Stomachs on legs are proud to present

From last weekend's edition of the Dominion Post here in Wellington, NZ:

In 1987, Saroun Lach was one of 50 or so Cambodian refugees on a plane from Thailand, headed for New Zealand.
Mr Lach became New Zealand's champion pie maker, several times over. The walls of his Wellington Elite Cafe and Bakery in Victoria St provide a gallery for 30 framed awards, stretching back to 2000, the year he became a pie maker.

As a boy, he had been a top scholar. In New Zealand, he became first a wool sorter and later a taxi driver. Mr Lach had a fondness for a daily pie, but was very critical of many he ate, comparing one with another, and thinking that the best were few and far between.

When a bakery shop came up for sale in Alicetown, at the urging of his mother-in-law he bought it. He won Bakel's Supreme Piemaker of New Zealand, a title he would win again, along with many others. His steak, mince and cheese pies became a rapid urban legend.

He loved music, movies and his family.

He was considered a role model of industry and good citizenship in the Buddhist community. Paying tribute to him, his brother-in-law said his love would be "the roof above our heads to shelter us from storms to come".

In other words, Mr Lach will be tending that big crimped and fluted pie top in the sky.

We just arrived back in Canberra after the most wonderful holiday in New Zealand

Canberra is a 38 degree dust bowl, with no people, and nothing to do. It's all just bogans and bad food round here.

Although Australians tend to think themselves more sophisticated and cosmopolitan than New Zealand, when its a comparison between Auckland and Canberra, I'll take Auckland thanks.

Here are some photos that substantiate my overall sentiments right now.

cheap new zealand mussels and pipis around NZD 4 a kilogram



Plentiful fresh snapper which we caught ourselves in the snapper spawning grounds that are Auckland harbours


such as here


and here


Just check out those beautiful pink gills


Home-smoked kahawai


and kahawhai sashimi



and landing on deserted beaches


and cooking on our own beach

The Chip Group a partnership between local industry groups and the New Zealand Heart Foundation focused on improving the nutritional profile of chips or chups.

Judging from their website* and giveaways they have received some serious funding.

*Note awesome chip wallpaper.

If you do decide to join up like me you will be privy to some pretty spectacular videos covering topics such as optimum "chip size", "oil temperature", "basket drainage" and of course "salt"

After watching seven amusing clips which cover topics such as THUCK cut CHUPS are BUTTAR for your HELF and that you should not use SKUNNY CHUPS. I aced the tests (sorry modules) and received my certificate for which I am very proud.

The Chip Group recommends printing your certificate off and showing your work mates. Which is exactly what I did but Chalong my sous chef burnt it on an open flame. Where is the respect.

The Chip Group is now busily sending my two nieces in Auckland (I used their address as I thought it would be asking a tad much to send the goodie bag to Bangkok)

1 bottle of Kiwi Style Tomato Sauce (6 muthafucken liters!!!)
1 bottle of Kiwi Style Tartar Sauce (Also 6 ltrs!!! BURP)
1 Jar Kiwi Style Deep Frying Baking Powder (2 kg!)
1 jar of Kiwi style Chicken Salt Seasoning (2.5 kg!!!!!!!!)
1 apron and t-shirt (hopefully size XXXL as the girls little Hello Kitty t-shirts will not fit them after eating 12 liters of heavily processed condiments)

It was not a complete waste of 30 minutes. I learnt that 2.5 thousand tons of fat is equal 632 elephants. WTF? Actually this is the total amount of fat that they wish to remove each year from the NZ populations diet by cooking a better chip which is not a bad idea if you have ever seen Maytels dads tummy.

Anyway the password for my membership was horsefat which the website never once referred to which is a shame really as it is a nice middle ground, bridging the worlds of high and low saturated fats and producing a pretty good chip.

Anyway...Ella and Liv enjoy the 2 kg of Kiwi Style Deep Frying Baking Powder.

...Barbecuing at our family bach in Leigh (chicken legs rubbed with smoked paprika and lamb chops from Stubbs butcher), after a day spent at Tawharanui beach (with a picnic snack of radler beers and home-made sweet pepper coca flatbread).
Just behind the barbecue is the entrance to the mudslide, which goes down into the gully. Both barbecue and mudslide have been there since my grandfather dug them in the '50s.

A toasted muesli by any other name would smell as sweet...

In New Zealand and Australia, I became convinced that food down there is suffering a P.R. problem. The problem is that the P.R. department is on overdrive.

At some point in the '80s, it became hip to talk about food poetically, and the more foreign the description, the more artisanal the approach implied, the more moolah people became prepared to pay.

Somehow, good food became a status symbol in the new world, and fine foods emporiums sprang up selling passable sour dough bread for eight dollars a loaf, and bags of gnocchi imported all the way from Italy for 14 whole dollars.

When did gluggy lumps of potato begin to triple in value when prefixed with the adjective 'Italian'? Is nobody in the southern hemisphere able to make a decent batch of gnocchi?

This is not just a question of food snobbery. The absurd part is when people pay top dollar for something that's not even close to wonderful. Antipodeans need to say no to false advertising.

Stopping through Sydney a couple of weeks ago, I became a bit depressed at how rarely foods lived up to their descriptions. Browsing in a nice-looking deli-style store, we bought wild honey spice muesli, roasted carrot and tomato soup, sour dough loaf baked in the Californian tradition, and yoghurt with bush honey.

Yum, right? That's what we hoped, but in the end only the yoghurt could be described as delicious. The rest would have been more honestly described as toasted oats with cinnamon, a pretty average loaf of bread that was still better than any of the other bread we ate down under, and soup that could've come from a supermarket. A bit watery. Hardly any discernible carrot flavour.

Guess those descriptions wouldn't have looked so good on the label.

In NZ the situation can be just as semantically obfuscated.

We had lunch at a restaurant somewhere near the Kapiti coast. The menu talked about crusted this and reduction of that. I was a bit disappointed when my roasted potato turned out to be an oily hash brown.

Studies at the University of Illinois last year showed that when food is described in evocative terms, people are more apt to find it delicious
, but surely this ruse can only be taken so far?

It's not like you can't get delicious prepared food down under. There's much more on offer than the lovely fresh figs, jewel-sized plums and batonga pineapples, don't get me wrong - but the wordsmiths need to chill out a little.

People shouldn't pay through the nose when a spade is not called a spade, but instead called an 18th century wrought-iron jersey potato forager.

So the weekend before last I was in Auckland attending our annual sisters' reunion. There are four girls in my family, no boys. This is usually a weekend in either Auckland or Sydney and involves copious amounts of food, booze, giggling, bitching and sometimes tears.

This reunion began with foot massages and yum cha at Pearl Garden for which I was not present, instead I was standing at the kitchen sink grumbling about everything being organised far too early for my tastes, when I realised I just needed to go back to bed for a couple more hours (I had spent the previous day travelling 13 hours from Canberra to Auckland because I had decided to save money and catch the bus from Canberra to Sydney)

So the real get together began Saturday night. I collected kokoda and uni from the Nola's fish shop,



whilst other sisters bought oysters, salmon sashimi, crab, pipis and mussels.

Our dinners when held at my older sisters' are usually a movable feast. First off someone popped some champagne and then I decided to make guacamole with corn chips to serve with the kokoda, a la mexican kokoda that had worked so well when I made in March in NZ....the combination of Pacific Island style fish ceviche with mexican accountrements works and I recommend you try it.

We drunk more

My sister made the pipis and mussels smoked inside the bbq.



We drunk some more

I made kina spread on bruschetta with a bit of butter, salt and pepper and lemon. I had intended on serving it raw but it had a strange bitter after taste that Japanese uni doesn't tend to have so I decided that grilling it would be better. It was. Although reactions to the idea of kina bruschetta by my sister's partner's Maori and Pacific Island work mates was one of confusion "Kina...hmmm....Bruschetta????" Kina Bruschetta is an abomination to anyone that grew up fishing and diving in the Pacific seas.



Then we decided we were full....the live crabs sitting in a bucket in the garage probably thought they had made it past dinner



But then a few hours later came a second wind. We plunged them into hot water, pried back their heads and quartered them and threw them on the brazier



The night ended with cheese, whiskey (seconded from our father's booze cabinet) and a card game that couldn't be won on account of the fact that a number of cards were missing from the deck but everyone was far too drunk to notice



Sunday morning rolled round and began with my sister's spelt flour pancakes served with strawberries, yoghurt and maple syrup. An indulgence that made me wonder where the indulgence was.

We then went cockling at Cornwallis



Once everyone had collected their alloted 50 cockles each we recounted them and threw back the littlest ones





We headed for the grass for a rest beneath the pohutukawa trees, the classic red flowering tree of NZ often called the NZ Christmas tree.



Until we decided we were hungry again

So lunch of smoked salmon, salmon sashimi, cockles, bread and every single condiment we could find was amassed on the table in addition to a salsa verde I whipped up from my sister's kitchen garden.





We peeled off. I had a nap, others went for a walk and the littlest went home to feed her kitten. We reconvened at another Huia beach for a high tide swim



We returned for one last mammoth eating effort, lentil salad, toulouse sausages, tomato ragu and watercress, avocado, pear and walnut salad.



And said goodbye for another year.

I firmly believe the best burgers in the world are to be found in good old New Zealand, at a chain called Burger Fuel. Their third-pounder with cheese (extra beetroot) is one of my definitions of heaven. I'm not usually one to top up my calorie intake with a shake and fries either, but at Burger Fuel this is mandatory: their malted shakes are the bomb and their kumara fries with garlic mayo are, in terms of dopeness, weapons of mass destruction.

So New York's Shake Shack (supposedly one of the city's best burger spots) has frozen custard in tomato, sweet corn or caramelised peach flavours. So what. Burger Fuel has coconut ice malted shakes!
Suck on that!

Note: coconut ice is a type of old-fashioned sweet, common in Commonwealth countries, especially at garage sales, school fairs, and in grandmothers' kitchens. Crumbly pink cubes composed of dessicated coconut, condensed milk and pink food colouring. Here is a recipe.

Good portions, reasonable prices, friendly, but not too friendly service, only a handful of annoying baby-boomers

and great food, excellent flavours, interesting presentation

nuff said



Tortillini


Tuna and panzenella salad


Crab and avocado salad?


Quail


Snapper


Veal with cocoa sauce


Beetroot gnocchi


Pork


Desserts







365 Dominion Road, Mt Eden, Auckland City, New Zulund

Speaking of ducks, we of course had to have an Empress Garden Peking Duck back in AK. I've been around the world (well Asia anyway) and I've never found a better duck meal, despite once being told by a Chinese concierge in Beijing that "duck meal is duck meal" when we enquired where to get the best duck in Beijing. How wrong she was.

In my books, Empress Garden still cooks up the best duck meal I've ever had, despite being a million miles away from Beijing. There are several notable qualities that I especially like about the Empress Garden duck. First is that they cut the skin and a little of the moist and tender flesh for the peking rolls. Most places around Asia, including Beijing, cut only the crispy skin, but having a small slither of duck meat accompany the skin into the pancake and down your gullet is much more satisfying.

In addition, the following duck creations made from the left over flesh and bones are excellent, so good that they definitely compete with the first succulent pancake offering. Although there are several options for the two other duck dishes that follow from the pancakes, we always order the sang choi bao option (duck mince with crispy iceberg lettuce leaves) and the salt and pepper fried bones. The salt and pepper fried bones are one of life's true pleasures. I'm not shitting you. Think crispy kentucky fried duck with asian flavours but yummier and you're on the right track.

It's Smoked Kawhai.....NZ must eat list item number whatever "eat smoked fish"....check

I usually just buy a fish, leave it in its paper wrapping and unceremoniously pick at from time to time in the fridge while nibbling on pickles and bits of lettuce mix



But Hock staged a smoked fish intervention and mixed it with a white sauce and parsley and lemon and served it on vogels bread with a side of silver beet (my favourite vege). Although it does look a lot like cat vomit I assume it tastes nothing like it

We did some fancy shcmancy dining while in Auckland hitting up all three of Hock's 'must eat' restaurants in the name of 'research'

First up was the French Cafe....having long held the title as Auckland's top fine dining spot we checked in to see if anything much had changed since we'd been there last. The previous time the restaurant was smaller and the food fantastic, the wine matching was unsurpassed and each course on the degustation menu was matched superbly with top New Zealand wines. I remember taking a mouthful of each course and thinking "yum" and then sipping the wine and thinking "oh my god that's amazing"

So me and my sister and her partner and Hock all booked in on a Tuesday night, knowing that on a Tuesday we would be more likely to get better food and service than on say, a Saturday.

Our dinner dates were late so Hock and I sat at the bar and ordered some cocktails. I had a rinquinquin and was so enamoured by the girly sweet summeriness of the drink that I downed it and ordered another one...how come no one ever told me about this drink, here all this time I have been slavishly plugged away at trying to get to like pastis, when I could have just gone for the peachy goodness. I can't remember what Hock had because I was too busy enjoying my own drink. They served some Waiheke olives to us while we waited and watched the dinner guests arrive for the evening. Having arrived at 8 pm we managed to slip in before the onslaught of punters. Drinking quietly in the corner we watched the steady stream of moneyed-up baby-boomers pile through the door, the men invariably dressed in bright "funky" shirts that try to proclaim "hey I'm down wit it". Bright shirts hug large abdominal fat bulges made worse by the fact that they are tucked far too tightly into jeans or business pants, often balding many shave off all their hair in a proud pronouncement - "I would rather be bald than wear a comb over like my Dad". Being wealthy alpha male types they all seemed rather large stocky blokes, the prime succeeders in a country where the business sector often seems to be dominated by retired rugby players and their old boys networks. Their dates...the fading debutantes and divorcees of the 1970s and 80's frocked up in pretty dresses, silver shoes and handbags and often displaying far too much cleavage in the not so subtle ploy to detract attention from other less desirable humps and bumps.

we ate our Waiheke olives


When sister and Ginny finally arrived we re-ordered the Chef's Tasting Menu NZD $120 + $85 for matching wines


The menu read

FRESH NELSON OYSTER....grapefruit vinaigrette...

Oysters weren't available so we had to make do with a shot of pea soup



SECOND: CURED SALMON.....crayfish jelly, crème fraiche, caviar

This was probably my favourite course...except it wasn't caviar, but rather black lump fish roe



THIRD: FOIE GRAS PATE....crisp nougatine, pear relish, apple caramel

This was good but in a strange order, the sweetness of the relish seemed to be a better pre-dessert than pre-dinner appetiser



MARINATED TUNA....picked crab, aromatic herb salad, lime leaf dressing

a bit odd after the foie gras but really nice and fresh asian take on tuna



SEARED SCALLOP AND PORK BELLY



LANGOUSTINE TORTELLINI....sweet tomato, pea puree, vanilla foam....

Really great flavours but on a technical note Hock reckoned the pea puree was too floury.




ROASTED FRENCH GOATS CHEESE caramelised onion, beetroot and fig tart, red wine syrup....
really great dish, but again the order was a bit strange....we all agreed that it would be better as a cheese dish maybe after the frois gras and before dessert


SEARED DUCK BREAST....sweet spices, mandarin puree, bok choy, kumara mash...

An extremely boring duck dish that was on the menu last year...Hock remembered his disappointment from last time and opted out of the duck and for the snapper instead...I joined him. Snapper came with corn and barley....it was still simple but not as simple as the duck


Snapper


At this stage I felt extremely full. The portions were enormous and far too big for a degustation course. Hock commented that although one should never feel like a stuffed pig after a degustation course given the size and estimated propensity towards over consumption by many of the baby booming patrons, it was most likely that the chef had made the executive business decision that in the case of the Auckland fine dining market "more is more"....And it's not just in fine dining that portion sizes cater by default to the groaning bellies of large white males, everywhere in Australia and New Zealand I am constantly served portions far beyond my capacity to consume. I often wish I could ask for half the size and pay half the price but it seems that in most places in the food industry, standard portions are defined by the biggest eaters. I speculated that had course sizes been reduced in size one can only imagine the grumbles from over-fed yet under-satiated big men of Auckland "I paid $205 and I didn't even feel full"

Dessert....

WATERMELON AND ROSEWATER GRANITA...passionfruit curd, strawberry and watermelon salad

I could barely eat it but it was nice palate cleanser



PEACH MELBA poached peaches, champagne sabayon, vanilla icecream...

MUST....STOP......EATING...........except had to have a mouthful of icecream



CHOCOLATE ESPRESSO orange sugar...everyone except Hock cancelled this dessert, we were just far too full to eat it.



Although the service is always prompt and attentive at the French Cafe, this time I found it over bearing. During the dinner our conversation was interrupted endlessly by waiters presenting and explaining dishes and wine. I much prefer what they used to do at Hock's old restaurant, which was leave you with a beautiful piece of paper rolled up in a scroll with the courses and wine matches printed on it. That way you could check at your leisure, take the menu home as a souvenir and not be interrupted endlessly by waiters. Even the waiters felt embarrassed by constantly interrupting, as if the scallop on the plate were more important than the conversation at the table.

Finally a note on the wine matching. Where previously rare New Zealand tipples were served the restaurant had now taken to serving more French wines that did little to set off explosions of flavours in my mouth. Where before the matches seemed verging on genius, the new matches with imported wines were far less enjoyable. I wonder again, whether this has to do with pleasing the aspirations of the majority clientele. Another problem here was that on one occasion we were served off wine. At the cost of $800 for four people plus tips, you'd expect wines poured to be checked first.