Anger Burger

If one thing can be said about New Zealand, it’s that it doesn’t fuck around with springtime.  Each day the weather swings from bone-frigid to instant-carcinoma sunlight in a matter of minutes (or, as Marika pointed out, miles) and all the while a wind screams over from the Tasman Sea that, if in the American midwest, would be setting off tornado warning sirens.   The house whistles and pops like a bonfire and last night, as Mike and I took the dogs for a walk, the clouds raced past the moon so quickly that I got the same vertigo a child gets mesmerized by a receding wave.¹ I figured it was time for chicken flavored potato chips.

I realize that isn’t a chicken.  Or a Bluebird.  And while I’m not certain New Zealand has tiny penguins the size of pickle slices, I appreciate that their graphic design is heavily mired in the early 80′s.

And how does it taste?  Well, it tastes rather like salt.  Sort of complex salt, but salt nevertheless.  At one time I did get an extra en-flavored chip and got the faintest hint of artificial chicken-broth flavor not unlike chicken Top Ramen.  It sounds bad, but to be honest, I liked it.  It was like salt, but… better.  It also helps that Bluebird chips are especially tender and brittle without breaking into glass-hard shards that tear up the roof of your mouth.

Mike and I decided to start taste-testing packaged pies, something I’d never purchased on my previous trip.  Why?  Well, why buy them cold from a store when you can get them crispy and warm from any one of a dozen local shops?  Still, what if one wanted to ah, warm one themselves in the privacy of their own home?  Of the available options, we went for the one with the most appealing graphic design, Hub.

First up: chicken, cranberry and brie.  I never order chicken pies because they almost always have white meat in them and I find white meat chicken to be both less interesting and less healthy than tofu.  Still, I’d better branch out if I’m going to be a scientist about this.  Oh, and before I continue: the packaging didn’t have any instructions on heating the pie, and while I’m an adult who can figure out how to heat a damn pie myself, I was still so shocked that I read and reread the package for several minutes.  (As a matter of record, I microwaved each pie for 1 minute, and then baked in a hot oven for about 7 minutes, until the crust was nice and crispy.)

Oh, um.  That… doesn’t look super.  It looks alright, but there’s a bit of separation to the cheese and gravy, so it appears almost curdled.  Still, it smells fantastic and as it turns out, tastes brilliant.  I can’t get entirely behind it 100% because of a lack of cranberries (there was one that I saw, at the top there, and it was so gravy-logged that it didn’t taste like anything but more gravy), but this chicken was actually rather moist and most surprisingly, strong brie flavor.  I might have to reconsider the lack of chicken pies in my pie diet.

Pepper steak, a classic.  Kiwis don’t play coy with the pepper, either.

Oh hell no.   What the fuck is that?  I’m sorry, but I’m fairly certain that is dog food.  It’s the precise texture of high-end canned doggy chow.  Again, though, it smells delicious and my mouth watered even as I attempted to photograph the least appealing product shot known to man.  And flavor?  It tasted pretty good.  It wasn’t as good as the meatpies we had the first morning here (I’ll revisit those later for a more in-depth review), but ultimately I’d still be thrilled to get one on any day in Los Angeles.

And!  I didn’t take any photos of a terrible, awful, no-good dinner I made last night.  I decided I was going to try and cook only “classic” Kiwi dishes this week, and started it off with a lamb and kumara simmer.  It was… deeply uninspiring.  I know I should be sharing my failures as well as my successes, but…  if you thought that above pie looks like dogfood, you’d laugh at the simmer.  Or gag.

¹ I say this with a specific authority: one of my earliest memories is, as a toddler, getting seashore vertigo, falling down and having my diaper/underpants fill with sand.  I don’t think you can learn to really resent your parents until they laugh while cleaning sand out of your special places.