Trying to Cook in NZ

Asian: Now I am going to write a little about the food we have encountered. When we landed in Auckland, we noticed that we were in a very multicultural city. There has been a lot of immigration from Asia to the ‘City of Sails.’ There are restaurants from every corner of Asia. The most common seem to be Korean, Thai and Japanese. The Japanese ones seem to fall into two categories, those that have English writing in them and those that don’t at all. Those looked the most interesting, but since I don’t read a lick of Japanese and all the customers seemed to, we decided to try other options. The best we found was Food Alley, I wrote about that in our travel log already, so I won’t bore you too much, but it was amazing. This place didn’t have any Panda Express type places, all of the places cooked the food to order. Some was quick and some took a surprisingly long tome to prepare. That just shows how fresh it is I guess. We were both very impressed that places like that existed and there were more than one. They seemed to be a way for the government to be able to keep an eye on sanitation while letting sole proprietors of food carts and stands form in a central location which seemed to be good for all involved, including us.

Cafes: The other main form of eatery in New Zealand is the café. They are everywhere. The service industry in NZ doesn’t seem to be that service oriented. In most restaurants, you orders at a counter, are given a number to place on your table, your food is then delivered and when you are done, you just get up and leave. There are full service restaurants in the country, but the majority are cafes or pub type where you order at a counter. The cafes usually have a display case with pastries and pre-made sandwiches that are usually fairly reasonable in price. They will sometimes have a menu or menu board where more expensive food is listed. The sandwiches can be good, but New Zealand has a strange fascination with bad bread, sauces that are sweet, but shouldn’t be and canned beetroot.

Fish and Chips:Fish and Chips are as ubiquitous as in Great Britain. Some say that it is even better. I do know one thing. There is usually a selection of fish that ranges from cod, to snapper to local varieties like tarakihi, gurnard and warehou. We got here at the end of Whitebait season. Whitebait are tiny little baby fishes that are served in fritter form, usually one part batter to three parts fish. A portion is usually 100g and costs about $10NZ. In that 100g portion there are probably about 100 little fish. I haven’t had the opportunity to try it yet and I hope I can before they are all grown up. The other fishy specialities here are Paua (abalone) and local scallops. I also haven’t tried them yet. Most chip shops I have been to have been pretty standard affairs with a menu of fish, chips, and some non fishy fritters like bacon and corn which is pretty good. I got my first taste of a true New Zealand fish and chip stand on the Coromandel peninsula. It looked normal enough. I ordered the $6 lunch which was 1 piece of fish, 1 scoop of chips, 1 potato fritter and 1 sausage. I had no idea that they were going to cook the entire meal in the fryer. If you haven’t had a deep fried sausage, don’t feel that you have to bother. The potato fritter was a cross between a McDonalds hash brown and a giant flat French fry. The chips where pretty normal and the one piece of fish was about half a pound of tarakihi that had been well battered and deep fried. It came with a little container of what looked like ketchup, but it was something altogether different and scary in its own way. It was sweet. It tasted like pureed chutney. I have since learned that they don’t really have ketchup here, but use this stuff instead. It isn’t too bad if you add a lot of salt. While I was eating the sausage I thought it had a bit of lamb in it. I was wrong. Nina noticed that a chip that she was eating tasted like lamb too. In fact, everything tasted like lamb. The whole lunch was fried in a vat of lamb fat. It was great, I love that idea, cook something in the most delicious part of a good lamb shank, the fat. It actually tasted pretty good, it only had a slight lamby taste. The real lamb flavor came out in the burps.

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