Kiwi Cooking

We quickly discovered that cooking is an important part of the culture here down under. For example, the break room at our office has a fully-equipped kitchen. At lunchtime it’s common to see the HR manager sautéing salmon or the ICS manager chopping up a fresh salad. 

Break room kitchen

On the home front, though, the missionary couples all seem to have one major stumbling-block. Looks like an ordinary kitchen stove, right? 

Lying in wait...

Most of the couples have flats with an oven that only has a top element (45 minute recipe still raw after 3 hours) OR a forced air setting (25 minute recipe burnt after 7 minutes—and melts your mascara when you open the door). But we have a very modern oven, so we have BOTH settings and can choose whether we want raw food or burnt food!

We have a favorite television show broadcast out of Australia called “Junior Master Chef”.  These are young kids (REALLY young—as young as 9!) in a cooking competition. We wouldn’t have thought some of them were even old enough to be trusted alone in the kitchen with a knife, but it was all, “I got really worried I was running out of time to dry my gnocchi dough.” And, “I was completely confident about my hand-rolled phyllo for the chocolate ginger custard.” Or, “Jack’s asparagus gruyere soufflé looked brilliant, so I just hoped the judges would like the seasoning I ground in with my veal paste.” One of them had already written a cookbook on lamb!

So it’s been rather dismaying not to even be able to turn out a simple batch of chocolate chip cookies here.

Of course the fish is superbly fresh and there are a lot of varieties we never saw in America. Check out the fish market in downtown Auckland.

Fresh from the sea

Yes, that's the price.

Curious, but we think we may pass.

Red snapper really is red.

May be some kind of sardine; they are very small.

We bought some snapper and ran into a little communication difficulty. Bob asked them to fillet ("fill-LAY") the fish. "Sorry? What?" In Kiwi it's pronounced "FILL-it". However pronounced, Bob cooked it up and it was delicious, firm and very mild. Can't wait until the weather is nice enough again to try grilling some of the fish here.

Meats are different cuts, even if they have the same name as American cuts. All the meats have a very different taste and smell. A colleague here who has a ranch in Idaho tells us it’s because all New Zealand livestock is completely grass fed.

We wonder if that’s what makes the dairy foods here taste so extraordinarily wonderful! Each time we drive to the temple in Hamilton, we stop on the way home in a little town called Pokeno, where there are two side-by-side ice cream shops. One has 20 flavors and the other has 22. 

Bob's favorite orange chocolate chip + a scoop of Dutch chocolate

 

There is a lot of sugar in the foods here. Even the horseradish sauce is sweet! We couldn’t find cereals that didn’t have sugar as the first or second ingredient, so Bob eats oatmeal and Jan eats homemade granola (“muesli” in Kiwi). Even some foods with labels that look identical to American products—Old El Paso enchilada sauce, for example—are really sweet here.

Some of the things we usually cook with are hard to find, stocked in unexpected aisles. We searched for weeks for pearl barley in the rice section, for example. (The rice section here is half-an-aisle long.) Then one night we finally found it: in the meat cooler right near the sausages.  Jello (“jellie”) is right next to the ice cream cones, which are in with the maple syrup…

We haven’t yet seen many foods that were completely unfamiliar, but here is one that was new to us.

About the size of a thick thumb

And very pretty

 

Any guesses? They’re yams! You only thought you’d eaten yams. We scrub them, bake them in their skins, and eat them—skins and all—with butter. They aren’t sweet, but taste like very flavorful potatoes.

We tried passion fruit this weekend. The skin is dark purple, nearly black, and very tough like a pomegranate’s, only thicker. We couldn’t tell which ones were ripe so we asked the attendant at the market, who told us they were all ripe—all their foods were always perfectly ripe! Nothing to do but try one.

Passion fruit: the one that's not kiwifruit or nectarine.

Also like a pomegranates, the fruit inside is all about seeds, with a small amount of highly-flavored flesh around them. Of course they tasted like passion fruit, but a lot more sour than expected…Or maybe ours wasn’t ripe…  

We came across some dark purple carrots once at the veggie ("vegge") market, about the color of very dark beets. We brought one home and were so curious to try it that we forgot to take a picture of it first. Oddly enough, it tasted just like a carrot! We haven’t seen any since that night, so don’t know if they are now out of season or what.

Also new to us is kiwifruit juice, which has become a favorite with Bob, but Jan thinks it looks way too much like something Captain Hook tried to trick Peter Pan into drinking.

Juice or poison?

We also love the Australian Bundaberg sodas. The flavors available are blood orange, apple ale, guava, sarsaparilla, lemon lime & bitters, ginger beer, pink grapefruit, creaming soda (red cream soda) and Jan’s favorite,” peachee”—a dangerously delicious carbonated peach juice.

Peachee: If you ever see it, buy it.

It’s very common for people to have bearing citrus trees in their yards (“gardens”) here. Our neighbor has a mandarin orange tree and has invited us to help ourselves. He also has tangelos and grapefruit on the other side of the house. 

Mandarins right across the driveway. Definitely not like a Kansas City winter.

We’ve heard a lot about manuka honey, a honey made from the pollen of manuka trees, which are the New Zealand variety of tea tree bushes. It is very expensive—about $60 for a small bottle—to get the highest enzyme activity (actually rated by laboratory testing). This would be “hospital grade” honey. It’s not only eaten as a medicine for several conditions, but is actually applied topically to wounds and infections in hospitals here for its healing and antibiotic properties. Similarly, in the Bandaid aisle at the supermarket you won’t find rubbing alcohol or hydrogen peroxide at all. Instead you’ll find tea tree oils for disinfecting. We know for ourselves it works on athletes foot!

One thing we’ve discovered we don’t like at all is the ubiquitous Wheatbix. The picture looks a lot like shredded wheat, doesn’t it? Anyway, it sure fooled us! Turns out they have no flavor at all that we could discern, and as soon as you put milk on, they turn into a slimy sludge. Bob tried to finish up the package by eating them dry like crackers, but finally gave up and tossed them out.

WheatBix: If you ever see it, don't buy it.