Food in New Zealand

I love food. Part of travelling for me is experiencing countries and cultures through food; hence my goal to take some form of cooking class in every country I visit. We ended up cooking most of our meals here for two reasons: 1. Because New Zealand is a relatively expensive country to travel in (CDN is on par with the NZ dollar right now), and 2. When travelling for so long, it's nice to have some form of routine or "normal life" where we can make food that we are used to eating. Of course, when we came across good looking food though - we ate it!

My first Pavlova; see previous blog post here.

Tom's cinnamon buns

Tom's scones

Tom also made several loafs of bread but I forgot to take pictures of them.

Cafe food was REALLY good.

Fish pie

We also had a lot of venison pies and sausage rolls sold at cafe's but again forgot to take photos of these.

Green tipped mussels

Fish & chips served in old newspapers and paper

As mentioned in a previous post, we went to a Hangi where we had lamb & chicken cooked in a pit below ground.

We did eat alot of lamb too: steaks, sausages and burgers. No photos though because they were just too good.

Smoked mussels and clams

Feijoa. These are a very fragrant fruit. It tasts like a kiwi mixed with rose water and texture akin to a grape on the inside and an unripe pear on the outside.

We discovered hokey pokey ice cream, which is like a vanilla ice cream filled with little crunchy caramel bits.

Moro Gold chocolate bars (these are our new favourites!)

Coffee. Kiwi's take their coffee very seriously. Generally we found the coffee to be better here than in most cafe's in Vancouver. You could be in some small town with a population of 1000 people and the one and only cafe had great coffee, although I found that the South Island had better coffee than the North Island. Our usual: Tom would have a flat white (like a latte but the milk has a dense velvety texture) and I had a long black (a.k.a. Americano but with less water which means it was stronger and just the way I like it!)

Next food post: Singapore!