Shouts From Down Under

Breakfast fit for a King!

What we eat for breakfast here may turn your stomach.

The toast is most likely acceptable. Even the fig jam on one piece. Milk coffee pushes the envelope a little. But the other bit of toast with strange black / brown stains on it?

What IS that stuff?

It's called Vegemite. And I have it every day. Yes, I eat it. Bite, chew, taste and swallow. Every last crumb and swirl.

My earliest memories of breakfast surface at our grandparents home, on the side of the road, at an unheard of, isolated place called Rocky Glen. The entire town had been planned and laid out on paper, but no houses were ever built within city limits and there were only 3 or 4 there. It wasn't even a village.

My earliest breakfast memories consist of Vegemite on toast.

At some unearthly hour, my grandfather, who used to be a shearer by trade, (my dad learnt the same skills), would rise up and light the old Canberra wood stove in one end of the large kitchen / dining room.
He'd then work in tandem with grandma to cook up a pan of blackened lamb chops, a big pot of wheat porridge and in later years that became Uncle Toby's Rolled Oats.

There would be scalding hot tea poured into enamel mugs or those old Bessemer melamine plastic ones. The bore water would stain them and the hot beverage always tasted of plastic.

They would insist that I sat on one of those spidery wooden chairs in front of the stove, with my feet propped up on the spark catcher in front of the ash box, to warm my toes in the frosty dawn.

The chops would be sizzling and I could smell the fresh bread grandma baked herself, toasting it on a three prong fork held in front of the embers, the fire door wide open, toast whisked away by grandma to be hot buttered, ready for a few scrapings of Vegemite applied sparingly on top.

There was no dishwasher, but plenty of hot water from their solar system on the roof; when it wasn't burst with the frost and being repaired.

So, that was breakfast as I remember it, and much the same at home. Except as a treat we'd have crumpets. They are delicious with honey, Golden Syrup or Vegemite too.

This makes me wonder what's for breakfast tomorrow morning!

I tried some Grits a friend sent from South Carolina, one time and they were very yummy. But the hot biscuits eaten in America are completely different to what we call biscuits here in Australia.

Our biscuits = your cookies.

And that, is another story- and not a breakfast one.



Sparky