NZ South Island Food Odyssy 2012: Part 1

Cray fish - poor mans lobster but just as delightful

You can't beat a good Kiwi Platter

I planned my south Island NZ trip not just around catching up with old friends & seeing some of the most amazing naturally beautiful spots in the world but also around foodie destinations. Through the power of the internet and with the help of Cuisine magazine [NZ’s answer to Delicious] I hunted down the best and award winning restaurants along my route. The South Island offers some of the best quality produce I have ever come across and it was incredible to be able to sample these along the way.

Cray fish in kaikora:

After a stomach churning stormy ferry ride from the North Island we landed in Picton  in the South, where we picked up our hire car. It was wet, cold and miserable weather and we decided to get the hell out of there asap. So our South island foodie trip really started down in Kaikora. In Mauri this actually means Cray-fish. Kaikora is reknowned for amazing seafood and the local speciality is, yes you’ve guessed it, crayfish.

It is cheapest and often freshest bought at road side caravans by the beach. Nins Bin is the one made famous on the internet but it is 30min drive north of Kaikora. It is just as good and possibly cheaper to stay in town and drive down to the end of the beach for a breakfast treat! You get to choose your cray out of a chill bin and they will simply grill it for you with garlic butter. It was an amazing experience. I loved it!

The spectacular seafood in this region also invariably included NZ Green Lip Mussels - famous all over the world and gigantic in nature ...

Recommended restaurants:

1.The White Morph:

This seafront resto delivered quality posh nosh from a room with a view. It was fairly expensive but totally worth it !

Kaikora

NZ Lamb



2. Pegasus Bay Winery: Winner of Best Restaurant in a Winery

This gorgeous place gave us some of the best meat I have ever tasted and spectacular views of their art adorned gardens. Generally NZ lamb tends to get exported to us in the UK and it is actually more expensive to buy it in NZ. Some clever places however keep some of the best cuts for themselves and boy oh boy was it was mouth wateringly good..

Beef carpaccio

NZ lamb chops on a bed of Aubergines

We were blessed with great weather as we made our way down the west coast. We stayed with old friends in Christ Church and they took us to Akaroa for some of the best Fish and chips down south!

Akaroa

3. Riverstone Kitchen: This won the best casual dining awards last year and was further south of ChCh near a place called Omaru. The chef here has become famous for his use of simple local ingredients and associated recipe books. I therefore had very high expectatiions and I am happy to report that I was not disappointed. It was a family friendly venue i.e. lots of noisy children running around in the gardens and creche area and lots of harassed designated drivers/parents, but nevertheless the atmosphere inside was relaxed and friendly. The food was sensational!

More NZ lamb!

Steak!

When you drive around NZ there seems to be more cows, sheep/lamb and venison in fields than there are people or cars. It was just great to get to eat the incredibly tasty meat from the next field in these locally sourced resto's. You don't need to do much to food if it tastes that good to start off with and the meat in NZ has so much flavour!!UK butchers do have amazing produce but let's face it, how many of us can always afford meat from the butchers? Sometimes the budget can only stretch to supermarket quality - which I believe is improving in the UK but not always this good.   Luckily we have NZ lamb available to us in the UK supermarkets for a lot cheaper than they have it here!! Hurrah!

Sugar and Spice and all things nice

Battered and Deep fried chicken wings with sweet chilli dip

Singapore was extremely hot, unbelievably humid and very wet all throughout December and my experience was thwarted by the constant sweating and inevitable fatigue that followed. The heat was exhausting to the point that it inevitably reduced my usually insatiable appetite.  However eating out is a national past time here & so it was difficult to say no to meals out!

The number of options for restaurants was overwhelming but having had my fill of Chinese in Hong Kong, I was happy to go for more Indian/European places where you could try and choose some low carb, low fat and low sugar options! It was hard to choose healthily in most places in Singapore as most menus had fattening food combinations. Somehow I managed to stay away from their beloved Chicken Rice and Laksa Noodle based combos but it did not mean I lost any weight – if anything my muffin tops grew more muffin tops and I felt I was walking around with a ring of middle fat that could keep me afloat in a swimming pool.

In this city, people tend to move from air con mall to mall through an underground labyrinth network taking them from designer shops to food halls throughout the town centre. These food halls are a head ache inducing bombardment of cuisine options from all around the world and it is near impossible to make a choice as there are so many counters. I was however NOT spoilt for choice as invariably none of them were actually very healthy. Lots of things were deep fried and most dishes were loaded with sugar.

Food & culture in Singapore is a melting pot of Indian, Chinese, Indonesian and Malaysian. They like their spicy chilli hot dishes but they balance the heat with sugar – so much so that it mostly left my teeth set on edge! I found that most meals were heavy carb based – huge portions of noodles or rice & the sauce to go with it had loads of palm sugar and coconut based ingredients like coconut milk/cream/oil etc. – saturated fats galore.

Fat Brothers Satay Stand at a Hawkers Market

Satays for example are an Indonesian creation where the meat is marinated with grated palm sugar and chopped chillies. The meat is then stuck onto skewers and grilled before being served with a sweet peanut sauce, again full of palm sugar.  Sambal is the main chilli paste that every household and kitchen in the country makes daily. This is a sweet and hot paste that accompanies many dishes as a condiment or is the basis of many a curry sauce. Again it contains tooth ache inducing amounts of palm sugar along with copious amounts of mind blowing hot chillies! No doubt Dentists will have their work cut out here!

Sugar and Chilli paste - sambal

The hawkers markets provided the cheapest and varied options. Most were based around Chinese influences with lots of Dumplings and Deep Fried foods. Some had everything from Indian to Thai to Pizzas – definitely more interesting than fast food joints but I am not sure they were any better for hygiene or health. I always wonder where they get their cleaning water from and how often the tiny kitchen counters are actually cleaned at these markets.  The best choices in these markets were the BBQ [even if the marinades or sambal sauces are sugar based] as the food would be char-grilled and hopefully all the microbes would be nuked before consumption!

After learning Indonesian and Chinese cookery, I decided that I would rather try my hand at some Malay cuisine while I was so close to Malaysia. I decided to try a cooking class that taught their most favourite dishes. Malaysian food has more Indian influences and is more curry based. Ask any Malaysian what their best ever meal includes and Beef Rendang always comes on top of the list! This king of curries is a rich delicious stew prepared for every special feast or celebration. 

Beef Rendang

Here is the recipe – I recommend that you make this if you have an excellent exhaust system in your kitchen/ can cook outside/ if it is summer and you can open all the windows of the kitchen AND if you have a pressure cooker.... Oh and you will need a morter and pestle OR a food processor/blender for the paste.

Ingredients:

•  8 – 16 dry red chillies soaked in water until soft or 6 – 12 fresh red chillies
• 12 shallots
• 3 garlic cloves peeled
• 1 inch ginger peeled
• 1 inch galangal peeled
• 1 stalk of lemon grass bruised [remove the hard outer layers]
• ¼ tsp turmeric powder
• 2 tbsp of Oil
• 4 tbsp of grated coconut dry roasted till light brown
• 5 Kaffir lime leaves torn up
• 1 tbsp of palm sugar grated
• 1 and ½ cup of coconut milk
• 500g of cheapest cut of Beef diced into bite size portions
• [Other optional items – may be difficult to get: turmeric leaves and pandan leaves – bruised and used as flavouring – not to be eaten]

Slice and then pound together  the chillies, shallots, garlic, galangal, lemongrass and mix in the turmeric powder or use a blender to make the paste

Toast the grated coconut in a dry wok until golden

Mix the coconut into the spice paste

Add a pinch of salt to the dry wok then add the oil

Fry the paste in the oil for 10 minutes until it becomes darker

Add the beef and cook for 5 minutes

Add the Kaffir Lime leaves, coconut milk, salt and sugar

Cover and simmer for 1 and ½ hours or for 1 hour in the pressure cooker

Adjust the seasoning once the beef is cooked and serve with Basmati rice

This rich dry and thick curry is a joy to eat and a special occasion dish. I also tried Chicken and Lamb Rendang out in Kuala Lumpur and I must say they were also pretty damn special. You can make the curry to your taste and reduce the number of chillies and up the coconut or sugar content to get a milder version.

Mild Chicken Rendang

Lamb Rendang

Dieting in Hong Kong: Portion Control

I am back in Honkers but sadly this time I am on a diet. I have been struggling to maintain my weight in my year abroad. In fact my insatiable lust for food has caused me to steadily balloon over time. I generally eat very healthily but I have realised that I eat too much and possibly too often. Greed for good grub is my excuse.

It is an universal truth that you are what you eat and the only way to loose weight is to eat less and exercise more, right? Well I spent 6 months hauling my backside to the gym at least 3 times a week [and even saturday mornings for Body Pump sessions!!] in Melbourne, but going to the gym not only increased my appetite and my need for more food but it became an excuse to indulge. In Australia the portions are enormous and I really have no self control over portion size - 'eyes bigger than my belly' as they say!  All that exercise also turned most of my fat into muscle which actually weighs more than fat - so I was constantly getting heavier! Over the last few months I have had to give up the gym due to lack of funds and travelling around. So all the toned muscles I built have now settled into flab! With the ol' metabolism slowly grinding to a halt with age, it means that I have to eat less, much less than before, if I want to reduce. However I love my food and I refuse to starve myself [hungry = angry and irritable] so what is a girl to do?

The other worry is that I know that I am an apple shape by nature ie my body shape is such that I put on weight around the tyres around my middle. The buddha bellies and muffin tops that the experts lovingly call central obesity, puts apples at higher risk of high cholesterol and heart disease, as all the fat lies close to the main organs like the liver and the heart.  If you are a pear shape then you may not like your thighs but it is a much better shape for your heart!

I decided to take note of the eating habits of the impossibly slim and trim Chinese ladies in Honkers and look into what they eat. They all eat out. Everywhere you look there are restaurants teeming with people, all the time. Most people don't have great cooking fascilities at home. So eating out is very common. So how do they do it? Well the most obvious thing I noticed straight away was portion sizes. People eat Dim Sum and share plates of food with each other a lot more here - so small portions divided into even smaller mouthfuls. They take a little bite size portion onto a small bowl and they don't have a large plate for themselves. Spanish style Tapas is also very popular here. When they go for a pizza - it is shared between a group. Someone overheard my converstaion about pizzas the other day and they nearly choked when I admitted that I had a whole one to myself... oh the shame and the guilt!

I was misty eyed and nostalgic when I found a Pret a Manger in HK. It was a reminder of home but I noticed that they only serve single slim sandwiches here! I have spied on office workers at lunch and all the women come in and have one slim sandwich and they eat it very very slowly ....

Even the supermarket portions of meat or fish are packaged in smaller portions and meant for sharing between people.

I have also observed that they hardly eat that much meat - especially red meat... No great big juicy rib eye steaks for them and certainly not washed down with a gallon of red wine! Weirdly they don't go for many raw salads either - apparently many people believe that raw food is harder to digest and makes you bloated. Cooked salads seem to be popular instead as is blanched/steamed greens like choi sum/ bok choy, served with a little soy.  Rice and noodles are a staple but I have observed that they don't eat much of it, especially at night. They like soups as fillers and believe some are good for digection like miso soup which is though to be a probiotic. They do have tofu [good for calcium I guess] but very little dairy/eggs.

More importantly, they hardly ever drink alcohol. They mostly consume gallons of green tea which is full of antioxidants and helps increase the metabolism apparently!

I dare say the ultimate diet control is actually using chop sticks - it is very hard to shovel in too much food too quickly with 2 bits of stick. 

So wish me luck - I am trying my hardest to stay away from the yummy dim sum places until I learn not to over order. I am also going to follow the Chinese rules that I have observed and see if I can get back into my little black dress by New Years Eve! Oh. Hang on. I forgot about Xmas. Oh dear.

For the love of Pizza

Pizza Porn

My insatiable pizza lust has led me to eating more pizzas around the world than you can shake a stick at and I have finally realised that I may have used up my pizza quota for a lifetime. I am now on a pizza free diet [Boooo!] as none of my clothes fit and my face is looking like a calzone. But before I go cold turkey, please let me share with you some of the best I have had recently and quietly reveal that the number 5 top spot that was open in my top 5 best pizza joints in the world, has now been filled.

In Auckland New Zealand, I was pleasantly surprised at a pub called the Country Club [nothing to do with a golf course] which had great thin based tasty pizzas! [See photo above and below] They were generous and unconventional with their toppings but each one was a reasonable size [ie not that much bigger than your head - Miss Piggy would approve] and no soggy bottoms! We had the additional excitement of the rugby world cup and the joyous reunion with our beloved Kiwi mates, which made the pizzas taste even better!

chicken, chorizo and red onion

Next in line came SPQR, again in New Zealand, in the stylish Ponsonby road area of Auckland. This restaurant was my final meal before heading back to Melbourne and boy oh boy did it meet the mark. We sat outside on the pavement seats, soaking up the sun and being thoroughly looked after by a very flamboyant & gregarious waiter! The pizza I had was incredibly thin and crispy and the toppings were numerous but the best bit was the tomato sauce - it made the pizza one of the finest I have had! The flavours were bold and robust with so many strong topping ingredients but it was thin enough to make the mark! Check this out...

Salami, Black olives, Anchovies and mushrooms

My 3rd and final venue is a little wood fired pizza shack or beach hut called Champling, in Seminyak Bali, Indonesia. I was a very lucky girl to not only spend my birthday in Bali this year but I also got birthday pizza for lunch [who needs cake!]. This hut was behind our Hotel, right on the beach with a massive wood fire and looking out towards the water. When I went up to ask if their pizza was thin or fat based, the little Balinese girl serving behind the bar squeeked 'it's crispy' at me and I was sold! The view was just incredible - the continual & mesmorising rolling waves of the Indian ocean & miles and miles of clean beach was stunning. With music in the background and the warm ocean breeze, I had died and gone to paradise!

Okay so the location, view and warm weather made a huge impact on the choice, but Champling wins hands down and makes it onto my top 5 Pizza list! I found the lunch options on Bali to be pretty aweful - their salads made me ill [probably to do with the running water used to wash leaves not being drinkable or clean - raw food is a no no on this Island] and the other options were the burger/chips-Aussie/British- male-on-holiday-and-junk-food-diet variety. I tried going for Indonesian curries but they rendered me unwell for hours afterwards too and to be honest they were not that impressive. It was best to stick to food made to order in a fire that would cremate all microbes! So I pretty much went back there for lunch on most days but to keep it some what healthier and guilt free, I asked them to make mine without cheese. The toppings were simple, tasty and kept to a minimum. The star of the show was the delicious tomato sauce base and the crispy slightly smoky base. Simple and perfect.

So that's it. Sigh! Back to being healthy. No more Pizza. At least not for the rest of THIS year...[ahem.]

Plenty more fish in the sea - or is there???

At 6am on the day of my Balinese cooking course, me and a group of eager beaver foodies were taken to the only fish market on the south of the island, to pick up the restaurants catch of the day. When we were at the beach we were shown the Balinese side of the beach which was empty and then the Javanese side which showed more hustle and bustle. I was looking forward to a Rick Stein style odyssy of roving around a busy fish market but instead there was hardly anything going on. Turns out the waters surrounding Bali have been all but fished out and due to fear and ancestral superstitions about the sea and their inability to swim most Balinese fishermen have stopped fishing! The Javanese on the other hand, fish in Java and bring their meagre offerings over after a day long trip and sell their undersized fish as so called freshly caught stuff!! Unbelievable! There I was thinking we had sucked the seas dry in Europe but as it turns out there are hardly any fish left in the sea on this side of the world too. How sad.

The fish market had loads of fish that looked deader than dead but the whole place did not smell of fish at all. They have no refridgeration or ice. So what were the day old fish being kept in ? And since there is absolutely no regulation of fishing, the size of the catch were woefully small - in the EU or in Oz they would be fined heavily for trawling such small underlings!

There were some fish that looked freshly caught as they had rigor mortis, slimey flesh and clear eyes but mostly they looked very very miserable indeed. It made me not want to eat seafood in Bali as I realised that all the top end resto's were importing everything and the smaller local places were using these not so fresh undersized babies. There is sadly no escaping the fact that we have over fished our oceans and due to over population and constant demand there is really no fish left in the sea.

This was all that was fresh and available for the restaurant we were doing the course at

Nevertheless having been stunned into silence the group trudged back to the restaurant for our master class and learnt a few choice recipes.

Recipe No. 1: Prawn and papaya salad [Lawar Gedang]

The Balinese curry spice mix for seafood is another complex batch of ingredients that have to be roasted, crushed and cooked down for an hour. Once made it can be cooled and stored for ages and used generously with any kind of fish or seafood as a masala or marinade.

Spice mix: large red chillies [seeded and sliced], garlic [peeled and sliced], shallots [peeled and sliuced], fresh tumeric [peeled and sliced], tomatoes [seeded and sliced], candle nuts/raw skinless peanuts [crushed], corriander seeds [crushed], tamarind pulp [soaked and drained], dried shrimp paste [roasted - stinkiest stuff in the world], veg oil, water, salt and bruised lemongrass stalks.

This amazingly fragrant masala is sauteed in oil to release the flavours and to it you add minced prawns, chicken stock and coconut cream. This is then simmered until the prawns change colour and become firmer. Then you add salt, pepper, lime juice and zest before allowing it to cool.

In the meantime you grate a green papaya and mix it with grated coconut, deep fried shallots, deep fried garlic and fresh red chillies chopped up finely. Once the dressing is cooled it is combined with the papaya and served garnished with deep fried shallots. I have noticed that deep fried shallots and garlic can be bought ready made in jars in most asian grocers these days so you don't have to make your own batch every time.

Recipe No. 2 : Minced seafood sate [Sate Lilit Ikan]

This is a good way of using up fish trimmings when filleting fish. You can use half minced prawns to half fresh white boneless fish too. Basically you mince up the flesh [in a food processor] then mix in grated coconut, a good dollop of the seafood spice mix, salt, black pepper, palm sugar and finely chopped red birds' eye chillies. You can use lemongrass stalks as the skewers or just soaked wooden sticks. Best to use your hand to mould the mixture around the sticks and BBQ until golden and eat immediately!

Sate boys

Recipe No. 3:

Another method of cooking this seafood/fish paste and spice mix is to mould it into a sausage shape and steam in it banana leaves or I guess you could even use the husk of corn or just baking paper.

The Balinese tend to steam these parcels of minced seafood/fish or minced chicken in banana leaves secured with tooth picks. When they cook their steamed rice they pop in the parcels for about 15 minutes before the end of cooking time. Dead simple and a very healthy way of cooking!

I rarely ate any fish in Bali after my experience at the cooking course. I love fish and I don't want to give it up. But it made me think twice while I was there. In Australia there seems to be an abundance of huge great big fish. They do have a very small overall population here compared to the size of their land and their seas and they do have very strict and well regulated fishing policies which definitely helps. I think I can get away with eating fish in Melbourne without worrying. However, will we all eventually have to stop eating fish ? Now that would be a crying shame.

Balinese Banter

My birthday wish last year was to spend my next one, on a beach in Bali and by sheer hard work and bloody mindedness I made my wish come true! As a treat to myself, I booked in to do a Balinese cooking course - one of those days where they take you to the early morning markets and teach you real home cooking. It was a real eye opener to the Balinese way of eating and economising. I also learnt a lot of interesting cooking tips from the course which I will share with you and a few yummy recipes.

When I think of Indonesian foods the 1st things that come to mind are dishes like Nasi Goreng [translates as Fried Rice] or satays and rich curries. It seems that Bali has a lot of influences from other Indonesian Islands like Java and countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and China. Nasi Goreng is essentially a chinese concept - left over bits all fried together with yesterdays rice. The satays with peanut sauce apparently is a Java-nese concept. It was really hard to find a true and pure Balinese restaurant on the Island or real Balinese food on the streets. The real Balinese cuisine is in their home cooking and the cooking school gave me an insight to what the people of Bali really eat.

Their main staple is rice and all the other bits are condiments to flavour the rice. So a small amount of curry or sauce of some description is presented to enable them to eat the rice. I was also told that they are one of the only nations that don't really sit down to eat together as a family but eat as and when they are hungry and it usually is a bit of cold rice with what ever is available! They have a real sweet tooth here as breakfast is usually rice and shredded coconut with palm sugar syrups or an array of sweet desserts made primarily with tapioca, coconut and palm sugar or sweet rice/mung bean puddings eaten with coconut cream.

They have a lot of weird and wonderful fruits too which they grow in their back yard and sell but don't really eat! Ever heard of snake fruit?

Apart from that I learnt that they have 2 basic spice mixes for curries, one for meat & one for fish/seafood. If you make it from scratch you may have to substitute some of the ingredients and the recipe, unfortunately, is as long as your arm. I think I will venture to make a large batch when I get home [if not exactly the same batch as the course!] and store it in ice cube trays in the freezer. Then I can just defrost a few cubes at a time when I get the urge to make an Indonesian curry! They use these spice mixes for every savoury dish so it is worth making. They also prefer to use coconut oil but veg oil is just as good. I personally will be sticking to using canola/rapeseed oil myself as it is the healthiest option! The addition of coconut cream and palm sugar to many dishes make their cuisine very rich indeed and far too sweet for me. So I will be adapting those elements too if I recreate these recipes!

Ingredients for Basic Spice Mix: To use with Chicken/Beef/Duck/Venison/Lamb...

Red chillies, garlic, ginger, shallots, galangal, kencur [lesser galangal = ??], fresh tumeric, dried shrimp paste, corriander seeds crushed, candlenuts [substitute : raw peanuts without the skin], black pepper corns, grated nutmeg, crushed cloves, bruised lemongrass, salam leaves [?? no idea??], veg oil, water and salt!

So all these ingredients get toasted, roasted, crushed and pummeled into a paste before cooking out slowly over an hour! It can then be cooled and stored. I reckon I can make a close imitation with whatever I can find and it will have to do! Lord help the neighbours as it really did stink when they were making up a batch!

Recipe No. 1: Whole chicken
A really great technique for a whole chicken is to mix a batch of the spice mix with chopped spinach that has been wilted then cooled.  This stuffing is then shoved under the skin on the breast side and inside the cavity. The chook is liberally massaged with more of the spice mix and then steamed in banana leaves [which I believe we can get at flower shops in Blighty or just use foil and a bamboo steamer!] for an hour and then roast it in the oven for an hour without the leaves/foil, to crisp up the skin.

Recipe No. 2: Cubed chicken
Mix a handful of the spice mix with cubes of chicken and grate a good bit of palm sugar all over the mix. Then throw in a generous pinch of chopped red chillies and salt and finally give the chicken a Balinese massage. Leave to marinade while the BBQ gets hot then skewer the cubes onto soaked wooden sticks and BBQ yourself some chicken satays. This can be done with cubes of beef/pork too!

Recipe No. 3 : Peanut Sauce
Ever wanted to make a great satay sauce? Well this is what you do... Take 500mg of roasted peanuts with their skins on and grind them finely in a food processor along with 5 cloves of garlic and about 5 red birds eye chillies [or less if you aren't brave enough] and a peeled knob of galangal. Then bring this paste to the boil in a litre of coconut milk and 20g of palm sugar and 4 tablespoons of sweet soy sauce. Simmer uncovered for 15 minutes and serve with lime juice on top [check for salt and season to your taste].