14th May 2011
There are only a handful of places to stay in the vast open spaces of the red centre, and boy do they know it.
You pay four-star prices and get a room that has all the charm of a bog standard motel but with better bathroom tiling. And the food is both expensive and rubbish. Maureen’s dinner was down on paper as “grilled chicken in cajun spices with a mango salsa, served on a mushroom risotto”. Okay, so there’s a slight collision of flavours already. But the chicken held no hint or clue that spices had ever been near it. The mango salsa was bits of mango from a tin with chopped up onion mixed in. I could tell it was from a tin, it tasted precisely like tinned peaches. And the risotto was just cheesy rice, massively over-salted. I’d just laugh if it hadn’t cost £25.
Yep, you’re a captive audience and they’re happy to treat you that way. You might offer the logistics of transporting food across the desert as something of an excuse, but that’s nonsense. I can make a delicious risotto and the only perishable you need to send me is some fresh parmigiana. And they insist on serving everything out here with a pathetic side-salad of lettuce, tomato and pepper. Is there anything in the world less suited to hauling across the desert and keeping fresh than lettuce?
It’s weird, to have had superb food right across Australia and then just hit a vein of relentless rubbish in the very middle. It’s laziness and greed, mainly laziness.
On a lighter note, we bought some convenience foods from the petrol station for our lunch today (mainly because a coachload had hit the cafe just before us and the kitchen looked swamped). Naturally the choice is limited in the middle of nowhere; it was a chilli beef pie and some potato salad. Check out the ingredients on that pie: water, wheat flour, beef, kidney beans, margarine, cheese, thickener 1422, emulsifying salts 451, 450, 361, salt, vegetable gum 415, colour 160a, corn, chilli flavour (sugar, salt, spice extract, food acid 330, 331, thickener 412, 415, 1412, hydrolysed vegetable protein, dried vegetable, colour 160a), pastry conditioner (milk solids, mineral salts 450, 500, wheat starch, wheat flour, emulsifier 481, soy flour, preservative 223, raising agent 920, tomato paste, jalapeno peppers (hurrah!), thickener 1414, soya flour, onion, seasoning, salt, emulsifier, garlic, colour 150c.
I hate this stuff. Why is that necessary? Please, I beg you all, don’t eat this rubbish. This is why I never go near convenience foods. And if you thought the potato salad would be sweetness and light: potato, canola oil, antioxidant 306, sour cream, water, vinegar, sugar, mustard, salt, whey powder, egg, food acid, modified starch 1442, 1450, emulsifiers 471, 435, vegetable gums 412, 415, garlic, flavouring, spice, colours161b, 171, spring onion, parsley. Why on the good green earth does a potato salad need artificial colourings?!?
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