Lady Lunchalot

Oh my goodness.

O and I are a little different after our return from a week in New Zealand. Firstly, we are now Mr and Mrs, though to be fair, that change took place the day before we left for the land of the long white cloud. We are both substantially more relaxed than when we left; the type of relaxed that only a week’s worth of mountain air can bring. And of course, we are both substantially rounder and softer than when we left!

New Zealand food is incredible! I don’t understand why it isn’t marketed as a serious food destination. O and I ate like hobbits for a solid week - we basically grazed and grazed (breakfast, morning tea, then elevenses, followed by lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, supper - you get my drift) until we had to be rolled onto the plane home.

My wonderful husband (!) had organised for a private food tour around Christchurch for the first day of our trip. Food writer Mavis Airey took the two of us on a personal tour of a number of producers in the area. I highly recommend this tour if you are ever in the region. Mavis is a fantastic guide, and took us to places we never would have found on our own.

First stop: A Cracker of a Nut
Ever thought about how a walnut comes to arrive in your Christmas nut bowl? Neither had I. But we found out anyway at the Cracker of a Nut walnut farm, where they grow and process walnuts into walnut paste, oil, and chutney. Nothing goes to waste here. The shells are ground up to use as an abrasive cleaner for machinery, and the pathways into the factory were layered with walnut shell gravel!

We were able to taste the difference between varieties of walnuts, including the unique bright NZ Purple walnut, which is actually from Europe, but they claimed and renamed it anyway.

Giesen’s Wine
No food tour to New Zealand is complete without a trip to a winery. We stopped in at Giesen’s for a tasting where I was reintroduced to Riesling. It made me realise I had been drinking Marlborough sauvignon Blancs for so long, I’d forgotten what other white wines tasted like! So I’ve now ruled our sauv blanc from my repertoire for a while.

She’ll be apples
After wine tasting came apple juice tasting! We stopped in at Dunsandel Store to taste some single variety apple juices. These apples are grown on the premises and milled within 24 hours of picking. We tasted Royal Gala, Cox’s Orange and Braeburn, and each one was as unique as a bottle of wine. We also tasted some cider made from Kingston Black’s that really had a kick.

This was the lunch stop. For my first official New Zealand meal, I couldn’t go past the roast lamb, served with braised capsicum and potato gratin and O had an exquisite piece of pork belly with a soy and star anise sauce, rice and bok choy. We also tasted some prosciutto from some pigs who lived on the orchard and lived on a diet of apple pulp from the juicing. Mmmm… appley pork…

Airborne Honey
From single variety apple juice on to single variety honey. Airborne makes honeys derived from single variety flowers. No, they don’t have tracking beacons on every bee. They simply test the pollen type of each sample of honey and if it is over a certain percentage from one flower it classifies as being single variety. We compared nodding thistle honey with clover honey, thyme honey, rata honey and of course New Zealand’s famous Manuka honey. And of course, we left with a few samples which we were happy customs was ok with! Mmmm…

Aquahaven
My favourite stop was Aquahaven, a processing plant for eel, salmon and mussels. We saw how the fish is turned into pate, smoked salmon, fresh salmon. We say trays and trays of eel being smoked in huge smoking cabinets. I’d never tasted eel before, but I definitely will again. It had the texture of a dense fish, with a delicious light smoky flavour.

I learned a tip on filleting salmon too. The best salmon to debone is a couple of days old, not fresh from the water. Apparently it makes a better shaped fillet if the rigor mortis has had a chance to set in before the fish is cut up.

Billy Goats Gruff
Gruff Junction was the home of a herd of well fed goats who produce the milk for a range of goats cheeses. This is a father and daughter operation, with dad experimenting with yoghurt and milk products, and daughter looking after the cheese manufacturing.

Hot stuff, Japanese style
I’d never been much of a wasabi fan. In fact wasabi and pepper are pretty much the only foods I don’t eat (besides offal, but that’s another story). So the idea of a wasabi farm as our last stop didn;t really ring my bells at first.

However we learned that most sushi-shop style wasabi (the type that comes in little tubes with your sushi) is usually mostly horseradish rather than actual wasabi. We also learned how to control the heat from wasabi - breathe in through your nose when it gets too hot. This trick really helped me enjoy the wasabi and ham sandwiches a lot more than I usually would.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Half-Baked Food Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.