Farm1 wrote:
"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
...
Billy wrote:
In article ,
"David Hare-Scott" wrote:

Farm1 wrote:
"songbird" wrote in message

(snip)
this season a few of those were acorn squash and
had fruits. hmmm... baked a few squash the other
day (one acorn and a butternut). the inside looked
like the acorn squash we used to get. actually yellow
to orange colored instead of white and pasty. the
flavor was excellent.

I had had no idea what you meant by an 'acorn squash' so did a
google and found out that its a winter squash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_squash
so that (and the butternut)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butternut_squash
is what we Australians would just put under the name of pumpkins.

Pumpkin is a staple foodstuff here in Oz and a very popular
vegetable.

Pumpkin is very, very rarely served here in any sweet form except
for Pumpkin Scones (and they have become somewhat of a joke)

Do they not grow Grammas in the south? I thought Gramma pie was a
bush standard.

D

Oh my, you be talkin' Strine now, aren't you?

Numero-uno: I doubt that any Bubba worth his salt would know what a
Gramma pie was. It's just plain pumpkin pie in these parts.

A gramma is a cucurbit with orange flesh that is particularly made
into a sweet(ish) pie and AFAIK not usually eaten as a vegetable. Whether
you would call it a winter squash or a pumpkin I have no
idea.

Numero-two-o: By bush (not Bush) standard I presume that you mean
common to unsophisticated rural areas. Au contraire, mon ami, Gramma
pie is consumed in vast quantities during year end festivals by
cognoscenti, bumpkins, urbanites, suburbanites, and all the other
"ites" alike.

The 'bush' is everything outside cities and major regional centres
and includes areas where your neighbours are a few hundred metres
away and the outback where they might be a hundred kilometres away. It is
where people tend to have land to grow large plants like
pumpkins and the tradition of doing so. I wasn't making any comment
on level of sophistication, it's that city folk wouldn't eat gramma
pie due to the lack of grammas and knowing how to make it.

:-)) Indeed. City people seem to have lost many skills when it
comes to food and it's preparation.

I'm always stunned when I visit my sister in Sydney and look in her
fridge and pantry. Both are almost bare and I always think of the
old saying about 'society being 7 meals away from anarchy'. I could
eat out of my fridge/freezer and pantry for at least a month but at
my sisters I wonder what they will eat for dinner (she seldom does
any cooking at all and they seem to eat out every night).

I was reading that in some western cities (eg New York) kitchens are being
converted to other uses (spare bedrooms, walk-in wardrobes etc) because the
occupants always eat out and that some new appartments are built without
one. No I can't recall when or who said so.

If you look at the way cities decay into anarchy in a few days due to
external events (eg weather extremes such as Katrina at New Orleans) we must
be very concerned about the fragility of such a way of life. As soon as the
power or fuel stop people will be hungry very soon. We are going to pass
through a transition away from a fossil fuel economy some time in the next
generation. I don't see myself as a doomsayer but I worry that the
transition will not be smooth. Many people would not be aware that in this
country we have had many thousands of city men tramping about the bush
looking for work/food. Sydney is now much bigger and more dependent on
remote supplies of food and energy than it was in the Great Depression.

D