I currently have few mums. I have my actual mother and then I have Queen Viv who always tells me off for not keeping a tidier house much like a mum does, M who is mum-like and my adopted mum Barbara from Barbara Bakes. Barbara is an excellent mum as she is always encouraging and never nags me to clean my house (although that may be because she has never seen it).
I tried to convince Queen Viv that I am actually a very tidy person and that it was a constant battle with Mr NQN’s love of messiness. She was suspicious until she saw my fridge. My fridge is perfectly ordered and stacked.. It’s like a little microcosm of my ideal world. Looking at a fully stocked and neat fridge makes me happy and it is one area where Mr NQN will not intrude and throw his dirty socks or pile up his sailing or bike equipment. Unless of course he is going to get a drink out of the fridge which means that he will of course drink straight from the bottle. I’ve given up holding out a glass for him. And remind me to tell you about his “pants bombs” one day…
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Warning: this post contains some graphic food! 
” Get your Mountain Oysters!”
“And what is your purpose for visiting New Zealand today?” the Christchurch immigration officer asks me when checking my immigration form. “To visit the Hokitika Wild Foods Festival” I answer. She laughs “Ahh okaaay. Well good luck! I wouldn’t eat half that stuff” and waves us through.
The Startled Worm Cafe-featuring earthworms among others!
The Stream Larvae stall
Shark anyone?
Our trip to New Zealand was almost a year in the making which is a long time for a person like me who has very little patience. Mr NQN and I were being hosted by the lovely people at Tourism New Zealand and the event that I really wanted to go to was the Wild Food Festival held in March each year thereby necessitating the year long wait. It was something that we had heard of on our last visit where we had heard that all sorts of weird and wonderful things were being served there. A few days before I find myself looking up their website to see what I am to face. I find myself googling “What is punga?” and “What are huhu grubs?”. There are also larvae, worm truffles, mountain oysters (aka sheep’s testicles), moonshine, stag meat patties, mutton birds, paua, locusts and grasshoppers but then there is “safer” fare like shark, venison, wild boar and whitebait.
The bugs on offer
From 10am-5:30pm this sunny Saturday, the small town of Hokitika on the West Coast of the South Island, they will welcome just under 15,000 visitors to this one spot. Parties are encouraged with posters advertising “bring your party to our party” and dressing up is encouraged as we discover. The festival has attracted a lot of media attention in the past and has been featured in Playboy magazine (who claimed that the emu shells sold there were an aphrodisiac), The Amazing Race and features in Frommers Top 300 events in the world snaring second place 2 years ago (only pipped by Italy’s Slow food Festival). It pumps $2 million into the local economy and serves up an enormous range of food. One year they served up 10,000 Whitebait patties which is a South Island speciality and this year 300kg of whitebait was caught for the festival.
Pukeko (swamp hen) skewer
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When new words enter my vocabulary, usually as foreign language names by way of a menu, I’m usually unsure how to pronounce them. I remember the first time a friend and I went out to lunch when we were teenagers and there was a debate as to how to pronounce foccacia. My friend ordered it and pronounced it correctly but then the waitress corrected her. “It’s fukachiya” she said butchering the word in her broad Aussie accent. My friend was suitably chastised and mumbled “Yes that one please” and the waitress flounced off in the incorrectly superior knowledge that she really knew how to pronounce it. Of course my friend was right after all but not after we had to consult people i.e. our Italian friends to see how it was really pronounced should we ever be condescended to again.
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“Oh I know just the place for us” Queen Viv intoned authoritatively to me. I know she knows exactly what I like so at times like these I’m happy to give up eating location decisions to Queen Viv. When I had told her that I wanted to go to the Berkelouw Books Cafe on Oxford Street in Paddington she told me that an even nicer one existed in Newtown. And when she told me it involved stuffed vintage leather lounges I was even more sold.
We walk through the bookstore (which is always a good place for last minute gifts as they do free gift wrapping – many a time my derriere has been saved by them) and upstairs and stake our claim on a leather lounge. I feel like something savoury as I’ve missed out on lunch whereas Queen Viv feels like something sweet so we get a bit of each and share it. As I’m ordering an iced coffee comes out and it looks inviting so I order one of those too.
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I’ve mentioned my readers umpteen numbers of times. I love how you send me fantastic recipe suggestions and places to eat. One reader Stefania emailed me recently with a recipe suggestion for a No Knead bread. The recipe is by Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery and Co Pizzeria and addresses one of my biggest problems pre Kitchenaid – the inability to knead dough. I’ve never been able to knead dough properly-my arms just aren’t built for it although they are very good at carrying bags of shopping and dropping things and taking doors off hinges (accidentally of course, I can be freakily strong at the most inappropriate times).
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