And how fitting and serendipitous it is that we can complete our culinary world tour of the alphabet as the calendar year is drawing to a close.
This one’s mine, and I chose New Zealand as our foodie destination (sadly without Lianne, who moved north to Scotland last month).
I hope you will excuse the slight fudging of letters, but the only genuine Z countries are Zambia and Zimbabwe, and as we’ve recently ‘visited’ a number of African countries, I wanted to go elsewhere.
So: When delving into the NZ food culture, I found a mix of native, Maori tradition, and a layer of heavy colonial British influence, in both methods and ingredients (Sheep are definitely not indigenous!).
I did originally want to go for more Maori food, but, unsurprisingly perhaps, could not find many of the ingredients that would require. Modern Kiwi it is, then!
So what do Kiwis (the people, not the birds) like to eat?
Lots of lamb and root veg, as it turns out, and fresh seafood – as expected of an island nation.
I found this terrific blog: Our Big Escape which offers a handy list of 27 recipes for typical Kiwi dishes, and picked a few which sounded fun, doable and festive.
The main course was easy to choose and very straightforward to make: Roast Lamb Shoulder with potatoes and sweet potato (locally known as kumara) – perfect for this time of year (November winter). This basically entailed wedging garlic & rosemary into slits made into the flesh, and plonking that in the oven for a couple of hours with chunks of root veg and onion, and Hey Presto! (only overcooking could have ruined it).
The aroma which soon filled my flat was fabulous, and it turned out beautifully.
To balance this heavy dish, I picked a couple of all-seafood appetisers: super simple Scallops, and Whitebait Fritters.
The scallops (Coqui Saint Jacques) were genuinely super easy to make: briefly fried in olive oil with chopped parsley & thyme, white wine, and salt & pepper. And they were delicious – to everyone but Bernhard, who harbours an inexplicable animosity toward these dainty morsels. Go figure.
On the impact/effort ratio, easily one of the best dishes I’d ever made.
The whitebait fritters did present a bit of an issue: Whitebait are literally Small Fry – very young, small fish, scooped up from the shallow water where they swim in tight schools. I think the fry available in New Zealand is much smaller than what I found here in London, UK, as the recipe simply says to mix the whitebait with whisked egg & chopped herbs, and make those into flat, roundish fritters in hot oil (check out the pic in the recipe).
But the whitebait I got where far too big and chunky for that.
So what Bernhard, to whom I delegated this dish, did, was brilliant and very in tune with his Austrian heritage: rather than chop the fish, he coated them first in flour, then in the egg & herb mix – which created tiny, fishy Schnitzels in the pan!
Served immediately, with a squeeze of lemon juice, these were simply magical:
Now, originally that was all I was going to serve (on the savoury side); but while the Lamb was slowly roasting, I had time to consider… all these dishes are so easy to make, I could make another… be a bit more ambitious (Bernhard says I’m trying to compete with Idit’s elaborate feasts; I neither confirm nor deny).
Anyway. I did ‘happen to have’ the ingredients for another sea-based starter: Salmon & Chive Muffins, and the oven was already hot… So I made these, too (despite B’s protest, who worried that would upset the roasting lamb. It didn’t mind):
And I’m glad I did! They were savoury and satisfying, and as there was (duh) far too much food, our respective offspring enjoyed those we couldn’t eat.
Now, dessert.
The aforementioned blog listed a number of baked sweets, which would have all gone down well with a hot cuppa. But the one which caught my eye was the Lolly Cake, which sounded a lot like a large, log version of the chocolate balls my friends and I used to make quite often in my schooldays; This basically involved bashing biscuits into crumbs, mixing that with melted chocolate & milk and rolling the mix into balls, and in desiccated coconut to coat.
The Kiwi version, also delegated here to Bernhard, added condensed milk to the mix, and chopped foam sweets (the ‘lollies’ in the cake). These colourful sweets gave the slices a fun marbled look, but they were so sweet… I’m very glad I also served sliced fresh kiwi fruit, as the tartness of the kiwis made this obscenely sweet cake just about palatable.
Naturally, we accompanied all this food with really excellent Kiwi white wine (Cabernet Sauvignon), and an all-Kiwi classics playlist from Spotify
So this concludes our global culinary tour of the alphabet – eating the world from A to Z!
It took us nearly four years (!!), with 26 letters to cover, the Covid lockdowns grounding us for a while, and everybody trying to make this a priority in our already full schedules.
It was a wonderful ride, cooking and eating dishes we would probably never have attempted otherwise, and all with the best bunch of people you could wish for.
So… is this it?
No. we’re not gonna stop, but we are going to change things up: rather than go again through the countries of the globe, we are going to go alphabetically through THEMES!
Idit gave us a taste for it, with her Monaco / Casino Royal dinner, Dorrotya pitched in with her notorious Quarantine dinner, and this now feels like a very exciting prospect.
So next month we’ll reconvene at Dorottya’s, where she will serve an A dinner, with a yet undisclosed theme… I can’t wait to see what that will be!
Until then: Happy New Year everyone!!!
