Uh, what? Did you really just use your personal preference as a cite? :dubious:
I don’t cook turkey year round because a) it’s a dang lot of food, and b) at least around here, it’s more expensive than chicken once the holidays are over. Please note that “lousy meat” is nowhere on the above list.
Unless you think I’m pretending too… :dubious:
hijack
Hey I manage to about everything I want (at the moment that is dowloading audio books) I get booted off every 10 hours (probably not a bad thing) my download manager reconnects me if I’m downloading: cost 17cents. If I start getting frustrated with the slowness I take it as a sign that I need to go back to the real world for a bit.
Rarely eat turkey.
I think the second answer is because of distance and cost (Size of the USA less Alaska) but with a far smaller population. Our pay TV is far more expensive as well.
In my experience it’s a very common tradition.
I have read that the turkey that is eaten in Europe is descended from the Mexican sub-species, which was taken back to Europe by the Spanish. It seems most likely that the turkeys raised in Australia originated from European stocks, not American poultry farms.
It’s been some while since I searched it (don’t even recall why I did), but if you do a search on wild turkeys, I think you’ll find that supports what I’ve read elsewhere. Some have escaped from turkey farms and interbred with the native wild turkey, producing a more aggressive bird. The wild birds are reported to have become a real nuisance in New England. It’s very late, and I really should have waited until daytime to come here…
There is no question that wild turkeys are far more tasty than the domestic kind. It’s a matter of diet, as someone mentioned above (can’t find it right now). Turkey farms feed a processed food to their birds. Wild turkeys eat all the different things that appeal to them, including grains of different sorts, and some other things that flavor the meat.
Many U.S. states have a hunting season on wild turkeys. If you like to hunt, I recommend you check with your state Game & Wildlife Board (department, whatever) to see if there is a hunting season on them in your state.
I believe that the U.S. and Canada are the only countries which have a Thanksgiving Day. However, Canadian Thanksgiving is much earlier: The second Monday in October. To my mind, that makes more sense, since harvest time is over in nearly every part of the U.S. long before the fourth Thursday in November.
Okay, but how that severe fresh cranberry shortage? It’s an outrage, I tell you…
Cranberry (or rather, Cranberry sauce) comes in jars from the supermarket.
You’re going to have as much luck finding actual cranberries here as you will finding Clam Chowder, FWIW.
There’s a Cranberry promotion society on the web.
But even they don’t claim you’re going to find fresh cranberries anywhere in Australia.
What is wrong with frozen (I feed them to my rabbit)?
What type of turkey do you eat? I eat the kind that I buy at the supermarket, whatever that is.
As for taste, it’s subjective, but I think roasted turkey tastes great. The key is not to overcook it, which will make it dry, especially the white meat. And turkey soup? It’s the best!
Another Aussie checking in.
“Whatever kind is sold in the supermarket as a frozen ‘turkey’.” But it’s rare. We did it once about fifteen years ago. Ham (cold, by the way - never warm) is the standard, prawns are slightly less common, with barbecued fish, roast chicken and roast pork following as less-likely-but-still-common Christmas fare.
Because they can. Some really, really awful policy in the '90s meant that the telephone company was privatised as a whole, rather than hiving off the bit that’s responsible for maintaining the infrastructure. That company (Telstra) on-sells data access by the byte and the ISPs pass on that cost. I’m paying AUD60/month for a connection that’s “up to 24MBps”, and which usually tops out at 4 MBps (I’m 500m from the exchange), with a 30GB limit during peak times (7 a.m. to 1 a.m.) and 20GB in the off-peak time. The ISP’s no longer offering that package, though, and the current ones are more restrictive.
I’ll add a x1 for the kind of turkey you buy in the supermarket 
. I’ve never had a roast turkey in the sense of the whole bird. I’ve only ever had the roast breast. Which to me seems to be far more prolific than an entire turkey, which I see rarely, even at Xmas time.
As has been mentioned, my families X-mas lunch invariably involves roast lamb/beef, ham, chicken, & turkey breast all pre-cooked and served cold, plus a heap of seafood, invariably prawns, bugs and oysters.
Fair enough. I will agree it’s not uncommon for Australians to eat turkey, but I’ll stand by my assertion it’s not very common to make a big tradition or ceremony of it as Americans seem to do. I’ll concede that my original post didn’t make that distinction though.
I’d say that as other posters here have pointed out, with all the ham, seafood, chicken etc that we usually eat on the day, if turkey was somehow left out, most people probably wouldn’t notice.
Moved from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
I grew up having Crayfish on Christmas day! Yay! I had to buy myself one this year, as I didn’t go home. Though my dad has 10 in the freezer… sooooo jealous! We also had turkey (frozen), sometimes duck, a little bit of ham.
You don’t have clam chowder in Australia? Really? Why not? Do you suffer a shortage of chowders in general? Or do you have no clams? Or both?
(I don’t know why, but the idea of having no clam chowder is really weirding me out.)
Both. You can find a bisque if you care enough to look. You might be able to use a search engine to track down a place that serves a corn chowder, but I can’t remember ever seeing clam chowder, or clams at a fish shop.
Oysters? Mussels? Pippis? Go nuts. No clams, though.
No clams, or chowders. As BigNik says, a bisque is the closest you’re going to get here for the most part.
I’ve tried making my own chowder using oysters and mussels in lieu of clams but… well, I’m not really a chef so we’ll call it a “practice” dish while I try and work out where I went wrong and see if I can try again. 
I regret to say, as a Yank in Oz of nearly six year’s standing, that the cranberry shortage has gone on for at least that time and is predicted to go on into eternity.
Turkey? I order it from the butcher for Thanksgiving every year, which I then my my Australian family and friends suffer through for my amusement. (Alas, there’s no damn canned pumpkin, either, I gotta cook the stuff for my pies!)
I don’t know what breed it is, other than “small”. Seriously, it’s like a chicken with pretensions. It tastes about like a turkey should taste, when soaked in a brine with bourbon for 24 hours, as you do. (Or as you should do.)
My internet is expensive, but we are gamers and use it a lot. But we’ve been with iinet lo these many years and I notice every so often they shove an extra gig or two our way, so with ADSL2 we’re doing well by comparison.
Don’t know if you’ve heard of USA Foods? If you’re in Melbourne you can drive there - and they ship around Australia otherwise. Canned pumpkin is definately something they carry.