Really? I found tinned clams quite easily in Safeway when I had a hankerin’ to try out this clam chowder thing. Of course, they may not have been the “right sort”. But the results were verrrry good.
Never seen any restaurants selling actual clam chowder, mind you. They should.
Very much a favorite website of mine, but I can’t make myself justify the expense - I’m in Sydney, canned goods are heavy to ship, by the time I pay for canned pumpkin and have it shipped I’ve paid about $8 a can. Makes my eyes bleed.
I did find some in a candy store here, of all places - they carry a lot of American candy and they stocked up on a heap of Thanksgiving type stuff. I cleaned them out at “only” about 5 dollars a can.
Still made my eyes bleed, but I did four pies for various and sundry at Thanksgiving without baking pumpkin, so there’s that. If I hadn’t been making so many (why do people both make fun of pumpkin pie and ask me to make them one cause they love love love mine?) I’d have sighed wistfully and moved on.
I’m purposefully banning myself from USA Foods until I recover from Christmas, as I’m out of Ranch Dressing, Blue Cheese Dressing, Fritos and Lipton Onion Soup Mix. And Crystal Light. And a few other things.
Must. Not. Look. 
We had Christmas turkey. I think it came out of a frozen cardboard box. It was alright.
You can buy Ranch Dressing from the supermarket, you know. The Paul Newman’s Own brand is very good, IMHO.
If you ever get the hankering for a good Blue Cheese Dressing, I suggest a trip to Sizzler. Sizzler, FTR, is the closest thing we have to an “American” chain restaurant up here, but I recall seeing Outback Steakhouses and Chilli’s the last time I was down in Sydney so your results almost certainly do vary.
Up here, an Outback steakhouse is an Aussie chain.
No, it’s what Americans think Australian food is like. From what I’ve seen, Outback Steakhouse is very much “American Style”, but all the dishes have silly names using that quaint old slang that no-one in Australia has used since Skippy The Bush Kangaroo went off the air…
Oh, don’t I know it…but about 99% of the Americans who eat there are under the impression that they’re eating real Aussie food.
At which point, I unscrew my handy jar of Vegemite…
And the Americans run away, so they still don’t know what real Aussie food is like.
(I say this as an American who actually likes Vegemite and such things herself.)
Well, whaddaya know? No chowder! No clams!
Does this mean that you don’t have linguine with clam sauce?
And what about those giant clams they have over in Palau? (Yes, I watched that season of Survivor.) They don’t bring them in? Or aren’t they very tasty?
Well, do keep trying! All kinds of seafoods are used for chowder, so the oysters and mussels should work fine. (And all kinds of other foods too.) Clam chowder is just the most common/famous. As Aspidistra noted, you can make a very decent clam chowder with canned clams. You might also want to try chicken corn chowder. Yum yum!
Really? I’ve only been there a couple of times, but my impression was that there was nothing particularly “Australian” about the food–it seemed to be just decent generic American chain steakhouse food with gimmicky names. Maybe I missed something, though. What dishes do they serve that they’re selling as being particulary Australian?
They appear to have backed off the Aussie claims somewhat very recently, but:
italics mine. Clearly these Aussie names imply an Aussie preparation. From wiki
Paul Newman is bleh. Ranch is Hidden Valley. 
Newman’s Own will do in a pinch.
I had that thought on Blue Cheese, but alas, it hasn’t worked for me - might be a Sydney thing? There aren’t any Sizzlers near me. I’ve been to Outbank and the Blue Cheese was…disturbing. Thin. No lumps. Sort of like spoiled mayo. There’s a place on the North Shore I want to try, apparently most expats end up there, and not where I live in the Inner West.
I’ll have to try when I got to Melbourne next, I hadn’t thought about them maybe varying between states. I don’t get to QLD unless I’m on business, and then I have to eat with clients.
I love the food here most times, I just miss a few things.
We don’t, but marinara sauce is very different here to over there.
Marinara = a tomato-based sauce with fish, calamari, octopus and often oysters.
Yeah, there’s a lolly shop under Grace Brothers in the city that sells that sort of thing. You might also find that the food hall at David Jones in the city stocks some odd American stuff (across the aisle from the lifts), but they rotate their stock every so often, so don’t count on being able to find something twice in as many trips.
Nevermind
Yeah, the one under Myers (Grace Brothers) is the one I found the pumpkin at, but they haven’t had it again. I keep having bad luck at DJs, but I always look. They had Montery Jack cheese at the cheese shop…once. In about five years. I get to the city pretty often, too.
But they have yummy goat cheese, so that’s ok then!
I always meant to ask some travelling American this, and you’ve just reminded me…
What’s the closest local equivalent to Monterey Jack, do you think? I keep seeing it in online recipes - generally I just sub in cheddar, but I’m sure I could do better than that.
The snags are really good, too - I think they’re better than the AC Butchery ones that are supposed to be the measure of these things.
But they seem to keep changing what they get in as American foods. While I was waiting for the lift yesterday I saw that they had tins of “French fried onions”. I wasn’t sure whether to snicker to myself or simply despair for the degradations of humanity.
Then I remembered that I was trapped in a shop in the after-Christmas sales period and returned to my previous state of homicidal irritation.
I was fairly sure that Sugar Fix (I think? Sugar something, anyway) had tins of American pumpkin when I was passing there a couple of weeks ago. It might be a seasonal thing for Spring/Summer. I use it as a supplier of American barbecue sauce which is wildly different from the stuff that’s available locally.
Never tried the original, but I’ve been told that Coon is a pretty good substitute.
Yes they did. I saw them too when I was browsing what they had on offer.
Long as this thread is open–I need to ask you folks: What are those trees you have with sorta wide, flat greenery interspersed with bright orange-red flowery stuff, in bloom around this time of year? If they’re localized, I noticed them particularly in Queensland.
I’m amazed they brought this chain to Australia.
I’ve eaten in an Outback Steakhouse a couple of times in the States, and while the actual food was alright, the ‘themeing’ was completley laughable. I thought my wife and I had offended the waitress at one point we were pointing and laughing so hard at the menu
I’m really curious to go and try one of the Australian locations to see if they’ve changed the themeing at all for the ‘home’ market!