On Sunday, we went to have dinner with my two sisters that live in Auckland

In what has fast become a standard family ritual, Sunday dinners are held out at the eldest's house in the Waitakere Ranges on the West Coast of Auckland (think Jane Campion's The Piano). Someone normally goes to the the Auckland Fish Markets. Hock and I went this time and picked through the half fresh fish to find something decent. We settled on snapper, a crayfish and some scallops

We picked up some over priced vegetables that turned out to be obsolete when we got to my sisters and found her summer garden in full flourish.

We had a few tasty NZ beers on the deck (reviews to come)

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and my sister dug up the last of her potato patch

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My god there is nothing like fresh potatoes straight from the garden. We boiled them, as you would pasta, they only needed a couple of minutes and sprinkled with salt, pepper and slathered in butter

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Hock killed the cray
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We then all headed down to Cornwallis to the low tide to wade through the sandy mud and pick pipis and cockles...within allotted sustainable seafood limits. And yes, someone does come and check from time to time, my sister was once stopped in her car by people looking for over-zealous pipi pickers and had to put some back. Yup, round here no one searches your car for drugs or guns, just seafood.

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After expressing our "inner wahines" and collecting our "kai moana" in our "kitis" we headed back to the picnic table and drunk a bottle of veuve cliquot like the true bourgeois bitches that we are
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At home Hock cooked the pipis inside a smoky bbq.....we dipped them in hot chipolte sauce from the secret squirrel Mexican Store (more on this later)...they were so good, sweet, little and smoky. There is nothing more satisfying than eating pipis you've collected yourself

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Next in order of appearance was the snapper, that I cooked in a la veracruz...
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Then the cray and scallops
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Followed by whisky round the fire
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1 comments:

    woahhhh
    next time somebody asks what people eat in NZ i'll direct them to this post and tell them this is how we live every single day of our lives on the island

     

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