In 2011 his memoir, entitled The Exotic Rissole, was published by NewSouth Publishing. Josh Radnor wrote in The Canberra Times that "one thing is clear from reading The Exotic Rissole: Ahmed is a skilled storyteller who offers many valuable insights into the human experience." The Sydney Morning Herald's Michael Wilding calls it "a gentle and genial memoir of the migrant experience." Tory Shepherd gave it a 2 1/2 star review in The Advertiser.
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Ahmed was born in Bangladesh in 1975.Tanveer Ahmed, The Exotic Rissole, NewSouth, Sydney, 2011, p. 16. He and his parents moved to Australia in 1981,Ahmed, p. 31. and settled in Toongabbie, in the western suburbs of Sydney.
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The word kofta comes from Hindi and Urdu kufta (‘a poundedmeat’) which is derived from Persian kufta (‘rissole’).Alan S. Kaye, "Persian loanwords in English", English Today 20:20-24 (2004), . The languages of the region have adopted the word with minor phonetic variation.
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Similar dishes are found throughout the region. Falafel which is popular in Europe and the United States, was originally made from dried fava beans formed into a rissole with herbs and spices and then fried. It is also made from chickpeas, or a blend of the two. Green fava are cooked like other green beans, boiled and dressed with oil or stewed with meat.
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Products include beef, buffalo, pork, mutton, rabbit and poultry. The processed and semi-cooked products include corn beef, meat loaf, sausages, curries, bacon, ham, cutlet-mix, chicken-n-ham and salami. Sausages, one of the most popular of the MPI product range, come in varieties such as cocktail sausage, pork sausage, chicken pepperoni sausage, masala sausage and the world famous kransky. They also export a rissole (labelled as continental sausage) to Australia.
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In the US version, there were several minor changes to dialogue. "Rissole" was changed to "meatloaf", "two-stroke" was changed to "diesel", references to the Australian TV show Hey Hey It's Saturday were changed to the more generic Funniest Home Videos (which existed in both markets), and the brand names of the various cars in the driveway were changed from uniquely Australian cars like the Camira, to ones sold in both countries like the Corolla.R4 vs R1 DVD Comparison (scroll down to the section "R4 vs R1") The Australian TV version for "before-8:30pm screening" has scenes of explicit language either completely cut or, where possible, masked by aircraft noises or redubbed when lip movements are not visible. When broadcast after 8:30pm, all explicit language is intact.
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