New Zealand cuisine

Many of you asked us after our holiday here in January 2005 what the food is like, what kind of cuisine does New Zealand boast. We didn’t really know what to say, I mean, we don’t focus a lot of our holiday time on eating cuisine. You may recall we are Chipotle lovers—not very discerning restaurant-goers who enjoy several courses with all sorts of delicacies. When we travel, we eat at the grocery store or the bakery, one or the other.

To answer many of you we said there was a variety of foods from all ethnicities pretty much across the entire country: Indian, Thai, Chinese, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, McDonalds (is this classified as American?), etc. There is no: “let’s have some New Zealand for dinner tonight.” You’d think, lamb or seafood, but not really (apparently they export the best of both and those of us at home get the crappy leftovers).

There is one thing, though, that is exclusively New Zealand and EVERYWHERE (if I was being clever like my step-father Richard, I’d say ubiquitous, his favorite word).

PIES. PIES PIES and more PIES. Not homemade 8” fruit pies, but little mini pot-pies, at least that’s what they were called when I was a kid. They are about 2.5-3 inches in diameter, with about ½ thick dough all around the outside and the fillings vary but are pretty much along some variation of mince (meat), potato, steak, bacon and egg, ham and cheese, vegetarian, chicken, curried flavored meats, etc. or all of those combined together. On the front page of the local community paper, an advertisement for pies.

Some people create customized pies, like My Pie (http://www.mypie.co.nz/). I took this photo today at the Saturday market where they exhibit and sell their pies. They make customized pies like Thai coconut and chicken, minted lamb and pea, wild venison (which isn’t really wild if you’ve seen one of our earliest posts) and red wine, wild pork (guessing they aren’t wild either) and cider, Italian wild hare, and Windsor blue and kumara.

This last one I had for lunch today—my third pie since moving to New Zealand. Kumara is the New Zealand word for sweet potato. The pie was a mixture of kumara, boiled small onions and a touch of blue cheese. It was quite good, but can you say . . .

Carbohydrates galore?? I bet you can! Who cares, say the kiwis, we will eat our pies anytime, any place. We eat them for breakfast because we can buy them frozen at the store and heat them up before work.

We will visit the local bakery for lunch and have a pie during our mid-day break.

When I go to fill up for gasoline, I can grab myself a pie at the Mobil station.

And when I shop at the grocery store, the bakery counter is half full of breads, rolls, and sweets, and the other half is full of pies for take away and pies for eating right on site.

When we first arrived, we got our hands on a few pies and they were very, very yummy. But, we said, only once per week, they look so high in fat and grease and carbs, I’d add a third cheek to my ass. Turns out I’ve only had 3 so far and that’s fine. Don has maybe one every other week, if that. But folks here eat them every day all the time; there are news stories and commercials galore. So that means New Zealand indeed has an official cuisine: the pie.