either Asian (because of its slight spicy-savouriness) or Western (because it tasted like roast pork/beef stew like the way my mom makes it sometimes).

It's really a meal to remember, and I'm glad I took pictures! I even got Su-Wen to take a couple of pictures of me with the kangaroo meat, as seen below:

So really, it's been quite interesting, if simply for the sake of saying that I've eaten kangaroo. Some people told me there's this place at Darling Harbour that serves kangaroo and emu pizza, now that's something I'm hoping to try too! However, for the sake of taste and flavour, I think I still prefer lamb. Yum yum lamb... Now when are they gonna serve that? Cheers, folks!