New Zealand idyll

The trouble with writing this blog is that I feel compelled to eat ever more extreme things in order to titillate you.  I love weird food, so that’s not usually too much of a problem but I’ll have to confess my sense literary duty caused considerable trepidation when I attended last month’s Kawhia Kai Festival.

Our family first discovered the annual event a couple of summers ago and I had a great time trying all manner of Maori food – from the ubiquitous mussel fritters and hangi, to kanga wai (rotten corn) with whipped cream, and various items of bush food.

Some things appealed more than others but I tried as many as I could pack in, apart from one traditional delicacy - shark's liver a.k.a. ate mango (which I think is prounced atay mungo).

Apparently ate mango is prepared by carefully removing the gall bladder from the liver, then wrapping the liver in clean cabbage leaves and steaming it for an hour.  

I felt queasy at the thought of even looking at it, much less eating some but apparently ate mango was very popular and the stall owner assured me that it would be sold out within minutes once it arrived an hour hence.  I contrived to be at the other end of the festival site at the appointed time.

But this time would be different, I promised myself; this time I’d seek out ate mango and eat it.  All for your reading pleasure.  

On the long drive down from Auckland I fretted about what ate mango would smell like and whether I’d be able to eat some without spewing.  But I should’ve saved myself the worry because ate mango woman wasn’t there this year.  Which created a new challenge; what weird things could I eat instead?

As you’ll see, I did pretty well:

What's not to like about hot out of the pan fried bread
with lashings of golden syrup?  It's hardly traditional kai,
but who cares!

This chunk of king fern root may have looked disconcertingly
 like a horse's hoof but is as traditional as it gets.  In
pre-European times Maori struggled to include
sufficient carbohydrate in their diets and had to
resort to 'delicacies' such as this.

Cubes of cooked king fern root au natural. 
And some fritters.  It was pretty bland - a bit
like taro.

I've got to confess that my pikopiko purchase ended
up mouldering in the bottom of the fridge.  I've
had them before; they're a bit like
chewy asparagus.

Top: paua (abalone) fritter on rewena (Maori bread
made with a potato starter).  Delicious and
amazing value for $10.  Apart from a little onion,
the fritter was all paua.
Bottom: puha (sow thistle) and mussels.  Tasty.

Raupo (bullrush) pollin.  In pre-European days, Maori
would make a type of unleavened bread from raupo
pollin.  The stall owner selling this product used it
to add interest to cup cake icing.  I've yet to get
experimenting with my purchase.

Happy hangi munchers.

Rory on Kawhia wharf. Yeah, I know there's no food -
but isn't it a lovely photo anyway.

Food may have been the star of the show, but the Kawhia Kai Festival is about so much more than eating.  It’s always held on the nearest Saturday nearest to Waitangi Day and is  also a cultural celebration that has a full programme of Maori music and traditional performances.

As my New Zealand readers will know, there’s been considerable national debate and angst about what this country’s national day should mean and how we should mark the occasion. 

I hate what Waitangi Day has become and am happy to leave the official event at Waitangi's Te Tii Marae to the politicians, the protesters and the press.

To me, the Kawhia Kai Festival exemplifies how we should celebrate the anniversary of our nationhood - whereby Maori, Pakeha and people from all nationalities, ages and backgrounds come together to celebrate Maori food and culture in a low key, relaxed and fun way where the colour of one’s skin and the pedigree of one’s ancestry doesn’t matter a bit. 

Cucurbit surprise

As much as I love cooking, I’m no great fan of preparing weekday meals after a busy day at work – especially when dinner time looms large and I’m feeling distracted and/or completely uninspired.

Just such a dilemma presented itself the other day.  As much as I’d like to have blamed work pressures for my missing mojo, I’ve just returned from a month’s summer break, and am not especially busy at work.

I couldn’t think of anything I really felt like eating, much less cooking, which didn’t help.  All I knew was that I wasn’t in the mood for fish, chicken, lamb or beef.  And, as some of you know, I’m never in the mood for pork.

I’ve got two vacuum packed mutton birds in the downstairs fridge for a bit of rainy day experimentation, but I wasn’t feeling brave enough to give them a go.

And then it hit me; what about a cucurbit themed dinner?

Yeah, yeah, I know that's weird and probably a little too geeky but, thanks to my gardening prowess, I had lots of cucurbits lurking in the fridge and it seemed a shame to waste them. 

From left: courgette, Lebanese cucumber,
tindora (a mysterious vege I bought from an
Indian grocery store).

A blizzard of cucurbit cookery ensued.  I turned the Lebanese cucumbers into an old favourite: Eastern European sweet and sour cucumber, a recipe given to me by my uncle's Hungarian mother-in-law:

Eastern European sweet and sour cucumber salad

2 cucumbers
Salt
1 cup water
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup white wine or cider vinegar
Fresh dill fronds to taste (optional)

Peel cucumbers and remove the seeds.  Slice very thinly and place in a colander.  Sprinkle generously with salt and leave to drain for an hour. 

While the cucumber is draining, make the dressing by gently heating the water, sugar and vinegar until the sugar has dissolved.  Adjust sugar and vinegar quantities to suit your own tastes.  Cool mixture.

Squeeze as much of the liquid out of the cucumber as you can.  Most of the salt will drain away, so there is no need to rinse the cucumber.  Put the cucumber into a serving bowl and pour over the dressing, which will instantly be absorbed by the cucumber.

Add a little chopped dill to taste (I suggest going pretty easy on it as it can be quite overpowering).

Serve the salad lightly chilled.

That done, I turned my hand to the courgettes and decided to stuff, then bake them.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve eaten some stuffed courgette horrors in my time: bland, watery, boring.  What I’ve discovered is that they need to be really well seasoned, so worry about your arteries another day and use lots of salt if you decide to get stuffing.

I won’t give you the recipe because I made it up as I went along out of all sorts of leftovers lurking in the fridge, including cubes of roast lamb and cubes of walnut stuffed salted aubergines pickled in oil. 

This filling might look like the aftermath of a dog’s dinner, but was  delicious.  Even Rory liked it.














Baked, stuffed courgette. Fortunately
the end result looked far more
appetising than the filling would
have suggested.





Finally it was tindora time.  I’d never eaten tindora before and, until I bought them, hadn’t even heard of them.  But they looked cute and I was feeling adventurous, so into my shopping basket they went.

Fortunately there was no shortage of tindora recipes on the Internet.  Unfortunately I discovered that I don’t like tindora.  In their defence, they have an appealing crunchiness (a bit like a crisp dill pickle in texture) and their blandness makes them a good carrier for whatever flavours you want to cook them with.



Tindora innards.

But they had a background bitterness that I disliked, and I knew my family would also dislike, so I didn’t bother serving them up.

So there endeth my cucurbit extravaganza...or so I thought.  A rare and welcome run of fine weather saw my cucumber and courgette plants burst into another reproductive frenzy and I’m back to square one again.

No prizes for guessing what’s going to be featuring heavily on our dinner menu this coming week.

Boom bang baking

Being an adventurous type has led to all sorts of cooking escapades but never until now have I needed to use a heavy stick and a hacksaw to complete the job.

What a fun way to get back into foodie cooking following a three week hiatus.

I’d burned myself out after an awful lot of cooking and baking in the lead up to Christmas and didn’t feel up to making anything more than the absolute basics over the ensuing weeks.  This was made easier by our family taking a 10 day break in the lower North Island and largely staying in motels, which generally have pretty basic cooking facilities.  

All of my culinary efforts were pedestrian at best and – according to Don – hideous at worst.  In my own defence, we’d arrived at a motel one evening armed with fairly minimal supplies that included a dozen sausages that really needed to be used, some spuds and a packet salad to discover the kitchen was only equipped with a microwave and one small glass bowl.  So I think Boiled Sausage and Spud Surprise wasn’t that bad given the circumstances.

The meals we purchased during our travels weren't much better, with the exception of the unpretentious but delicious home cooked fare served at Kapiti Island’s lodge, and the wonderful Italian food we enjoyed at Soprano in Paraparaumu.  So by the time we returned home, I was revitalised, dying for something exotic, and raring to cook.

Along the way I’d bought a couple of bags of stone ground flour from the store in Foxton’s Dutch windmill and I decided to put some of it to good use by baking ciabatta.

Ciabatta is probably my favourite bread, but only if it’s made the old-fashioned way by making a starter dough the day before, and incorporating it into the final dough mix.  Bread like this tastes divine and has a lovely texture but it requires forward planning because, resting time included, it takes the best part of 18 hours from go to whoa.

One of the challenges with ciabatta dough is that it’s extremely wet and gluggy, and impossible to knead.  So I use my trusty 18-year-old food processor to start the job, finishing with the gruelling task of mixing by hand when adding the final third of the flour.

I think you know where this story is going and, sure enough, half way through the job – just as I was wondering how much life the old gal had left in her – there was a loud bang and thick smoke started pouring out of the food processor. Impressive!

Having come this far, I wasn’t about to give up on my project, so I decided to remove the dough from the mixing bowl and continue by hand.  And that’s where things got interesting.

The food processor will (or used to) only work if a large tab on the lid is fully locked into a slot on the machine.  Trouble was the explosion’s heat had fused the plastic tab with the casing, making it impossible to release.  The machine was obviously a goner, so there was nothing to lose by taking a forceful approach.

I’d taken its smoking corpse out to the back steps by this stage because it smelled so bad and can only but wonder what the neighbours made of me squatting there bashing away at my food processor with a big stick in a futile attempt to release the stuck tab.

R.I.P.

No luck; bits started flying off the lid without releasing it, so off I trotted down to Don’s workshop for a hacksaw to do the job. It didn’t take long to liberate the dough, allowing me to continue on my merry bread making way.

I'd like to be able to report that the resulting loaves were a culinary triumph in the face of considerable adversity, but they weren't.

Until now, I’ve always made ciabatta with white flour, which produces fantastic bread.  But this time I decided to get slightly experimental and use the windmill’s whole grain bread mix to create a rustic version.

The end result was nice enough, although the bread mix was saltier than I’d have preferred.  Using whole grain flour meant the loaves were a bit drier and heavier than would normally be the case.

So, despite all the ‘boom bang’ in its creation, my ciabatta ended up being more ho-hum than va-voom.

West of East

Having munched my way through many Eastern cuisines of late, I recently had a hankering to move westwards; but where to venture?

Europe has some interesting offerings (think Sardinia’s maggot cheese, or Iceland’s rotten shark) but I suspect New Zealand’s food police have probably banned them. And you’re hardly going to get excited if I blog about spaghetti bolognaise or coq au vin.

Inspiration recently struck when friends told me about an Eastern European delicatessen they’d discovered tucked away in a Newmarket back street, so off Kieran and I went to check it out.

I know little about Eastern European cuisine apart from Croatian food (thanks to my Croatian heritage). Don and I spent three days in Moscow in 1990 and my memories of Soviet food were of very long, exotic menus, with virtually everything unavailable. I was a vegetarian at the time and recall canned peas featuring fairly heavily in the meals I was served.

We also spent a week in Bulgaria, which had great cheese and bread, foul wine and really cheap ice cream. But I don’t remember much about the food otherwise.

So I leapt at the chance to discover more. Skazka sells an interesting array of Russian, Polish and Bulgarian products that range from fresh rye bread and pastries, to frozen dumplings and filled pancakes, through to canned and bottled goods and sweets.

Predictably, Kieran zeroed in on Skazka's chocolate and sweet aisles, and I honed in on the weirdest thing I could find: a jar of pine cone elixir. Apparently it’s used on pancakes, in much the same way one would use maple syrup. It sounded intriguing, so into my shopping basket it went, along with a jar of rose elixir.

I've been too busy lately to make breakfast pancakes,
so I had to resort to tasting these au natural.  The rose elixer is
very sweet and subtly rosewater tasting.  Disappointingly, I
couldn't even detect a hint of conifer in the pine elixer; just
a sweet, slightly golden syrupy taste.  Ho hum.

I also bought some sweet cottage cheese pastries, frozen beef-filled pancakes, frozen sweet dumplings, and these treasures:

This home-style cottage cheese was fabulous.  The curds
were far firmer, less watery and more flavoursome
than the cottage cheese one gets in the supermarket. 
I'll be back for more.



Bottled boletus.  Far too cute to eat.

Inspired, I got Googling as soon as I got home and the ensuing cooking blizzard covered the length and breadth of the former Soviet Union:

Here's what became of the cottage cheese - Siberian vatrushki. 
Home-made sweet pastry, filled with a sweet cottage cheese / rum soaked
raisin / lemon rind / egg filling.  The cherry reduction was my own touch.
They tasted as good as they looked, and my lucky sons had
vatrushki in their lunch boxes for days afterwards.

The ultimate rib-sticker: Mashhurda (Uzbek mung bean soup
topped with sour cream).   In addition to mung beans, the
soup contained cubed beef, veges, bay leaves, peppercorns
and rice.  I'll add more liquid next time.  Delete the meat and it
would make a nutritious vegetarian meal. 

Yet another hearty dinner: Holushki (Russian cabbage and sour cream with home made
noodles). And yes, I really did make the noodles.

Two more recipes remain high on my list of things to try ‘Chakhokhbili’ – a Georgian chicken stew that’s chock full of fresh herbs (apparently it absolutely MUST include fresh coriander, dill, tarragon, basil and parsley or the flavour will not be authentic) and Medovie – a complicated Russian recipe for honey cake layered with a filling comprising unbelievable quantities of butter, condensed milk and - you guessed it - sour cream.

While it has been interesting trying Soviet food, the things I've tried have been pretty stodgy fare. Which is fine in the depths of a Russian winter when it’s minus thirty, but not quite so great on a warm Auckland spring evening.

Skazka
16 Kingdon Street
Newmarket
Auckland
http://www.skazka.co.nz/

Food porn

There’s something in females’ DNA that gets us really, really excited about cake, pudding and all manner of sweet stuff. Some women pretend not to give a fig, as it were, but they’re either lying, unhealthily obsessed with the size of their thighs, or are coming down with something.

Men are different. Although some probably spend quite a bit of time obsessing about thighs – usually someone else’s – many men genuinely don’t care for cakes and desserts. No strategic eating at restaurants for them; they simply flick straight past the dessert menu and head for (horrors of horrors) – the cheeseboard or – worse still – opt for nothing to round off the meal.

So, guys, you might want to go and get your kicks somewhere else on the Internet today because this blog is graphically and gratuitously all about cake and dessert.

Yum.

I won’t, however, be regaling you with accounts of sweet treats I’ve whipped up out of the Edmonds cookbook. Nope, every offering involves something I've invented.

My profiteroles dinner party dessert offering looked like mutants, but they tasted great. I experimented
with using freeze-dried plum powder when making the filling. The plum crème patisserie filling was tasty
but a little gluggy. Plum powder folded into sweetened whipped cream worked best.

I made two different versions of this spice cake, one that used the traditional all spice,
cinnamon and nutmeg spice mix, and one that used five-spice instead. Both versions of
the cake were lovely. Do you like freeze dried lychee nod to the East on the five-spice version?
A bit over the top maybe, but then again, I reckon 'more is more' when it comes to food.

Readers of my Horror Food blog may recall the sauced duck tongue surprise I took to our
friends’ dinner party, and write me off as the dinner guest from hell. At the risk of ruining my
reputation, here’s the dessert creation I took to offset the duck tongues.
(See the end of this post for the recipe.)

I could go on, but I’m worried all that sugary, creamy excitement might prove too much for my female readers. So let’s plummet back to Earth with a bump.

Domestic goddess I may be, but even goddesses have their off days as I discovered when I attempted to make a sponge cake using a liberal measure of freeze-dried passion fruit powder in the batter.



L-R: Dish sponge, my sponge...or was that, my sponge, dish sponge?



Not even lashings of whipped cream could
redeem this sad puppy. 
PS: The right hand photo above was the dish sponge.

Anna’s cardamon scented roasted apple custard tart

Roasted apples

1.7 kg Granny Smith apple slices (peeled and cut into quarters or eighths)
½ c soft brown sugar
32 g butter

Toss apple slices in butter and sugar and roast until golden.  Leave until completely cool before using.

Sweet short pastry

170 g softened butter
85 g sugar
1 small egg
4 drops vanilla essence
260 g standard plain flour

Lightly cream butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla and beat until just combined. Add flour and mix until the pastry comes away from the sides of the bowl. Be careful not to over mix. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour before using (overnight is fine).

Custard

5 eggs
6 tbsp sugar
2 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp vanilla
2 c lukewarm milk
1 c lukewarm cream

Beat eggs, sugar, cardamon and vanilla together.  Pour in warmed milk and cream while beating, and mix until combined with egg mix but not foamy.

Method

Roll out the pastry to about 3 mm thickness and line a greased 28 cm, deep flan dish. You can brush some lightly beaten egg white over the pastry to help prevent leakage.

Place roasted apples over the pastry case then gently pour in custard mixture. Bake at 180 degrees C for 50 minutes or until the custard sets.

A lunch to drool over

I've been spending an unhealthy amount of time fantasizing about eating saliva chicken after spotting it in a local shop last month.

Despite its disgusting connotations, the dish’s unconventional name utterly intrigued me so I sought enlightenment from a Chinese friend.

Apparently saliva chicken tastes so delicious that one’s mouth salivates at the mere thought, hence the name; I would have thought “mouth watering” to be a far more marketable title.

I’ve been eating out a lot lately and have felt the need to give my body a bit of a rest over the past week but today the temptation of an ecstatic food experience proved irresistible. So off I headed to buy myself a chicken saliva lunch.

It’s sold in an unprepossessing little outlet in Mt Albert’s Lim Chhour complex. Tables outside the shop display a range of fried doughy snacks, and suchlike. I’ve tried a few but they’re nothing amazing although the massive omelettey square looks like it could be worth a go one hungry day.

Beyond briefly ogling the saliva chicken, I’d never taken much notice of the contents of a chiller insider the shop. Closer inspection revealed all sorts of northern Chinese goodies, so I decided to buy myself a mini banquet.



Saliva chicken.  The
lumpy bits are peanuts,
sesame seeds and chilli
flakes.



The saliva chicken lived up to its promise and was really nice: salty, slightly acetic, savoury, chilli spiced. I suspect that today's version was probably a bit more basic than some but it was still good.

Bean curd stick salad.

Less delicious was the bean curd stick and carrot salad, served in a very light oil and slightly chillied dressing. It was okay, but smelled disconcertingly of old socks. The taste was improved by combining the coriander garnish with the bean curd stick but there was far too little garnish to lift the dish to a new level.

"Crispy" kigou.  Tasted
more like
"chewy" kigou!

As for the crispy kigou, I had no idea what it was when I bought it and, now I’ve eaten some, I still have no idea. I’m pretty sure it’s vegetal. It tastes similar to Korean kimchi and it’s really, really chewy so I didn’t eat my way through much before aborting the mission.

A crispy kigou fights
back.

Although I enjoy pushing my foodie boundaries, there are some lines I never intend cross - unlike a blogger that I recently discovered. Here’s one of the most stomach churning foodie accounts I have ever read: http://www.allyoucanteat.com/2011/05/pig-brain-and-pig-spine-soup/

Horror food

Readers of this blog often comment how adventurous I am. While it’s true that I like to push my culinary boundaries, I have my limits.

Just in case you think I recklessly eat every weird thing that comes my way, I thought I’d share a few horrors that are well down my ‘to eat’ list - such as this offering that I spotted this in a local Chinese cafe yesterday.  I suspect I may get around to trying it one day just for the hell of it.  

This product range really amuses me. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to design cheerful packaging that belies the horrors within. What’s even funnier is that it’s all labelled in English even though, apart from a few weirdos like me, most native English speakers would recoil at the thought of eating duck icky bits.



A foodie friend recently invited us over for dinner and, when I asked what he’d like us to bring, he replied “scare us”, so off I toddled to the shop selling the abovementioned duck bits.

Sauced, semi-dried duck tongue.

Given that he lived in Hong Kong for many years, and his wife is Hong Kong Chinese, I should have known better than to present them with this lame attempt at horror food.

They hoovered them up without a blink and offered to cook me some freshly prepared ones some day.

I’ve cheated a bit with this example, because I ended up eating a couple of the duck tongues. They’re ok.

Pig spine soup (spotted on the menu of a Korean restaurant in Queen Street).  As much as I admire this restaurant’s pragmatic honesty, I don’t like pork and the dish’s main ingredient is spine. What more can I say?

The other night I heard Kieran coughing and spluttering out in the kitchen, followed by the tap running hard. It transpired he’d gone to make vegemite toast and, in his rush to satisfy his hunger, had grabbed the first jar he saw with a yellow and red label. Poor lad; this sambal is seriously HOT.

The Chinese may have cornered the horror food market, but Stutz burger bar in Ohakune is giving them a run for their money.

My husband and kids reckoned their burgers are the worst they’ve ever tried. As for Stutz’s garlic chips, even my greaseaholic family was flummoxed by this soggy garlic butter topped nightmare.

They offered me some, and I was tempted to kill off my arteries and try them just so I could regale you with how ghastly they were. But my nerves failed and I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it.