The Queen's Daimond Jubilee

[CarolF Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close CarolF]

My memory of Betty Crocker is very sketchy but I do remember being quite young and thinking, who on earth is Betty Crocker (and never picking up a box to find out). I think the only prepared food available for a long time was boxed cake mixes but our family didn't use them. The Pillsbury Dough didn't come here, our early advertisements had a definite English flavour with English accents. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0BvujonfWY

Our food was mostly home prepared but my mother was sometimes quite adventurous and I remember a lengthy period where we always had Japanese seaweed biscuits and crackers in the cupboard. Scottish Kippers for breakfast were a favourite. I recall only a few canned products in the cupboard - salmon, ham, spam, asparagus, pineapple and that's about it.

Basic ingredients are still very readily available here and I'm just loving the arrival of Indian supermarkets where you can buy spices in large quantities. For a long time, spices (ground turmeric, cardamom, coriander seed, cumin seed etc) were available in 1 ounce quantities in tiny glass jars, now I can get a 1 or 2 pound bag at a reasonable price. I've noticed beans in cans have become more visible recently and I sometimes use them rather than soaking my own. When I eat out I've notice some of the places are starting to use what I call supermarket prepared food. We have what is called a "big breakfast or traditional breakfast" which is commonly bacon, egg, mushroom, spinach, grilled tomato, English breakfast sausage and toast. They are starting to include hash browns which are obviously not freshly made and aren't worth eating. I was recently served a supermarket hollandaise sauce and that wasn't worth eating either.

Our Australian Women's Weekly magazine started publishing cookery books about 30 years ago and they are really popular. I have so many but my most used would probably be the Italian Cooking Class Cookbook. I often use online recipes, sometimes I google the things I have in the fridge and find a recipe which incorporates what I have available.

Cooking programs on TV are very popular also and have created an explosion of people renovating their kitchens and purchasing new and expensive appliances. We initially had English personalities/chefs (Two Fat Ladies, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson) cooking shows but more recently we have Australians. When I look at newspaper recipes in England, America and Australia the recipes and style is very, very similar. We are starting to merge I think. I like the New York Times Recipes for Health Series, in particular, the ability to select an item and theme to get recipes.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/h...lth/index.html

[Hobbitess Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Hobbitess]

I think the only prepared food available for a long time was boxed cake mixes but our family didn't use them.

My mother "cooked out of boxes" for years and years -- we had boxed macaroni and cheese with tuna fish at least once a week (haven't lived with her for decades and still won't eat tuna fish ), all our soups were canned, we got canned chow mein, Friday nights we had either pizza mom made from a box or spaghetti from a box, Saturday nights pancakes made from a mix, a big treat were the boxed blueberry muffins mom made once in a while on Sundays, and Sunday dessert was always a pie from a box mix, including a "cheesecake" which is nothing like real cheesecake (although I really don't mind it once every great while). I don't know how common that was, but there was always a good selection of prepared food and mixes at the store so I'm guessing mom wasn't that far out of main stream.

The Pillsbury Dough didn't come here, our early advertisements had a definite English flavour with English accents.

I do not like malt or yeasty flavors and brewers yeast in particular, so have not tried vegemite. Is peanut butter at all popular there?

I recall only a few canned products in the cupboard - salmon, ham, spam, asparagus, pineapple and that's about it.

Canned asparagus sounds nasty, but I've only ever had it fresh. We got it once a year (with a velveeta cheese sauce on it ) when I was a kid so long as we had a neighbor who gave us some that often, and then we didn't have it at all after we moved away. Now we get it whenever it goes under $2/pound, which is mostly in the spring.

We do have canned salmon and canned pineapple on hand most of the time, although my tolerance for canned pineapple comes and goes depending on how recently I've had the real stuff.

For a long time, spices (ground turmeric, cardamom, coriander seed, cumin seed etc) were available in 1 ounce quantities in tiny glass jars, now I can get a 1 or 2 pound bag at a reasonable price.

Do you grate your own spices? I don't think I'd want a 2 lb bag of any of those otherwise!

We can get bulk spices and other staples about 45 minutes away in one of the stores the Amish shop at, so I'm not seriously worried about supplies completely disappearing from around here. And we've been known to get stuff in bulk through the mail -- my husband used to grind wheat to make flour for the bread he made in the breadmaker, soooo good.

They are starting to include hash browns which are obviously not freshly made and aren't worth eating. I was recently served a supermarket hollandaise sauce and that wasn't worth eating either.

I'm always surprised at the people who rave about the food at Disney World, because most of it is clearly prepared well ahead of time and they use a lot of mixes and things. But so do most fast food and moderate-level restaurants across the country. I almost never order soup in a restaurant because it's generally too salty for me to eat, but I guess that's what people are used to. The canned soups you get at the store are often too salty for me as well; I generally make my own chicken broth and I guess I don't salt it as much as they do.

I often use online recipes, sometimes I google the things I have in the fridge and find a recipe which incorporates what I have available.

I do that. Although I get to comparing recipes and wandering around to the point where it'd probably take less time to run to the store!

Cooking programs on TV are very popular also and have created an explosion of people renovating their kitchens and purchasing new and expensive appliances.

We've got "The Food Network," which has a fair number of cooking shows on it, but I think the really popular shows are the competition ones ("Worst Cook in America," "Iron Chef", etc.), where either the recipes are very challenging or require ingredients you wouldn't want to be eating together anyhow. But a lot of those recipes are available on the Internet, too.

We are starting to merge I think. I like the New York Times Recipes for Health Series, in particular, the ability to select an item and theme to get recipes.

That's a neat website that I hadn't run across before. I've got a New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook floating around; I think I've cooked about six things out of it, most of them variations on pancakes (wheat germ pancakes, whole wheat pancakes, bread crumb pancakes -- which taste a lot like French toast -- cottage cheese pancakes...). I kind of follow my mom's pattern of pancakes every week, but I skip a lot of weeks and, when I make them, they're never from a mix and often a tad exotic. Seriously considering ginger pancakes with lemon sauce for dinner tonight, but I'm not sure what our guest would think of them. Maybe I'll give her a choice between that and Mexican pan bread (essentially an onion-y corn bread with beans in it and cheese melted on it). Or I'll do the pan bread for dinner and call the pancakes dessert!

I cook a lot of stuff of British heritage, but I still measure by cups, teaspoons and tablespoons instead of pounds and ounces, let alone grams! That's the big difference I see between US recipes and those from England or Australia. Although there were a fair number of recipes in the "Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook" I hadn't tried or even heard of, like Knickerbocker Glory (which apparently originated in New York, but died out here while it's popular there). But there was a lot of stuff I'd made, too, like Irish Soda Bread and Goulash and Cornish Pasties and Yorkshire Pudding (although I don't think I've ever made it with gravy -- we always thought cooking it in meat drippings sufficiently decadent!). And we have various brats and mashed potato recipes that are fairly close to bangers and mash.

I sometimes wonder how much American home food is influenced by where people live, and how much by their heritage, although I suppose it depends on how long people have been here, too. My mom and dad's respective families through their father's sides were both here at the time of the American Revolution -- dad's side, of English heritage, stayed and fought with the Revolutionaries; mom's side, of German heritage, scurried up to Canada until things settled down. Mom's side tends toward pacifist and dad's side to arguing to this day. But most of the German food my family ate mom deliberately chose because it was German -- she makes stollen every year, but it's not an old family recipe because no one if the family made it before her. She made it from scratch, too -- she can cook from scratch, she just finds it scary.

So I'm guessing American families with a grandma from another country still around are much more influenced by their home country's cooking than we were, but OTOH most of the second generation immigrant kids I knew ate school lunches with the rest of us, so maybe not.

Just remembered this article from 2009, which made me think that, while I was growing up, my mom cooked like the average UK mom;

http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/...5AF3DU20091116

Except my mom's list would have been Italian Spaghetti (usually a doctored up mix), Pot Roast made with dry onion soup mix and canned condensed cream of something soup (she made it nearly every Sunday and I really hated it in my teens -- don't mind it once every other year or two now), Cottage Pie (which we called Shepherd's pie, but it was made with ground beef), corned beef casserole (noodles, corned beef from a can, American cheese, condensed soup from a can), meatloaf with baked potatoes, pizza from a box, beef stew with Bisquick dumplings (which she made only in the fall, and rarely), Cedric's Casserole (ground beef, cabbage, and condensed tomato soup), and pork chops baked on scalloped potatoes. Never had curry until I made something with it as an adult. Still not a staple -- oh, but chili is, forgot that. A tomato chili made with chili powder, which she'd often serve with oyster crackers.

So some of the recipes are similar, some very different, but I thought it interesting how close they were in the number of rotated recipes. And, like a fair percentage of the UK moms, my mom generally did new dishes only for company or a special occasion. Which is odd, when I think on it, because she used to say she thought me brave for doing that. I'm guessing she'd usually do them for a family birthday party first and then for something involving guests -- the only cake I remember from my childhood not involving a mix was a birthday cake for my brother, and I know she made that for guests sometimes, too. And I would guess "my" birthday cake was kind of new and challenging for her, although she did use a mix for the angel food cake part, and she did that for a family party the first time as well. So I guess she experimented on parties with just her kids, siblings, and parents before she tried a recipe for adult pals from outside of the family.

[CarolF Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close CarolF]

I do not like malt or yeasty flavors and brewers yeast in particular, so have not tried vegemite. Is peanut butter at all popular there?

As a child, we had Marmite in the cupboard, but no-one ate it. Vegemite is still popular here and a mistake most non-Australians make is they have too much of it. Commonly spread over butter (on bread or water crackers), the vegemite is spread so thin it is transparent. I liked crunchy peanut butter as a child and we now make it ourselves at the local organic store. Mostly used for peanut sauce for satays.

Canned asparagus sounds nasty, but I've only ever had it fresh.
We do have canned salmon and canned pineapple on hand most of the time, although my tolerance for canned pineapple comes and goes depending on how recently I've had the real stuff.

Canned asparagus is very nasty, I think my mother bought canned asparagus to try it. For a long time, our fresh foods were limited in variety. We had potatoes, an unnamed variety, they were always white skinned, white flesh. Lettuce was only Iceberg, but the word Iceberg was unheard of. Capsicum, eggplant, kumara, avocado and asparagus just weren't available in the stores. Thank goodness for our early Italian, Greek, Vietnamese and Chinese communities who very, very slowly introduced new foods.

Canned pineapple was popular in the 70's. It was considered exotic to serve cubes of cheese together with cubes of pineapple on toothpicks to guests, cheese and mini coloured pickled onions, cheese and kabana were other variations. Hard to believe I know.

Do you grate your own spices? I don't think I'd want a 2 lb bag of any of those otherwise!

Sometimes I grate my own. I leave cumin seeds whole for cooking. Sometimes I share bulk quantities with friends and often freeze quantities of my mixed spices for cooking. We use a lot of spices, I cook in really large quantities, then freeze it for use when we get home late from work. I eat cinnamon, nutmeg and turmeric daily for their medicinal qualities.

I'm always surprised at the people who rave about the food at Disney World, because most of it is clearly prepared well ahead of time and they use a lot of mixes and things.

The canned soups you get at the store are often too salty for me as well; I generally make my own chicken broth and I guess I don't salt it as much as they do.

I prefer freshly made food which uses fresh ingredients and it is usually readily available alongside fast food type cafe/outlets fortunately.

I use stock sometimes, but more recently I've started using spices for flavour rather than stock. I haven't tried our canned soups in the last decade, they were pretty bad then, I don't know if they are any better now. I use tinned tomatoes during winter (for cooking) and they are available in tomato juice (no additives). Tinned foods here are often labelled low salt or no salt. Our tinned Tuna and a lot of frozen fish is imported from Asia and I don't buy it. I do buy tinned Salmon (Alaska).

I still measure by cups, teaspoons and tablespoons instead of pounds and ounces, let alone grams! That's the big difference I see between US recipes and those from England or Australia.

Last week I bought a set of scales with a bowl which has metric and imperial measurements which can be changed with the addition of each ingredient - Yay. I have a really old recipe which I use to make tomato sauce (biennially) and it includes "1/2 tin of golden syrup" which is now in plastic jars. I googled an image of the tin to find out the original quantity in the can. Love the internet sometimes.

Food in Australia was traditionally "meat and 3 vegetable" for years and years. In my house, the vegetables were boiled (and usually overcooked) and served with casseroled meat, steak and kidney or corned beef or Shepherd's pie. Shepherd's pie was seasoned minced meat (your ground meat?) with mashed potato on top and browned in the oven. Mum made dumplings sometimes which were cooked in the casserole.

Each Sunday in the middle of the day, (parents called it dinner) we call it lunch, a Roast of some sort was cooked - beef, lamb, pork (called the Sunday Joint) or chicken and served with boiled, or in later years steamed, vegetables. The rules for the 3 vegetables were, potatoes plus 1 green and 1 orange vegetable. Sometimes the potatoes were roasted. Gravy was always served and Yorkshire Pudding also.

Dessert was sometimes a home made fruit pie - blackberry, apple or apricot served with vanilla ice cream. Mum's Trifle was popular and included a large quantity of alcohol (sherry I think). Alcohol was rarely served and Mum rarely drank. I remember bringing my first boyfriend home and Mum knowing he liked Scotch Whisky offered him one, then poured him a full water glass of Whisky, she had no idea. Bottles of alcohol were kept for guests, but most guests were served tea so the bottles of alcohol lasted for years and years.

I think the original idea was to attend Church on Sunday before returning home to cook a roast meal. In Australia, I don't recall any/many people attending Church. Some children attended Sunday School but not regularly from what I could work out. I asked to go but gave up when no-one else I knew was there. We sang God Save the Queen at Primary School.

At Christmas, a large roast was always served, you got more variety in vegetables too. I remember having Turkey maybe once or twice, it wasn't a common meat here. Small fruit mince pies were made. The fruit sat in alcohol on the kitchen counter for a number of days before they could be made. Christmas Fruit cake with marzipan and icing was a constant. Christmas is a very hot time of year and many families, including mine, still observe the traditional roast dinner for Christmas. At other times, a large un-iced fruit cake was made and was occasionally served with a slice of a tasty cheese (a Yorkshire idea I believe). Birthday cakes were usually a cream filled sponge, with jam spread on the bottom cake and topped with icing, often butter icing.

[Hobbitess Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Hobbitess]

Canned asparagus is very nasty, I think my mother bought canned asparagus to try it. For a long time, our fresh foods were limited in variety.

Yah, we certainly have a much larger variety of fresh fruit and vegetables now than when I was a kid, but it varies according to where you live. Grocery stores in my mom's hometown in Southern Minnesota had very limited options when I was a kid (and not a whole lot more now, but there's a Walmart within an hour's drive with fair selection), but we had access to more in the cities we lived in and yet more in Southern Michigan. It was easy to get a fair variety of fresh foods in Southern Michigan and Northern Indiana from farm stands -- which now are sometimes quite elaborate buildings with air conditioning and all, but are still more commonly just a table or tiny stand out by the road with fresh vegetables or fruit on it, and maybe a bucket of gladiolas, and the farmer's wife or kids will come out when they see you pull up. I think those are most common in rural areas where there's enough tourist traffic to make it worthwhile, which is why there was nothing like that in Southern Minnesota.

Cities may still be bad, I dunno. Hubby's best friend, who comes from the East Coast, was shocked and impressed by the fresh fruits and vegetables he could get at the local store, and said he could find nothing like that where he'd lived before -- it's the only thing he's ever thought better here than there.

Canned pineapple was popular in the 70's. It was considered exotic to serve cubes of cheese together with cubes of pineapple on toothpicks to guests, cheese and mini coloured pickled onions, cheese and kabana were other variations. Hard to believe I know.

I've got recipes like that I've pulled out of women's magazines from the seventies here, so not hard to believe at all!

Last week I bought a set of scales with a bowl which has metric and imperial measurements which can be changed with the addition of each ingredient - Yay. I have a really old recipe which I use to make tomato sauce (biennially) and it includes "1/2 tin of golden syrup" which is now in plastic jars. I googled an image of the tin to find out the original quantity in the can. Love the internet sometimes.

I've got a lot of church cookbooks (a spiral or ring bound collection of recipes collected from a particular church's members), and they'll often have "a number two can" of this or "a number 300 can" of that, which were quite a challenge to use before I had access to the Internet! Even better are those that just say, "a can" of something that's canned in multiple sizes. My cookbook recipes from the 1970s mostly give can sizes in ounces, but can be a challenge sometimes because they're calling for can sizes that aren't made any more. Some manufacturers release recipes for a particular size can that only they distribute, too, but that's usually less of a challenge since so far it's always been something someone in the family likes straight out of the can or something where I can just throw in a larger can and it'll turn out fine.

Some staples are easy to find here in no salt varieties but aside from tomatoes I get them frozen anyhow. We just discovered second son has high blood pressure (at sixteen -- runs in hubby's family, unfortunately), so I either need to find a salt-free variety or start cooking my own red and black and kidney sort of beans. I haven't looked much, though, because it's never been an issue before, and they don't salt the beans enough it bugs me. Although I do rinse them for salads and leave salt out of some recipes to compensate.

Shepherd's pie was seasoned minced meat (your ground meat?) with mashed potato on top and browned in the oven.

Here, minced meat is finely chopped; ground meat is actually run through a grinder the way you would for sausages, although it's loose. Ground meat is not spiced (although one common additive to ground beef is something called "pink slime" -- processed trimmings treated with ammonia ); spiced ground meat is usually called either sausage (most commonly pork sausage or turkey sausage) or flavored hamburger (which are usually preformed rather than loose).

Each Sunday in the middle of the day, (parents called it dinner) we call it lunch, a Roast of some sort was cooked - beef, lamb, pork (called the Sunday Joint) or chicken and served with boiled, or in later years steamed, vegetables. The rules for the 3 vegetables were, potatoes plus 1 green and 1 orange vegetable. Sometimes the potatoes were roasted. Gravy was always served and Yorkshire Pudding also.

Hubby refuses to call any meal "dinner," because here it refers to the biggest meal of the day, which is lunch on Sundays but the main evening meal the rest of the week, and he hates the fact that it switches around according to context.

Alcohol was rarely served and Mum rarely drank. I remember bringing my first boyfriend home and Mum knowing he liked Scotch Whisky offered him one, then poured him a full water glass of Whisky, she had no idea. Bottles of alcohol were kept for guests, but most guests were served tea so the bottles of alcohol lasted for years and years.

We don't drink alcohol much, either. I like some wines, but not enough to buy them for drinking -- and I greatly dislike a preservative that's in a lot of wines, so it's a hassle. We have a fair collection of alcoholic beverages for cooking, though, but most of our guests drink beer if anything (Lutherans ), and any beer we have around is (1) cheap and (2) probably months old, because none of us drink it and I only use it for cooking or baking. Eldest loves beer bread; too malty for me but I do like beer in a couple of soups where it just kind of adds to the complexity of the flavor. All of which means I don't offer people alcoholic drinks as a rule.

I think the original idea was to attend Church on Sunday before returning home to cook a roast meal. In Australia, I don't recall any/many people attending Church. Some children attended Sunday School but not regularly from what I could work out.

We always went to church on Sunday when I was a kid. In the U.S., I think it depends on where you live and who you hang out with. More people go to church in the Midwest and the South than in the West or either coast, is my guess. Hubby's family in Illinois would send the kids to Sunday School if they were interested (the church sent out a little bus to picks kids up), but the adults didn't go (more go in our generation than his mom's, though). In my parent's generation, and to some extent mine, anyone who was anybody would go to church in small towns of the midwest (not attending church -- at least regularly enough to remain a member -- was equivalent to rejecting local society). A lot of my friends had no contact with church at all, to the point where one friend asked me once about "my people" in the same patronizing tone some people of my parent's generation would use when asking a black person about their culture -- only my friend was using "your people" to refer to people who go to church.

OTOH, going to church in small towns was expected and really didn't mean much; going to church in the bigger cities on the coast or in the west was actually making a statement about what you believed. Although there are still churches that seem to me to be more about getting into, or identifying with, a particular social group than about any particular set of beliefs. For example, Unitarian churches vary from congregation to congregation, where in some if you don't believe in some kind of god you'll feel like an outsider, while others atheists fit as well as anyone and once in a while they're practically the local Buddhist church! Although that last may be less true now than it once was, because there are a lot more Buddhist churches around than there used to be. On second thought, I think they're temples, not churches. Buddhist congregations, how about.

[Hobbitess Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Hobbitess]

Alright, this is bad -- my response won't even fit into one post now. If I'd posted when I first read yours instead of letting it marinate a few days, probably would have been fine!

At Christmas, a large roast was always served, you got more variety in vegetables too. I remember having Turkey maybe once or twice, it wasn't a common meat here. Small fruit mince pies were made. The fruit sat in alcohol on the kitchen counter for a number of days before they could be made. Christmas Fruit cake with marzipan and icing was a constant. Christmas is a very hot time of year and many families, including mine, still observe the traditional roast dinner for Christmas.

The first time I served Yorkshire pudding and trifle was for an "English Christmas" dinner I made the first year hubby and I didn't visit the parents for Christmas. When I was a kid, we had turkey and dressing for Christmas -- basically, the same meal we'd have for Thanksgiving, except Christmas dessert was a cranberry pudding with a sauce made of equal quantities of sugar, butter, and cream, instead of the Thanksgiving pumpkin pies. My dad told my mom the cranberry pudding was something his mom always made when he was a kid; when Grandma finally visited at Christmas and first tasted it (when we were little we had three Christmasses -- one with my dad's parents on Christmas eve, one with my mom's parents on Christmas Day, and then one at home after we got back), she really liked it and asked mom where she'd picked it up, and when mom said she thought it was their traditional Christmas desert when dad was a kid, Grandma said, "Yeah, I guess I made something like that... once."

At other times, a large un-iced fruit cake was made and was occasionally served with a slice of a tasty cheese (a Yorkshire idea I believe). Birthday cakes were usually a cream filled sponge, with jam spread on the bottom cake and topped with icing, often butter icing.

Fruit cake is Christmas cake around here, although it's also the source of many jokes because it's considered so heavy -- and because most people don't have it, I suspect. I've only known one family that actually makes it from scratch; most times I've had it, it's from a box. And I haven't had it very often -- I can't remember if my grandma's would have it for Christmas (if so, I never had it because there were always so many other things I wanted more!), but my mom never did, although she gets it most years now. Through the mail, in a box.

Birthday cakes are usually box mixes or a cake with "butter" cream frosting purchased at the store, and are deadly dull IMHO. I made a two layer cake where you split the layers and spread them with jam, then use buttercream icing for the filling and outside for a couple of birthdays and quite liked it, or at least liked it better than just cake and buttercream frosting, but I haven't convinced anyone to adopt it for their official birthday cake yet. I'm not much for cakes with buttercream frosting as a rule, so always try to steer the kids to some other kind of dessert for their birthdays, without much success except when it comes to eldest daughter and second son. Although I fear eldest daughter has settled on Butterfinger Cupcakes, based on a recipe from Disney, with two kinds of buttercream frosting (white on top, chocolate as filling), and chocolate ganache, and crumbled Butterfinger candies.

Made them once and thought that was plenty for one lifetime, thanks, but eldest daughter felt differently. No one but myself to blame. And second son has cheesecake every year, but it's an orange cheesecake with chocolate crust and a strawberry sauce -- he has yet to try the sauce but I wouldn't like it without it -- and I wold love to convince him to vary that a bit because I don't make cheesecake more than once or twice a year and there are probably six of them I like better.

[CarolF Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close CarolF]

It was easy to get a fair variety of fresh foods in Southern Michigan and Northern Indiana from farm stands -- which now are sometimes quite elaborate buildings with air conditioning and all, but are still more commonly just a table or tiny stand out by the road with fresh vegetables or fruit on it, and maybe a bucket of gladiolas, and the farmer's wife or kids will come out when they see you pull up.

Love those produce stands. I've got quite a few near me and they are all "unmanned" so I carry an assortment of notes and coins to leave in the "honour box".

We just discovered second son has high blood pressure (at sixteen -- runs in hubby's family, unfortunately), so I either need to find a salt-free variety or start cooking my own red and black and kidney sort of beans.

Sorry to hear about your son, I hope he is sensible with his health. My DS's common-sense went AWOL for a few years at that age, interesting stage.

Here, minced meat is finely chopped; ground meat is actually run through a grinder the way you would for sausages, although it's loose. Ground meat is not spiced (although one common additive to ground beef is something called "pink slime" -- processed trimmings treated with ammonia ); spiced ground meat is usually called either sausage (most commonly pork sausage or turkey sausage) or flavored hamburger (which are usually preformed rather than loose).

Ahh, our minced meat is put through a mincer and fits the description of your ground meat. We season the minced meat ourselves to make shepherds pie and afaik we don't have a finely chopped meat for sale. I heard about your pink slime, I think our equivalent is meat glue - there was a TV show which showed how offcuts are "glued" together to make replicas of expensive cuts of meat.

We don't drink alcohol much, either. I like some wines, but not enough to buy them for drinking -- and I greatly dislike a preservative that's in a lot of wines, so it's a hassle. We have a fair collection of alcoholic beverages for cooking, though, but most of our guests drink beer if anything (Lutherans ), and any beer we have around is (1) cheap and (2) probably months old, because none of us drink it and I only use it for cooking or baking. Eldest loves beer bread; too malty for me but I do like beer in a couple of soups where it just kind of adds to the complexity of the flavor. All of which means I don't offer people alcoholic drinks as a rule.

Since marrying DH, I now drink wine. Haven't acquired a taste for beer except when I'm on holiday in Asia. I love the Asian beers when I'm in Asia (not here) although I suspect they are full of preservatives and not very good for me. I have never cooked with beer but I think I would like to try it, sounds interesting. I recall my Dad and Uncle making Stout during the 70's, I think I tried it (mixed with lemonade) but can't recall what I thought of it. Mum talked about drinking stout and lemonade in London during the war.

We always went to church on Sunday when I was a kid. In the U.S., I think it depends on where you live and who you hang out with. More people go to church in the Midwest and the South than in the West or either coast, is my guess. Hubby's family in Illinois would send the kids to Sunday School if they were interested (the church sent out a little bus to picks kids up), but the adults didn't go (more go in our generation than his mom's, though). In my parent's generation, and to some extent mine, anyone who was anybody would go to church in small towns of the midwest (not attending church -- at least regularly enough to remain a member -- was equivalent to rejecting local society). A lot of my friends had no contact with church at all, to the point where one friend asked me once about "my people" in the same patronizing tone some people of my parent's generation would use when asking a black person about their culture -- only my friend was using "your people" to refer to people who go to church.

OTOH, going to church in small towns was expected and really didn't mean much; going to church in the bigger cities on the coast or in the west was actually making a statement about what you believed. Although there are still churches that seem to me to be more about getting into, or identifying with, a particular social group than about any particular set of beliefs. For example, Unitarian churches vary from congregation to congregation, where in some if you don't believe in some kind of god you'll feel like an outsider, while others atheists fit as well as anyone and once in a while they're practically the local Buddhist church! Although that last may be less true now than it once was, because there are a lot more Buddhist churches around than there used to be. On second thought, I think they're temples, not churches. Buddhist congregations, how about.

You have explained that so well, I was really having trouble getting my head around how it all worked. Our latest statistics show something like 60% of people identify themselves as Christian then the next group is No Religion. Our Prime Minister is female, unmarried, childless and an atheist who lives with her male partner and no-one minds or cares much. Our fastest growing religion is Hindu apparently.

.. she really liked it and asked mom where she'd picked it up, and when mom said she thought it was their traditional Christmas desert when dad was a kid, Grandma said, "Yeah, I guess I made something like that... once."

Love that story. My grandparents were born in the 1800's and I didn't get to meet them.

Fruit cake is Christmas cake around here, although it's also the source of many jokes because it's considered so heavy -- and because most people don't have it, I suspect. I've only known one family that actually makes it from scratch; most times I've had it, it's from a box.

Birthday cakes are usually box mixes or a cake with "butter" cream frosting purchased at the store, and are deadly dull IMHO.

I'm beginning to get the idea that your ready-made-food and box mix industry has been highly developed for a long time. Your postal service for food sounds well organised too. I wonder if the high cost of fuel here has hindered our food manufacturing businesses over the years.

Mum was a skilled tailor/dressmaker and didn't like the style or quality of clothing here. Some bits and pieces were posted to us from Marks and Spencers in England but they took ages to arrive. She was glad to be able to locate fabric from England and Europe here, and I remember her excitement at finding Swiss cottons, French lace, Scottish plaids and Irish linens. Even now, it is generally accepted that the clothes in England are much better quality than our clothing.

Today it was announced that our Girl Guides have changed their pledge and will no longer promise to do their duty to God and serve the Queen. Instead, they will promise to do their best to be true to themselves and develop their beliefs, serve their community and Australia.

[Hobbitess Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Hobbitess]

Love those produce stands. I've got quite a few near me and they are all "unmanned" so I carry an assortment of notes and coins to leave in the "honour box".

We've done that too, but usually someone will wander out to tell us what else is ripe in the garden or just chat.

Sorry to hear about your son, I hope he is sensible with his health. My DS's common-sense went AWOL for a few years at that age, interesting stage.

Second son is big on the common sense thing and always has been, although I'm not sure how that'll transfer to his eating. His diet isn't actually that bad, though, so I'm not sure how many changes he'll be making. His older brother is diabetic, so second son knows that having a particular condition can mean you just eat the way you gotta eat. Eldest son is NOT known for his common sense, but fortunately when it comes to his diet he's really good. Although he does "take vacations" -- when he's at scout camp or visiting his grandma, he just eats what he wants and kicks up the insulin to compensate. But outside of that, he stays pretty much on target, so second son has that good example at least.

afaik we don't have a finely chopped meat for sale.

The finely chopped meat I'm most familiar with is chipped ham, which is sliced very thin and then chopped, although I guess it's more finely cut than finely chopped. You need chipped ham for a proper chipped ham sandwich, which goes back to a particular chain of delis (Isaly's), so it's popular where they were (Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia). But if you go early enough (i.e., when there are still butchers around!), most grocery stores around here you can pick out some meat and have the butcher chip, chop, or slice it for you. We get our ham that way -- picking out a whole ham and having it prepared and freezing some of it is way cheaper than buying ham sandwich meat in the little eight ounce packages. Hubby and eldest son eat a lot of cold ham sandwiches with the thin sliced; second son is going to have to give up his chipped ham sandwiches, but we very rarely have them anyhow, because you cook it up with onions and melt cheese on it and it's more effort than the cheese sandwiches that are his staples.

He's going to have to switch to Swiss cheese (less salt than the American cheese food he's been using), and he's started making grilled (really fried) cheese sandwiches with olive oil instead of butter, which I think sounds kind of nasty but he's fine with it so far. Although it's American cheese with olive oil that sounds nasty; Swiss cheese with olive oil sounds more reasonable, somehow. Eldest daughter is not a huge fan of the American cheese sandwiches, but she thought the Swiss with olive oil really good. Not good enough to make them for herself, of course. But she'll eat all the ones she can con second son into making for her. The boys cook more for themselves than she does, but OTOH she eats leftovers and they don't, so I shouldn't complain.

Since marrying DH, I now drink wine. Haven't acquired a taste for beer except when I'm on holiday in Asia.

I used to drink wine when I hung out with a friend whose mom has wine every evening, but it was just social drinking for me, not the calming ritual it was for them. My calming ritual is making tea; pouring out a glass of wine isn't fussy enough to work for me I guess. There's a "winery loop tour" not far from here, where you can drive or bike to a bunch of wineries that offer samples that I keep intending to do, but hubby has no interest and, up until recently, the kids were too young. I do buy local wines when I get wine, which are not the cheapest, but I probably wouldn't if they weren't in the cheapish range.

My sister drinks beer, but only European kinds, I suppose because she picked up the habit while living in Germany for a year. I used to pick some up for her when she living in Chicago and visited more frequently. I'm not sure if that habit survived her moving to New Mexico, now I think on it. Hubby's side has a lot of beer drinkers but my side, not so much. Just my sister and one cousin who is big on microbrewery beer.

Love that story. My grandparents were born in the 1800's and I didn't get to meet them.

I knew all four grandparents, and they were all around until I was into my twenties. I didn't realize how rare that is until my brother and I both married; neither of our spouses knew any of their grandparents. My husband's dad died when hubby was nineteen, so obviously my kids never knew him, but the younger ones don't remember hubby's mom very well, either, which is sad. She was actually still around long enough, but she had Alzheimers, and after a while Rick's siblings who lived in town and saw her every week discouraged us from taking the kids to see her (they kept going every week or more until she died, but only the oldest of the grandkids could handle her non-responsiveness).

I was the eldest grandchild on both sides; I was shocked a year or so after I got married when talking to my little sister and one of my cousins who is younger yet and discovered none of them remembered the house my grandpa built -- my cousin didn't even know he'd built one! He and grandma moved into the other house when my sister and cousin were so young, it's just not part of their memories. My mom always said I never knew her dad, because she thinks he was suffering from depression before I was born, but I knew him a lot more than some of the other grand kids. Maybe I didn't know him when he built the house, but I knew the house, which was his creation, so I wasn't unaware of that aspect of him at least. I do think that knowledge revealed more than my mom realizes.

I adored that grandpa, and enjoyed all my grandparents, but had no idea how lucky I was just to have that experience. Sometimes I think I'm going to pay for it at the other end -- when we got married, hubby warned me that all the men in his family die at 65. Both my grandmas, and most of their female siblings, lived to be ninety, and my mom's generation is well on their way to that. So sometimes I think I may "pay" for knowing my grandparents by not having a hubby for some years. Not a logical connection, but there it is.

I'm beginning to get the idea that your ready-made-food and box mix industry has been highly developed for a long time. Your postal service for food sounds well organised too.

If I remember rightly, it was stateside corporations that expanded into Europe with cake mixes, at least to start. But what I most remember was their efforts to sell in Japan -- the Japanese don't have ovens in their homes, so they developed a cake mix that could be made in the rice cooker. Didn't sell, and when they researched why, turns out a lot of Japanese moms were worried about the cake "contaminating" the rice somehow, just by being in the same cooker at different times. Although the real problem was the common habit of doing a batch of rice in the cooker and letting it sit there all day -- can't bake a cake in a cooker full of rice.

Mum was a skilled tailor/dressmaker and didn't like the style or quality of clothing here.

I am no seamstress but my mom made a lot of our clothes when I was younger, and I think it was hard to get really high quality materials back then. Plaids, but not clan plaids; some good narrow border laces but the larger stuff was not fine. I used to make costumes for movie premieres when I was in my twenties, and it was hard to find the really nice stuff then. Plenty of good quality cottons and corduroys and every day stuff, but no nice silks and the satin was always all polyester and/or nylon. Hard to find good heavy wool cloth, too, although a fair selection of light weight blends. There's a lot more choice on the Internet, but I always want to be able to touch it before I buy! Some places will send samples, and I may make use of that when I'm not actively parenting, but right now that sounds like way too much hassle.

There's a very skilled dressmaker at church -- since she went off to college, she's been posting her creations on Facebook right regular; some are stunner. She prefers patterns from the 1940s and '50s, and I love about half her dresses and hate the other half. Our tastes overlap considerable, but she likes some stuff I think much too tailored and fussy. She always looks trim and well put together, though, whether I like the dress or not. Most of the other people I know who sew do quilts or projects (our pastor's wife did a "skirt" for our changing table, back in the day, and also some retracting shades for our dining room windows), which probably explains why those are the kinds of materials that are easiest to find around here.

My big involved sewing accomplishments lately are... pillowcases. Dead simple, "straight stitch across the bottom and up one side, hem the edge" pillowcases.