June 2005 Archives

New Zealand cook Judith Cullen used to run her own café in Dunedin before she changed careers to become a successful teacher of cookery classes, many of which are run from her home. Judith Cullen's Cookery Classes is her first published book but she has a fresh and simple approach that many more seasoned cookbook writers would envy.

Staying with the format of her cookery classes, Cullen has opted to divide the book into monthly menus with a seasonal slant - picnic ideas for January, mid-winter slow cooking in July. An introduction to each chapter gives some background on her choices as well as plenty of useful tips and ideas. One thing that I loved about the book was the way in which Cullen made the most of seasonal fruits with her emphasis on relishes and sauces.

This is fusion cookery without fuss. Cullen uses an eclectic but judicious mixture of foods and flavours, with influences ranging from Asian, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and North African, introducing and demystifying unfamiliar ingredients, from pomegranate molasses to tamarind and sumac.

The one fault that I found with the book is the fact that no recipe states how many people it serves. Although on further investigation I found a line in the introduction saying that most of the recipes feed four to six people, I shouldn't have to go searching for it. Nor does this better inform me of the number of biscuits/cakes that I will get from the recipes for Blue Cheese Biscuits or Ricotta Cakes.

That aside, Judith Cullen's Cookery Classes is a beautifully written and photographed introduction to modern New Zealand cooking.

Judith Cullen's Cookery Classes is published by Longacre Press

We weren't very well organised for the last bank holiday weekend so it was Sunday morning before one of the Boyfriend's friends and his girlfriend came over and we tried to figure out where to go for the night. Despite fears that all accommodation would be booked solid for the weekend, a quick scoot through the Rough Guide to New Zealand and a few calls later and we had rooms for the night at Formerly The Blackball Hilton in the wee town of Blackball on the South Island's West Coast.

The historic hotel - it dates back to the early part of the last century - used to be known simply as The Blackball Hilton but, when the representatives of a certain Hilton hotel chain discovered the place, it wasn't long before lawyer's letters started flying Blackball direction. Showing a healthy disregard for American bullsh*t, the owners put a Formerly in front of their name and carried on as before. I'm not sure how long they'll get away with it but their stand is a typical West Coast one.

After a long afternoon spent in the car and waiting for the Boyfriends to finish their climbing on Castle Hill, the road to Blackball seemed to take forever but we were no sooner in the town than we came across the large looming presence of Formerly The Blackball Hilton. Through the front door we came to a large entrance hall, papered on one side with lots of local notices and flyers for events in the district - evidentially Formerly The Blackball Hilton is a popular place with the locals, always a good sign. Collecting our room keys from the bar, we went upstairs to discover just how strange and quirky the place was.

The rooms were all colour-coordinated in a very strange way. Ours was purple and a particularly lurid green, complete with family-type pictures on the walls and dressing gowns in case you felt the need to wander down the corridor to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Once you switched off the main light and turned on the bedside lamp, thereby tuning down the alarming colours, the room was cosy, clean and, most importantly in New Zealand at this time of the year, warm.

As most of our party were hungry, we went downstairs to the pub, which was warmed by a roaring fire, and got ourselves a seat in one of the booths on the side of the room, settling ourselves at a table covered with a cheerful red and white gingham tablecloth. I wasn't hungry but the food ordered by the other three - Blackball Salami Company sausages and mash, fish and chips, roast of the day - seemed to go down well, and I have to say that I had no complaints about the rather strong gin and tonics that arrived from the bar.

Being flat stony broke these days, I like to try and bring my lunch to work with me rather than be dependent on cafés. Sometimes the lunch is leftovers from dinner the night - rice or pasta with some kind of sauce - but other days I am forced to rely on sandwiches.

Having eaten plain ham sandwiches for years as a secondary school student my boredom threshold is quite low so I try to ring the changes as much as possible with different breads, fillings and spreads. One thing that really lifts a sandwich, be it ham, cheese, pate or chicken, beyond the ordinary is this sticky and savoury Red Onion Marmalade. It's a great standby to have on hand. You can put it into jars if you want to keep it for a while but mine doesn't get a chance to hang around. I just put it straight into a covered tub in the fridge. It's great with any kind of sandwich, I have often pressed it into service as a relish when I've been eating cheese and crackers and, in her Cook's Companion, Stephanie Alexander suggests stirring a spoonful through cooked pasta.

Red Onion Marmalade is not difficult to make but it does involve some time. I find that it is a good thing to cook while you're doing other things around the house. Peeling the onions is probably the worst part of the job and, no matter what evasive action you take, you'll be shedding bucket-loads of tears before you get the last onion chopped! I try to stand by an open window or at least make sure the kitchen is well ventilated. After peeling each of the onions, rinse it under cold water and leave it to drip in a colander in the sink until you start chopping. This won't prevent the tears but it might lessen them somewhat.

I've just heard from Greg Malouf's publishers - Hardie Grant Publishing - that his new book finally has a preliminary title.

It is apparently going to be called Saha - Food and Travels Through Lebanon and Syria. From talking to him at Savour New Zealand, it looks like this will be well worth a look.

I'm not sure if it will be published at the Irish side of the world - I don't think that his earlier books Arabesque and Moorish are available in Europe - but I'll see what I can find out from the publisher.

Any of you that look at Bibliocook regularly will know that Moorish has become one of my most used cookbooks in recent times. I am really looking forward to reading - and cooking - more of Greg's recipes.

Further update: 7 July 2005
Hardie Grant Publishing sent me this press release earlier in the week.

SAHA
Written by Greg and Lucy Malouf

Description: In Saha, Greg Malouf returns to the land of his ancestors to explore its broad and influential cuisine. Stretching from neighbouring Persia throughout the Mediterranean to North Africa, the roots of Greg's culinary history are here in the land of his forbears, and together with writing partner Lucy Malouf and photographer Matt Harvey, he embarks on a month-long culinary journey.

The cuisine in Saha is traditional and inspirational; enticingly spiced and fragrant with flower waters. From hearty peasant dishes to more subtly spiced specialties from ancient palaces, the dishes are complex in flavour yet not overly complicated to make at home.

Heartwarming stories and recipes from the people Greg and Lucy meet on their journey are teamed with evocative images and Greg's own unique take on this history-rich and exciting cuisine, capturing the spirit of the modern and the ancient; the characters, dishes, flavours and colours that make up Lebanon and Syria in this highly illustrated and lavishly designed volume.

When I was a kid, Bread and Butter Pudding was the desert that we all loved. I wasn't too impressed with other traditional milk puddings like Farola or semolina and often would walk away from the dinner table with my pockets full of secreted spoonfuls rather than actually eat a bowl of the insipid stuff.

But Bread and Butter Pudding was another story. I always seem to remember it being made in an enamelled dish. My mother used to scatter plenty of sultanas through the buttered bread slices before she poured over the eggy milk. My job, at that age, was to poke the bread down into the milk and ensure that it got as soggy as possible before it was sprinkled with sugar and whisked into the oven. That day I would even try to eat up my potatoes (another childhood foodstuff that usually got the same treatment as Farola and semolina) before tucking into a bowlful of the Bread and Butter Pudding. I loved the combination of the crunchy sweet topping and soft custardy interior, studded with plumped-up sultanas.

Although I have tried my hand at savoury Bread and Butter Puddings, it's been years since I had a sweet one. Then I came across a recipe for a Chocolate Bread and Butter Pudding with Turkish Delight in Greg and Lucy Malouf's Moorish. Their recipe brought Bread and Butter Pudding right up to date, putting a decadent spin on what used to be a wholesome desert. Could I resist? Not at all. When we had the Boyfriend's sisters and cousins round for a Moroccan meal one night I decided that this was going to be the piece de resistance and it didn't leave me down. As I was chopping pistachio nuts for the couscous that night I added a handful of them to the topping for another layer of crunch. It's a very rich desert so be sure and serve it in small portions. To really gild the lily, you can accompany it with some softly whipped cream.

As I'm still buying about two kilos of apples a week - I never can resist those markets - I decided, after my success with the French Apple Cake, that it was time to chance an Irish version. I turned to Clare Connery's Irish Cooking for inspiration and took her version of White Soda Bread as my base.

My idea was to use the White Soda Bread to sandwich a filling of sweetened and spiced apple slices. I'm not sure where it came from but maybe the traditional Irish cooking in Maura Laverty's Never No More gave me ideas!

It must be admitted that this Irish Apple Cake was a fairly stodgy offering but it didn't sit around for too long. A chunk of it heated up in the microwave and served with a heaped spoonful of Greek yoghurt made a rib-sticking treat for afternoon tea. A liberal hand with the sugar when you're sweetening the chopped apple is the key. I also brushed the top of the cake with milk and sprinkled it with another couple of spoonfuls of sugar making for a lovely crunchy caramelised top.

Maybe cake is too grand a word for it. It's like the sort of feed you'd take out to a field-full of men harvesting the hay or silage. Plenty of ballast for hard work!

When I was a little one, with a voracious appetite for books and cooking, one of the books that I devoured was my Nana's well-used copy of Full and Plenty by Maura Laverty. The distinctive blue and yellow covers contained a treasury of old Irish recipes but the icing on the cake for me were the stories with which Laverty started each chapter. The woman whose fine soda bread was more praised by her future daughter-in-law than her smug neighbours cake, the boiled onions that effected a marriage, looking for cuppeen and platter mushrooms in the early morning - these were all well-loved and frequently read tales of old Ireland. After a long and fruitless search through second-hand bookshops and charity shops I eventually found a copy of Full and Plenty over the internet and it now sits proudly on my cookbook shelf alongside many more recent books.

But it took a New Zealand author to let me know that Laverty had actually written more than a cookbook. I had been reading my way through my copy of Christine Dann's A Cottage Garden Cook Book - Recipes from a New Zealand Garden when I came across a stray remark about Laverty's other books. That was enough to send me looking in the library which, wonder of wonders, stocks her first novel - originally published in 1942.

Set in the Ireland of the 1920s, Never No More is the story of a young girl and her relationship with her beloved Grandmother. They live in an old farmhouse outside the village of Ballyderrig in County Kildare and the book is full of tales of and from the Irish countryside - the cutting of the turf, weddings and wakes, the solemn ritual of pig slaughter, family nicknames and stories of possession. Laverty has a wonderful grasp of the texture of country life and great powers of description. As with Full and Plenty, food plays a great part in Never No More and the book is packed full of mouth-watering images.

"White bread, brown bread, Indian meal bread and bran loaves. Short cakes, butter cakes and scones of all kinds. She made seedy cakes and Sunday cakes and prune cakes. And an enormous rich fruit cake with a whole glass of brandy in it. My arms ached from beating the dozen eggs that went into the cake, and from cleaning and preparing the pounds of currants and raisins and candied peel and nuts. She made apple cakes and Carrigeen shapes and flummery and jellies, and Mike Brophy carried over to Nolans' a big basket of Grandmother's famous preserves - haw-and-apple jelly, sloe jelly, blackberry jam and damson jam and a half-dozen bottles of spicy mushroom ketchup to add piquancy to the cold meats. "

With an original glowing introduction by Sean O'Faolain, a later one by Maeve Binchy as well as a quote from an imprisoned Brendan Behan, Never No More is an unexpected treasure. Binchy is also kind enough to fill in the biographical gaps between my much-loved Full and Plenty and Laverty's other work. As well as writing a handful of cookbooks, another three novels and a pair of children's books, she worked as a newspaper journalist, a radio agony aunt and wrote the scripts of a legendary Irish television series from the 1960s called Tolka Row.

Despite all her achievements, in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland Maura Laverty seems to have been all but forgotten. We're too busy celebrating new imported cultures and foodstuffs to appreciate the native bounty that still surrounds us. It might be difficult to get your hands on a copy of Full and Plenty but her novels are still in print, courtesy of Virago Modern Classics, and they're well worth searching for.

Ginger is big business in New Zealand. Whether it's the pieces of Ginger Crunch available in every café and bakery, gingernut biscuits beloved by the Boyfriend's parents, the many brands of commonly available ginger beer (not in the least bit like the insipid ginger ale mixer common in Irish bars) - the best of which is always a hotly debated topic of contention in the Boyfriend's household - or Ginger Bear sweets (like gummy bears, but with a ginger kick) it seems like the Kiwis just can't get enough ginger.

To keep up with this ginger fascination, I started thinking about making gingerbread. It was something I used to make often as a child, especially when I was working my way, recipe by recipe, through the first Stork Cookery Book. Without that book to guide me, I discovered that Nigella had a recipe for a rather unique Chocolate Gingerbread in her latest book, Feast. So, never being one to pass up a new variation on an old favourite, I tried this recipe. I have to say I wasn't too impressed. Rather than gingerbread, it tasted of liquorice - not a favourite flavour of mine. The Boyfriend, however, loved it and, after he took a couple of pieces to work everyday that week, there wasn't much left over.

I did like the recipe, however. It was a one-pot cake, all made in the one saucepan, therefore cutting down on dirty dishes - always a consideration when baking! So I decided to have another try. This time I substituted extra flour for the cocoa and chopped crystallised ginger for the chocolate chips and forgot about the icing completely. I'm not sure the Boyfriend liked it as much but this gingerbread variation was the one that I fell in love with. As dark and moist as the nicest of my childhood experiments but with the added extra kick from the embedded chunks of crystallised ginger. Gingerbread is a good keeper too so I've been able to nibble away at chunks of it all week. Just one tip - if you're going to make the version with the crystallised ginger make sure you cut it up small and it's worth tossing it in flour to make sure it doesn't fall to the bottom of the mixture like mine did!

Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt and that has surely been the case with one of my trademark dishes - Chicken with Garlic and Lemon. This is a dish that I have been cooking for years. It gets trotted out at regular intervals if friends are coming round for dinner and for many years it, and a variation on Apple Crumble, were my fail-safe dishes for those occasions. In fact, a poor housemate that I lived with for a couple of years must have gotten well sick of the sight and smell of garlic and lemon!

For all that I criticise it, this recipe is a great one to have up your sleeve - and it leads to endless variations. I think I got the original idea from the ever fabulous Nigel Slater but I've been tweaking it ever since, adding chopped or whole garlic cloves, a glass of white or red wine at the beginning or end of the cooking time, not adding any liquid at all, sitting the chicken on a bed of onions and/or other vegetables and experimenting with herbs - fresh thyme and rosemary being two of the most readily available favourites.

It is the work of minutes to prepare the ingredients then all you have to do is put your roasting tin in the oven and let the heat go to work. You can make this dish with a whole chicken or pieces. If I am cooking a whole chicken I normally put a lemon half into the bird. If not, I snuggle the halves into the tin with the chicken pieces. I normally use thighs, favouring the dark juicy meat over the white breasts. For this recipe I am going to presume that you are using chicken pieces - make sure they come with skin and bones intact. Crispy chicken skin is one of life's pure joys. And do try to cook free-range chicken if you can at all afford it. The flavour is just so much better - and there's none of the associated guilt that you get from eating chickens that have had an unhappy factory life. Having said that, this recipe does give flavour even to the most pallid of supermarket chickens.

It's not very often we go out for Sunday lunch but the fact that I had a voucher for the Riccarton House Café in Christchurch made our minds up for us last weekend. The café only does lunch but that's well worth the hour-long walk from our house.

It has the perfect setting. Riccarton House is a heritage attraction, a splendid example of Victorian and Edwardian housebuilding - complete with plenty of decapitated stags in the entrance hallway - and it is set in a 12-hectare reserve of ancient native forest and parkland. The homestead was the home of Canterbury's pioneering Deans family for 91 years and, when you arrive, you almost feel like you're walking into a private home.

The café is situated off the oak-panelled main entrance hallway in what might have been the Deans family sitting room. The tables and chairs are all solid and dark, as befits the space, but it does leave visitors with an absence of manoeuvring space. There are also tables outside on the veranda, overlooking the river but, despite the sunshine, it was too cold to sit there for long and we moved ourselves indoors before our meal arrived.

The menu isn't large but it is well balanced and there are plenty of choices. We settled on the pizza of the day with a topping of broccoli, blue cheese, caramelised onions and chicken. As we waited for our food, I hungrily observed delicious-looking dishes of goats cheese parcels, huge fluffy pancakes (they also serve a breakfast menu) and a pork roast arriving at nearby tables. Dishes to return for, perhaps. As it turned out we were more than happy with our pizza. While the base looked like it may have been made from wholemeal flour, it was thin and crispy enough to overcome this faux pas. Before it arrived, the Boyfriend had been bemoaning our lack of foresight in not ordering a serving of wedges as he saw them carried past us, but there were no complaints of hunger after we finished the pizza.

We did have enough room for desert so, although the Boyfriend was thinking about getting one of the scones resplendent on a table nearby, I managed to steer him towards a moist orange and poppyseed cake instead, which was served with yoghurt. Only after I promised to make a batch of scones at home! As for myself, I was seduced by the promise of a crème brulee. Although I have read a lot about these little French deserts and know how to make them - in theory at least - I had never actually tasted one. The waitress brought it over, apologising that the chef was only getting the hang of the blowtorch and sure enough there were little burnt patches on the caramel. Fortunately this only accentuated the experience of crisp caramel and light creamy custard. Not only did I finish it in double quick time, but the Boyfriend caught me using my finger to ensure that I hadn't let any custard behind. A couple of coffees and we were ready to rise. It was just as well that there was an hour's walk ahead of us!

Without the voucher the meal would have cost $34 for a shared main course, two deserts and two coffees.

Riccarton House Café is at 16 Kahu Road, Christchurch. Phone: 03 341 1018

In the Salvation Army shop the other day I discovered the one thing that would make me look the part while marketing - a wicker basket! Since then I've been trotting very happily to the market with my basket on my arm although sometimes I have to bring along a bag to supplement what it can hold. Look at today's haul - cauliflower, silverbeet, carrots, green beans, mushrooms and free range eggs...and that's what's on top. There's a wee cast iron pan, four forks, six spoons and a second-hand jumper underneath. It was a busy morning!

We're coming to the end of the true apple season here - although I'm sure we're still going to see plenty of apples in the shops - but the Apple Man at the St Albans Market has finished up his selling for the year. He and his partner were picking and selling almost 1,000 kilos of apples a week between the stall at their farm gate, St Albans Market on Saturdays and the bigger Riccarton Market on Sundays. He told me, on one of our many chats as the Boyfriend circled the market for the third time, that they grow lots of different varieties at their farm near Oxford. Therefore, unlike the big commercial orchards, the apples cannot be picked all at the same time and put into cold storage until the time comes to sell them. Instead they work on a more gradual picking and selling programme so that the apples that you buy from him at the market are often only picked earlier that week. As he bid me farewell, he said that he will be back in March with some early ripening apples. Something to watch out for - if I'm here!

In the last few weeks, before he ended up, he was selling big three kilo bags of Braeburns so there was always a hurry on to get the previous week's bag eaten before the weekend came around. I had been doing some research into American food writer Patricia Wells, who lives and writes about Paris and Provence, and discovered a recipe for what she calls The Apple Lady's Apple Cake in The Paris Cookbook.

It's a simple recipe - just make a cinnamon (my addition) and vanilla-scented batter, throw in the apples, cook for a while, top with a sugary mixture and then finish back in the oven - but its taste belies its simplicity. It can be whipped up in ten minutes and, if you use good, crisp eating apples, the short cooking time means that they still have a bite in them by the time the Apple Cake makes it to your plate.

Moorish is the second cookbook by Greg and Lucy Malouf, restaurateur and food writer respectively. Greg, who is commonly regarded as one of Australia's most innovative chefs, has been credited with influencing and introducing a generation of chefs and diners to the flavours, tastes and textures of the Middle East through his cooking in O'Connell's restaurant and MoMo in Melbourne. But you don't have to travel so far to experience his kind of cooking as the recipes in Moorish, with a subtitle that proudly states "flavours from Mecca to Marrakech", will let you try it in the comfort of your own home. And you'll have a hard time keeping away from the kitchen after reading this book.

The first few chapters are devoted to dry and wet spice mixes, dressings and relishes and pickles and preserves - the basic building blocks of Moorish cooking. The Maloufs have covered it all, from Chermoula and Ras el Hanout, harissa and preserved lemons to lesser known blends such as Baharat and Toum. The rest of the book doesn't disappoint either. Each recipe comes with a paragraph by Lucy that talks about the flavours and origins of the dishes that take their inspiration from North Africa, France, the Eastern Mediterranean, Spain, and the Middle East.

There's nothing difficult about any of the recipes - although you will have to stock up on spices - but the Malouf's take on food is different enough to make even the most blasé of home cooks sit up and take notice.

Greg Malouf has his own website at www.gregmalouf.com.

If you've ever seen photos of Morocco, you'll be familiar with the piles of vividly coloured spices in the market places. My one-time housemate, on a trip to Morocco a long time ago, brought me a mysterious little bag from one of the piles. She didn't know what it was, neither did I, but I delighted in trying it out - until the day I discovered that the spice had turned into a wriggling mass of maggots. Not that that would put me off trying the spices, however, if someone should happen to bring me more of them, I think that I'd just look over them more carefully!

My fascination with Moroccan food has continued, despite the maggots, and I've been experimenting with a blend of spices called Ras el Hanout from a Kiwi company called Alexandra's Bazaar. There seems to be as many variations of Ras el Hanout as there are cooks in Morocco to argue about it which didn't help me when I went looking for a recipe to make my own blend. Paula Wolfert, in Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, got a sample of Ras el Hanout from Fez and had it analysed in New York. That blend had a total of 26 ingredients, including the aphrodisiac Spanish fly and poisonous belladonna leaves. Suffice it to say that I did not intend to going so far so when I discovered a recipe for the seasoning in Greg Malouf's Moorish that only had 12, easily obtainable, ingredients I determined to give it a try. Greg calls it Ras al Hanout and, in the introduction to his version in Moorish (he's got at least two others that I've discovered so far) says that this is a humble blend, for daily use. He says that it can be used in soups and tagines, as a marinade, or with rice and couscous.

Great excitement here this afternoon when I got an email from friends in Ireland to say that my article on food in New Zealand has been published in this month's edition of Ireland's Food & Wine Magazine! It's the new look edition of "Ireland's Food and Drink Bible" with a picture of a lovely looking iced summer treat on the cover.

My article starts on page 30, under the headline "The New Black", and apparently, according to the index, Caroline Hennessy tells why New Zealand's cuisine is worth writing home about. It's well worth checking out. Well, I would say that, wouldn't I!

A big thank you to all at Athena Olives in Waipara who took a complete olive picking novice under their communal wing today and gave me such a wonderful - and painful! - experience during a very busy time for them.

I spent the morning in the olive groves dragging large nets around to put under the trees before the men with the clappers (a kind of vibrating rake) shake the olives off the trees. Those nets don't manage to gather everything so there was plenty of picking the harvested olives off the ground. Between that, rolling the nets and moving large boxes of olives my muscles know all about it tonight! A lunchtime was never more welcomed.

After an hour back out amongst the trees in the afternoon, I got to work for a time in the sweet-smelling pressing shed, watching the actions of the traditional Italian hydraulic press and tasting the peppery fresh pressed oil.

Although picking olives may be a far distance removed from haying in Ireland the backbreaking work of the harvest is the same. And so is the satisfaction. Now I understand a little better how quality olive oil is produced - and why it costs so much...money well spent, if you ask me.

The days when you get a call from your Boyfriend saying "don't plan anything for dinner tonight. I want to take you out" don't come too often so, no matter what you've been thinking about cooking, it's time to put it aside. Especially when you discover that you're going to New Zealand's only Moroccan restaurant - Simo's in Christchurch. I've been a fan of Moroccan flavours for a long time and Simo's didn’t disappoint.

We were booked in for an early dinner at 6.30pm and, when we arrived, were the only people in the place. But, rather than making us feel in the way as can be the case sometimes, the staff really made an effort to put us at ease, showing us to our table in the warmly coloured rooms, dispensing menus and tempting us with the idea of a Moroccan cocktail. Cocktails are going to be my downfall in New Zealand, I can tell. I never can say no. This time I was glad that I hadn't even tried to. Unfortunately I can't tell you too much about them as the mists of time and, perhaps, alcohol, have dimmed my memories of what they contained but let it suffice to say that if you're offered a cocktail in Simo's, don't turn it down.

As little cards on the tables and the waitstaff explained, Simo's had won the Meadow Mushrooms Grande Entree Award of Excellence 2004 so we decided to see what all the fuss was about and share their entry, Trio of Meadow Mushrooms, for a starter. The Trio consisted of an Olive Oil preserved White Button Mushroom, Charmoulla Marinated Swiss Brown Mushroom and an Oven baked Portabello Mushroom. Mushrooms in any guise, as far as I'm concerned, are a good idea but my heart sank when the dish arrived at the table. It was a carefully layered and plated arrangement but, I thought, smacked more of style than substance. By the first mouthful I had forgotten such traitorous thoughts for this was a well-balanced dish, with different pungent and strong flavours in each bite. Before long we had managed to make our way through the Trio and were awaiting our main courses. The Boyfriend had chosen Lamb Tagine to put his fears about tagines to rest, after having a few greasy experiences in Morocco last summer. Judging by the speed it disappeared there was little comparison between the 'real' Moroccan experience and the Moroccan restaurant option! I had the fish of the day which was baked with chermoulla and served with one of the ingredients that I've been noticing lately - Israeli couscous, which has grains much larger than the normal Moroccan couscous. After tasting it in Simo's I promptly bought a bag of it the next time I saw it on display. Time to figure out how to cook it soon, methinks!

Although we didn't really feel that we needed desert, the Boyfriend, still having flashbacks to his time in Morocco, was tempted by the Moroccan Sweet Mint Tea. As this could come with a selection of pastries, I didn't hesitate to encourage him in his choice and this proved to be the perfect ending to a truly wonderful and relaxing meal.

Simo's is located at 114 City Mall, Cashel Street in Christchurch. Phone: 03 377 5001

Published in Ireland's Food & Wine magazine in June 2005.

Most people think of New Zealand and imagine spectacular scenery, lots of wine, and, thanks to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, a landscape populated with hobbits. But, since arriving in New Zealand six months ago, I've discovered that an interest in food permeates the very air the people here breathe. There are numerous food magazines, lots of cookbooks by New Zealand writers, the meals you get in cafés, restaurants and people's homes are, almost invariably, fantastic and every road trip is punctuated with stops at country stalls selling fruit and vegetables, hazelnuts, cheese and yoghurt. Go to the farmers' markets and you'll find an emphasis on organic and regional foods alongside a wide range of artisan food makers. Much is known about New Zealand wine - Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc has a justifiably excellent international profile - but the world is only just starting to wake up to the innovative food industry humming away in this little country.

Things weren't always this way. Twenty years ago, as in Ireland, New Zealand was a conservative market with little interest in new and unusual foods. Cheese meant cheddar while exotics like artichokes and aubergines were unheard of. The traditional Kiwi dinner was roast meat - most often lamb - with pavlova for desert. Simon Wilson, editor of Cuisine, New Zealand's leading food and wine magazine, agrees. "Traditional cuisine in New Zealand was very dominated by British, as well as Irish and Scottish, foods - and the kind of stodgy end of them. So some of the really interesting things that have characterised British cuisine - good cheeses, some of the delicious puddings, real quality products with meat, interesting use of spices - we didn't really have much of that. We had the meat and three veg, pretty heavy food. That's how people thought of British food and that's how people thought of New Zealand food."

So when did the change come about? What turned New Zealand into the vibrant food producer it has become? Wilson pinpoints these changes to the late 1980s. "That was when import regulations were almost eliminated, certainly eased up on, so it became possible for a large variety of food stuffs to be brought into New Zealand. We could eat all sorts of things that we hadn't even seen before, let alone tasted." But this was only one of the factors at play in the development of the New Zealand food scene. "In the last ten years or so, as has happened throughout the West," says Wilson, "there has been a large number of emigrants from Third World countries, bringing with them their strong and wonderful cuisines. So not only do we have the foodstuffs, we know what to do with them. There's a very healthy import, retail and restaurant Middle Eastern scene in New Zealand right now."

Influences from outside the country have certainly been strong but a lot of the changes came about from the ground up. The establishment of the now highly successful wine industry in New Zealand gave impetus to a lot of innovators. "As the wine became established, other people were saying we surely can do this with food," according to Wilson. "There were a lot of people who considered that they couldn't afford to start a vineyard but they could afford to grow olive trees or saffron. So that was a way that another whole group of people got involved in the food and wine industry."

It's a line of thought that Tina Duncan, who has a catering business, runs cookery classes and is also one of the founders of the Christchurch-based international food and wine masterclass Savour New Zealand, agrees with.
"Once we discovered we could make great wine then the emergence of boutique producers follows on because they're all part of the industry. You want the olives to go with the wine and the olive oils are just getting better and better. Our avocado oil is fantastic too. We're growing the best saffron in the world here in Canterbury and we're making fantastic wasabi. Where ever you go there are all these little people doing a wonderful thing."

It was this bounty of food that led Duncan and her partners to set up the Savour New Zealand event. Renowned chefs, experts, producers and writers on food and wine from around the country and the world gather for this biennial happening. "We just wanted to celebrate the fact that we've such wonderful produce," says Duncan. "We saw that everyone was becoming crazy for food and wanting knowledge. So we decided to create this event with the goal that it would become one of the top ten food and wine events in the world."

Since the first Savour New Zealand weekend in 2001, the event has attracted not only world famous chefs like Antonio Carluccio, Stephanie Alexander, and Sophie Grigson, but also highlighted the unique qualities of New Zealand produce to an international audience. "Our idea was to showcase New Zealand food and wine to the rest of the world by bringing in chefs like Patricia Wells from Paris, Melissa Perello from San Francisco, Anthony Bourdain from New York. Every time we have an event and they go back they're spreading the word."

British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has also been experimenting with and spreading the word about a uniquely New Zealand product, avocado oil, which he has tipped as the next 'it' food ingredient. While refined avocado oil has been used for cosmetic purposes for many years, it was only in early 2000 that a couple of companies in New Zealand started processing extra virgin cold-pressed avocado oil. Tastier than most oils, with a 'good fat' profile similar to that of olive oil and as many uses, avocado oil looks set to make a large impact on the food market.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Walk into any food shop and you'll find yourself wondering about the sheer imagination involved in the production of most of the local foodstuffs. From walnut growers turning their produce into oil, paste and flour to the revival of ancient European products such as verjuice and artisan bread-makers working with Maori chefs to create New Zealand breads with indigenous ingredients, there's hardly a culinary stone left unturned in this country. It's no surprise that, on last count, there were a total of 2000 specialty food and beverage manufacturers, employing more than 33,000 people.

One of the reasons that there is such variety in the foodstuffs produced in New Zealand is the variation in climates within the country. Errol Hitt of Eight Moon Saffron was the pioneer of the saffron industry in New Zealand and his award-winning saffron is considered equal to the world's best. In 1993, inspired by a throwaway comment on the radio, he decided to plant some Spanish corms at his farm in Rangiora, North Canterbury. "Right from the very first harvest it was good, partially because we were in the right place. If you drill a hole around here, straight through the earth, you come out around Spain or Portugal. Plus we've got a bit of a microclimate in Rangiora. It's a bit frosty in the winter, quite dry in the summer, and that's exactly what saffron needs." His success with what is called the King of Spices has led him into extending the business and now, as well as the pure saffron threads, he offers saffron-based honey, marinades, chocolates and oils.

"It used to be thought New Zealand was a temperate climate," says Simon Wilson, "and therefore couldn't sustain the kind of horticulture and viniculture that characterised Mediterranean countries. That might be generally true but it isn't true of all parts of New Zealand and it doesn't follow that we can't grow a whole range of things whether it's grapes, olives or any number of gourmet foods if the right location is chosen." It is something that Tina Duncan has also noticed. "We've got a very interesting climate here with pockets of different sorts of microclimates. This is why we can grow tropical fruits up in the north. There are areas around Coromandel where they started growing tea at one stage and we're producing our own truffles."

With all this interest in food can New Zealand now be said to have its own national cuisine? "There's been quite a bit of discussion about whether there is a national cuisine," says Wilson, "and there's a strong consensus that I think different people reached independently. Our cuisine is a matter of taking the fresh local produce, particularly things like seafood, beef and lamb, and using it with the best of whatever foodstuffs have arrived in the country from all over the world. Our chefs and our home cooks are not afraid to mix and match, to experiment, to find really quite delightful tastes. That has created a strong and taste-orientated cuisine that now dominates our restaurants and many people's homes." Forget the hobbits, New Zealand food is a whole new world just waiting to be discovered.

Caroline Hennessy

Useful links:
www.cuisine.co.nz
www.savournewzealand.com
www.avocado-oil.co.nz
www.eightmoonsaffron.com