Kokonda/Coconut Ceviche/Tahitian Fish Salad/Mata

For an entrée for 4 people, get:
400g fresh fish
½ cup lime or lemon juice
¼ cup thick coconut cream
¼ cup red onion
finely sliced spring onion or two
a green or red chilli (no seeds, no pith and finely chopped)
salt and ground black pepper

Cut the fish into small chunks or thin strips and mix through the lime juice. Leave it for at least an hour – up to four hours – in the fridge. The finer the fish is sliced, the quicker it will ‘cook’ in the citrus juice. Combine the remaining ingredients, drain it a bit and toss through the coconut mixture.

Plop into bowls, or for a classy touch, brandy balloons, and serve with salt and pepper to taste.

“Polony is a contraction of “polymerase colony,” a small colony of DNA.”

I always assumed Polony was some region of Italy. I guess it’s a corruption of “Bologna” by Western Australians who couldn’t understand an Italian accent?

We’d skin it and peg out the skin on the shed wall to dry because the skin was worth a few bob. My mother would make soup out of the tail and the hindquarters were made into wallaby stew. The rest was chucked over the fence for the dogs.

I’m told that visitors were sometimes given wallaby or kangaroo to eat by others in the district and then told what they had eaten. It was said that some threw up. My mum would never play a trick like that!

There was also a delicious sauce my mother used to make out of prickly pear fruit. And a sago desert.

There was other stuff, but that will do.

We don’t do regional diversity but we do terrific ethnic. KInd of a substitute.

No-one can do pizzas like Adelaide.

Penguin eggs apparently stay transparent as they cook. And smell of fish.

I rather like the bush tucker trick that Aborigines pull on politicians and filmmakers. One flyblown end of roo, rolled in the dirt, dropped in a fire, cooked enough to get the fur stinking, then pulled out and handed ceremonially to the fool in the clean trousers. With the suggestion that you stretch the sinews between your teeth.

That’s after the witchetty grub horses doovers.

My theory is that Aborigines have never, ever eaten any of this. Certainly not since the invention of spam.

Yobbo,
Yeah it’s Bologna sausage or ‘Baloney’ in the US.
Food doesn’t have to take a backseat to beer, since I’ve given up smoking I’ve been able to do a deft double act with a bit of timing and my left and right hand.

I dont know about Christmas dinner, all my family ever seems to eat at Christmas are buckets upon buckets of Yabbies (handy because we have about 10 dams full of them). I don’t eat shellfish so I usually just have a christmas ham sandwich or something.

Food definitely takes a back seat to beer at Christmas.

The wolf, of course, was the one at everybody’s door in 1942:

As for your icebox. (It is easiest to take it for granted that you still have one, and that it works, and that it is not an annex for the local Red Cross and filled to bulging with blood plasma.)