Anger Burger

We bought this soda because it had weird syntax (more on that in a moment) and because it was anti-American and that makes me giggle.  But!  I have a piece of advice: if you are going to trash on an American product, I recommend that your product doesn’t taste like ass.

Anyway, the ad copy in question reads:

“Illicit cola is made right here in New Zealand.  It may taste as good your favorite cola, but we’ve taken out the cheesy American culture and replaced it with good old fashioned kiwi attitude.”

Wait.  It may taste as good?  I originally thought it read “It may not taste as good as your favorite cola,” which I thought was hilarious.  But then I reread it as though it was sort of implying but not committing to tasting as good as Coke, and something about it irritated me.

And!  I almost feel patriotic here, but when I finally read it as it should have been (as in, “It tastes as good as your favorite soda and we’ve taken out the cheesy American culture”) I was totally irritated.

Initially I thought I was irritated because rebelling against “American culture” is a too fine a point — American advertising dominates the world ad scene, but for some legitimate reasons.  For example: Coca-Cola is an American product.  On another hand, if there’s any one brand that has since totally transcended its origins and gone global, is Coca-Cola.  The advertising for Coca-Cola in New Zealand is  handled by an ad agency in either Auckland or Sydney and while I can’t say with authority what their goal is (i.e., “Emulate America!”), it seems likely they attempt to specifically market towards Kiwis and not Americans.  Which is all to say: that American culture you’re rebelling against?  Probably not American.

Secondly, Illicit’s entire ad approach is old.  The “rebellion” product thing has been thoroughly played out by energy drink companies for quite some time now, and that’s just to limit it to beverages.  And rebelling against what?  Just American products?  If that’s the case, why emulate it and renounce it at the same time?  Hell, it even acknowledges that Coca-Cola is your favorite soda and only then tries to establish itself as “as good”.  From an advertising standpoint, that’s pretty weak.  Besides, New Zealand already has a few kiwiana beverages (such as L&P) (which, to be fair, made me gag) (what, it tastes like Pledge furniture polish smells) (AND! Irony! Is now made by Coca-Cola).

Lastly, and most sadly, Illicit tastes bad.  It was a thin, oversweet liquid with a distinctly medicinal flavor. The last line on the bottle is “Take a big dirty gulp of Illicit and get amongst it!”

As a quick check-in with my Crohnie Homies (haaaaay) I wanted to write a note on traveling with Crohn’s disease.

To bring everyone up to speed, Crohn’s disease has a lot of potential problems, one of which is the effect of stress on a diseased intestine.  And guess what!  It totally makes you have diarrhea.  There’s no fancy way to put it.  It’s physically painful, it’s exhausting and all the stress of travel is amplified by needing access to a restroom.  Imagine trying to stand in line for customs waiting for a critical connecting flight when you have to stop what you’re doing, get out of line and drag everything to the toilet.  Happy Vacation!

Much of the time I’ve adopted a “Well, whatever,” attitude.  It sounds very esoteric, but it’s true: even though I am a world-class worrier, there are certain things that I’ve learned to accept the hard way, such as:  I have to use the rest room when I have to.  The alternative is shitting myself in public — and this is just the dramatic side.  The less dramatic side is that when I am in the midst of a Crohn’s attack, I can think of little else.  My brain shuts down.  No amount of caffeine will bring it around to alertness.  The pain is workable but very, very insistent; I can think of little else to compare it to.  Rather like a very loud, cacophonous noise in the background, where you have spats of concentration, yes, yes, you nod while someone is speaking to you, but then it all piledrives up again and you’re lost in sensation.  Sometimes I think my trips to the bathroom are as much to reorder my brain as to void my bowels¹.

A Crohnie of mine remarked that I was very brave to travel with Crohn’s disease and I felt oddly deflated, like I’d been caught in a lie.  I’m not brave while I’m doing it.  I’m wondering what the hell is the matter with me to keep doing this to myself, but like so many things, after it gets better I just forget it was bad.  Even feeling like I was going to die at the top of Mauna Kea (I’ll tell you that story another time) has become a comedic interlude.  The secret ingredient here is humor.   You can plan ahead and fret all you want, but if you take it all too seriously it is doomed before it has started.  And believe me, I know you can’t just tell someone to not take it all too seriously.  But you can keep reminding yourself that this is the way its going to be, and you’re powerless to it.  Surrender.  Stop fighting.  And all of a sudden it begins to seem rather absurd, and absurdity is the gateway to all kinds of greatness.

On a practical level, you probably already know what to do, but it’s nice to have a reminder.

• Try and plan ahead as much as you can.  Better to have long layovers in airports than short ones (in particular pay attention to international flights that try and book a subsequent domestic transfer with almost no layover — reschedule that bitch!).

• Bring babywipes with you, they make everything a little easier.

• Go to the lavatory on the airplane even if you don’t have to go (I’m always surprised at how well-trained my body is).

• Bring snacks with you.  This is critical, for people with Crohn’s and those without.  If you’re like me then you find yourself at the airport offended that they’re charging $8 for a whole-grain bagel you can’t even eat.  Luckily you brought individually wrapped cheese slices!  Go you!

• If you haven’t already talked to your doctor about self-dosing with prednisone to get yourself out of a sticky situation, do so NOW.  Twice in my life this self-dosing has saved my ass (literally!  ha!) from a hospitalization, but prednisone is a potentially dangerous medication and only you and your doctor can make this arrangement together (just remember, no matter what you do: taper down).

• Don’t be above taking an anti-anxiety medication.  If flying is so nerve-wracking to you that it triggers an attack, for Buddha’s sake, take something ahead of time.

• If it makes you feel better, prepare for a worst-case scenario.  It’s odd how much this helps for all kinds of things.  Is pooing your pants the worst thing that can happen?  Pack a clean pair of underpants and a small, light crinkle skirt (I don’t know what to tell you, boys) in your handbag and at the very least you’ll be able to change out of your clothes and appear normal again quickly.

• Exhaustion will be an issue, so try and plan accordingly.  Do not schedule anything for your first day.  Do not.  DON’T.  And I mean your whole first day, not just the travel day.  The first whole day is just for drinking hot beverages and taking short walks around wherever you are.  THAT IS IT.  Trust me on this one.

Anyone else want to add anything?  I know there are a fair amount of readers finding this website by Googling Crohn’s questions – any of you want to weigh in?

¹ I apologize for writing “void my bowels” in a food blog, but you should have seen it coming.

I’ve been writing exactly 100% less than I expected to, and for that I apologize.  A small army of reasons is at my call, but I’ll spare you.

Should you be bored — and I would be if I were you — I recommend you head over to Project Waldo, which I’m adding to my link list.  It’s a new site started by Nathaniel Simpson, who is taking a sabbatical from doing game concept art in order to teach himself how to make comics.  The caveat?  His comic art is the most fucking amazing, complicated, beautiful art I’ve seen in recent years.  I’m a devoted fan of Moebius and Enki Bilal and Simpson is like some fucked up beautiful linework baby of the two.  I’m also addicted to watching other artists’ process, and Simpson is logging his in spades.  It’s slow going, but add it to your feed and enjoy your hard work.

I started out wanting to write something silly about food (which I will get to later today) but I first I want to share thoughts about a television series airing here in NZ called “Kill It, Cook It, Eat It”.  The program is filmed in the UK and as you can probably infer from the title, about the entire process of livestock and the culture of eating meat. Specifically, each episode focuses on a particular breed of animal and precisely how it is processed, from raising it to eating it.  There is a live audience on set that watches the process through a glass wall, and then retreats to a studio to eat the animal they’ve just seen slaughtered (they aren’t required to, it’s not Fear Factor).

The program itself is so incredibly well done that I wanted to write about it even though I doubt it will be seen by my American readers.  There’s a lot that has been written about this television show, much of what you’d expect.  The primary complaint is that the abattoir around which the show has been built is simply too sanitary. The butchers (is the crew that kills the animal called a butcher?) themselves are proud, skilled and respectful of the animals they are killing.  Indeed, the conditions are pristine.  However, I’m not certain that showing a repugnant, horror-house abattoir is the way to bring people back into a critical connection with their food, just as I am not certain those gruesome dead fetus posters are an effective way to bully women into keeping babies they can’t raise.

In the episode I watched, one vegetarian sat in another room and wept during the killing, later stating that the experience only confirmed her convictions.  She was treated with compassion, but I had to wonder what the fuck she thought was going to happen.  Another large man who bragged he was a meat-lover later found he couldn’t eat, saying that he wasn’t sure if he’d ever recover from witnessing an animal having its throat slashed.  I felt for him, because I imagine many meatitarians think they are at peace with the act of killing but have never been able to test that belief.  I suppose that was the point of the show.  Others eagerly ate, having nothing much to say at all.

Having watched the entire process of killing a lamb with them, I think I’m in the average by saying: it wasn’t fun to watch, but I’ll cook lamb again without a second thought.  I feel like an omnivore, not just morally, but physically as well.  My body responds to meat in a clearly different manner than it does to vegetables, and even further still in a different way to fish.  My body looooves fish.  I can feel it converting to energy and processing easily.  Could I live without meat?  Absolutely.  Could I live without fish?  Sure, but I wouldn’t want to.

Anyhow, should anyone have a chance to watch the show, I’d like to hear opinions on it.  Is it just another page in the whitewashing of the meat industry, or is it a positive social experiment with an end result of a more thoughtful relationship with food?  And how many posh words can I string together to make this sound interesting?

It’s rather silly to go to New Zealand from America and expect that everything will be exotic and foreign — after all, even the language is the same — but something more subtle and equally bizarre does happen.  New Zealand is a mirror-world, Bizarro-America, where the cars are on the wrong side of the road, the units of measurement are wrong and everything is slightly smaller than you’re familiar with.  Except for the kiwis.

Look at that monster!  What the hell?!  No joke, this kiwi is at least twice as large as one largest ones we get in the US, and both texture and flavor doesn’t suffer from the size.  Not that anyone is coming here for facts or anything, it’s interesting to note that kiwifruit are berries and are originally from China.  They were called Chinese Gooseberries until the 1950′s, when they were renamed to appeal to foreigners – and!  Perhaps best of all, they were originally renamed melonettes.  HA!  Oh man.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been doing my best to keep my meals locally-themed this last week, which is on a practical level totally silly.  New Zealanders eat very globally.  If you Google “traditional NZ recipes” or some variation thereof, you don’t get very far before the döner kebab, nasi goreng and butter chicken start showing up.  Hmm, I wonder what happens when you Google “traditional American recipes”… yep, as I suspected.  Italian, Mexican and Indian within the first two pages.

Anyway, there was one particular Kiwi recipe that came up with regularity: Apricot Chicken.  I disregarded it as a recent fad until I happened upon a rather terrible Australian television show called “4 Ingredients”¹ wherein one of the hosts remarked loving Apricot Chicken when she was a child. Well then.  Further research revealed that indeed, this was a longtime beloved national dish!  I’ll be damned.

Normally I don’t cook with packets or prepared products, but the packet mixes in NZ are of high quality and don’t include any nasty ingredients.  Ultimately you don’t even have to use the soup mix, but I feel it defeats the purpose of the dish a little if you exclude it.  Most Apricot Chicken recipes had nothing but chicken and onion as the primary ingredient, but a few had kumara (sweet potato) and I thought, “That sounds Kiwi!”  until right before I started cooking when I realized I didn’t really want a pile of starch on top of a pile of starch for dinner.  A carrot went in instead.

Lastly, the canned apricots in NZ are of a higher quality than those in the US, which tend to be quite mushy and bland.  Were I to make Apricot Chicken again, I would use either fresh or dried apricots rather than canned, add more vegetables and, well… probably make sweet and sour instead.  However, those of you that can live without the sour?  Will probably appreciate Apricot Chicken.

Kiwi Apricot Chicken
serves two fatties or four picky whiny babies

1 lb. of boned, skinless chicken thighs cut into large bite-size pieces
1 small onion, diced
1 Tbls. butter

1 packet onion soup mix*
1 C. apricot nectar + a little more to thin the sauce if needed
1 sweet potato or 1 large carrot or none all, but I worry about your fiber intake
1 C. chopped apricots (fresh or dried) chopped
salt
pepper
cooked rice to serve with

• In a large saute pan (large enough to put all the ingredients into eventually) quickly brown the chicken pieces on the butter and remove to a plate.  Fry the onion on medium-high in the brown bits in the pan until quickly, nicely browned.
• Mix the onion soup packet together with the apricot nectar.
• Return the chicken to the onions in the pan and add the vegetables, apricots and apricot/soup mixture.  Bring to a simmer, cover and allow to cook for 1 hour, or until the chicken is tender and the sauce is thick.  Keep an eye on the whole thing during the hour, though, because it’ll in all likelihood get too thick, especially if you used dried apricots.  If it seems too thick, stir in more nectar a little splash at a time.  Serve with rice.

* If you’re totally against using onion soup packets, you can just whisk in a little corn starch near the end of the cooking process, or leave the lid off during cooking and let the apricot nectar really reduce down into a rich sauce.  But this is supposed to be one of those lazy meals where you get everything in the pan in under 15 minutes, leave it to cook, and come back and eat an hour later.  You should be able to scream at your kids while cooking this meal.  Or cook it drunk.  Or both.

Also of note: I added  about a tablespoon of white wine vinegar and a healthy pile of chopped fresh rosemary at the end of the cooking and I feel like it contributed greatly to the final product.

¹“The cooking show that helps to get you out of the kitchen” is the grimmest cooking show headline I’ve ever seen.  It’s like a car show called “4 Left Turns; the driving show that helps get you out of the car.”

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.

Something I keep forgetting to discuss is my curious bad luck with Air New Zealand.  They are consistently rated among the top airlines for a whole array of things (punctuality, food, etc.) and yet, somehow two of the three flights I’ve taken with them have had a major minor plane malfunction occur.  The first was on my return from Auckland to Los Angeles in 2005.  Our plane was badly delayed for takeoff due to (get ready!) the failure of an engine.  It just wouldn’t start, and all within my delighted eyesight at the Auckland airport.  The workers swarmed over one of the engines with carts and tools and duct tape¹. After an hour the engine started and we all boarded on the plane as though nothing catastrophic had happened.

Until about an hour into the flight, at which point a major chunk of the plane’s electrical system went down.  I happened to be sitting next to the panel that housed the plane’s breakers, and watched as a pilot came back and helped a flight attendant throw the electrical to try and reboot the system.  When it didn’t work they made the announcement that since none of the outages affected the plane’s ability to fly, we’d carry on.   Fine by me, even though it meant I had to sit in darkness.  About an hour after that, a passenger who was fairly actively dying of cancer began to have seizures.  Oh yes, I said that.  Apparently the woman essentially smuggled herself onto the plane, since the airlines have strict rules about passengers with unusual medical needs having to register with them before flight.  I was sitting near enough to hear the entire story, which basically was: she wanted to get to America to be with family before she died thought it would just be okay if she laid down in the floorboards (!) during the flight.  The attendants refused, telling her that if she were incapable of sitting in her seat we’d have to turn the plane around and remove her.  She informed them should could sit just fine.  An hour later she had a seizure, requiring that oh-so Hollywood of requests “Is there a medical professional onboard the plane?  We seem to have a passenger who could use some attention” from the pilot.  There were two ER nurses onboard, each of whom couldn’t decide if she needed immediate attention.  Upon learning that the closest airstrip for said attention would be in Guam, the nurses decided to heavily sedate the passenger with a morphine drip (which they have on planes!!!) (I then faked a seizure but got no attention) and continue on.  We did, she was doped the entire flight, and when we landed she had to be removed via ambulance.  Dramz!

So while the medical drama distracted me from the mechanical drama, it all came back to me this last flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, almost five years later.  About two hours into our flight I started to feel quite warm.  Normally I find these flights rather frigid and had prepared myself with a sweatshirt, the plane’s blanket and an extra pillow.  However, I was sweating like a zookeeper.  I confirmed with Mike: this plane was hot and getting hotter.  Phew!  Eventually we snagged one of the attendants who sort of grudgingly admitted: “Oh yes, the environment is out in this section of the plane, we’re terribly sorry.  But we’ve turned up the AC in the fore and aft to try to cool it down.”  Then, as if in some clumsy bid for sympathy, he said, “You can imagine, they’re quite chilled.”  I can only imagine it, jackass, because it’s almost 90° in an enclosed tin can I can’t move around in².

Add to that the curious fact that not one but three children on the flight were in the throes a horrific flu that required them to scream and cough until they puked - repeatedly – and then you have a pretty unpleasant flight.  I got maybe three hours of sleep, snatched only by uncomfortably propping myself against Mike and removing my shoes and socks so that I could press my feet against the cool metal bars under the seat.  By the time we landed an attendant came around to apologize personally to each of the passengers, holding a manifest so he could address us by name (well, not us – for some reason he didn’t bother with Mike and I) and give us a 1/2 hour international calling card as apology.  As apologies for near-intolerable conditions go, 30 minutes on a telephone is pretty weak.  I’m certain they were counting on what eventually occured: we were so thrilled to get off the damn plane that we ran off without looking back.

Moving on!

Kiwis love potato chips as much as any civilized person, and its always a pleasure to see flavors other than cheese or BBQ.  One of the Kiwi flavors we Americans have never had a chance to love is chicken.  Each brand of chip has a chicken flavor, which of course means I was too tired and out of it to get any.  I will soon, I promise.  Instead I got mince pie and tomato sauce!

Also known as meatpie and ketchup.  A long while back I remember getting “steak” chips somewhere in the US and not liking them very much.  If I recall, they tasted like MSG and little else.  These meatpie chips happily tasted primarily of ketchup – in fact, I didn’t detect any thing that might be considered ‘meatpie’ in there at all.  Still, ketchup is an unsurprisingly good flavor for potato chips and America should get its goddamn act together.  Especially Kiwi ketchup, which has a stronger clove and sugar note than American ketchup.

Later, Mike and I drove back into Plimmerton for more fish and chips.

This time around I got a photo of how lovely the package looks (with a can of Coke for scale).  No plastic bag, no styrofoam, just newsprint, double-wrapped.  It’s heavy and fragrant and stays hot for a unexpectedly long while.

I can’t tell you enough how much I adore this fish.  The batter tastes precisely like a sugarless doughnut, the exterior is that addicting combination of chewy and crispy, and the fish inside is as flaky and fresh as can be.  And the kumara (sweet potato) chips?  My god.  A medal to the woman who makes these, if not only because she’s not afraid of salt.  Fear not the salt.  Salt is your friend.  Dear, dear salt.  Sigh.

¹ True, but also an exaggeration.  There is a particular kind of tape used on airplanes that looks like duct tape from afar but is much, much stronger.  It’s commonly used to increase strength in areas that are suspicious but not broken.  It sounds horrific, but since the tape is arguably as strong as a metal weld and takes less skill to apply, I’d just as soon they taped that damn thing up whenever they felt like it.  There are a few highly watched videos on YouTube of a workers taping stuff, much to the terror of the passenger filming the event.

²We also had a classic crazy fellow passenger experience – we had the window and middle seats, so the aisle seat was a woman that had (I hope) taken a sedative because she was essentially unwakable when we needed to get out and pee about 5 hours later.  When we did finally wake her — and I’m not exaggerating here, we had to shake and yell in her ear to wake her, enough that we woke passengers in other seats — she was a grumpy cunt about it.  She said sarcastically, “Well, if you have to go, I guess,” (yes, I fucking have to go, I’ve been chugging water because it’s 90 fucking degrees in here)  and then acted like removing her blanket and unbuckling her seatbelt were the most complicated thing she had ever done — and then stepped down the aisle in the direction the restrooms were, so that I had to say, “If you stand there,” (pointing at the other side) “we won’t have to try and get by you,” to which she sort of drunkenly glared.

This trip has been a real eye-opener for me: I’m a moron.  What I thought was soggy travel brain is clearly something deeper.  I fear I have developed a serious case of Crohn’s Brain.

Anyone with a chronic illness knows what I’m talking about, and even those of you with one of those lingering flus that leave you feeling 100 I.Q. points short knows precisely what I’m talking about.  There’s only so much energy the body can devote to one thing, and the first part of the body to get the pink slip is the higher brain function.  Oh sure, we keep the automatic breathing and the heart beating and a little bit of the fight or flight, but the navigation and the remembering how to use the TV remote skills?  Total loss.  It’s rather humbling to realize how short of a full scoop of chips¹ one is, and I’m repeatedly made thankful that I have Mike with me and that we can stay at a friends house.  It makes things much, much easier.

But let’s talk about better things.  First, a breakfast of creamed mushrooms over toast.  Its rather a thing here, the mushrooms over toast, and I found it to be an ideal breakfast.  Not too heavy but still substantial.  This one claimed to be in a port wine reduction cream sauce, but all I tasted was cream.  It was exactly as though one had made a thick gravy of cream of mushroom soup (imagine!) and then served it over sauteed mushrooms and thick slices of chewy bread.  In fact, it’s not “as though” at all, it is is.

We stopped by a bulk grocer and I renewed my appreciation for the lewd catcall “NICE BISCUITS!” which of course Mike then endured for the remainder of the day.  As an aside, there was a kind of Arnott’s biscuit I was addicted to about five years ago, from their Snack Right line.  You can still get the sultana (raisin) version, but they used to make a tropical flavor with dried passionfruit and I believe mango in it and I must have eaten a dozen packs back in the day.  No such danger now, as they appear to have discontinued them. I’ll have to make do with several pounds of  the world’s best Cadbury chocolate instead.

But at least I can get De Winkel yogurt.  Again, five years ago there was a passionfruit and feijoa flavor that I must have eaten gallons of, but it doesn’t seem to be an available flavor anymore.  Still, rhubarb!  I love rhubarb and it’s thrilling to be in a country that likes it almost as much as me.  New Zealand yogurt tends to be less sweet than US yogurt, which is a tremendous improvement if you ask me, and it is as popular as a topping for pastry as whipping cream is.  Our host, Marika, passionately extolled the singular delights of having a slice of lemon cake with a hearty scoop of rich, unflavored yogurt on the side and I almost fainted.

This sweet fellow here makes me happy, and not just because it looks like Mr. Burns when he was an alien.  The real reason is because they are still called Eskimos.  Earlier this year, an Inuit visiting New Zealand was offended and complained to the parent company, Pascall.  My first reaction was, thank god this happens in other countries.  My second reaction was, well yeah, I think it might be time to rename them.  When a native peoples come forward and says, “Hi, your name for us?  Is not our name for us,” is the point where you have to go, “Okay, sorry.”  And my final reaction is, maybe everyone should just let it go.  I strongly feel that the longer you allow words to have power, the longer you’re allowing them to hurt (or help) you.  The Inuit may not have forgotten the insult of being called Eskimo, but the practical matter is that the rest of us have.  In New Zealand you have a whole nation of people to whom asking “Fancy an Eskimo?” will result in them holding out their hand for a piece of candy.  It’s not a happy medium, but it’s a medium, and sometimes that’s all you can ask for.

¹Little bit of Kiwiana for you there.  Chips are, of course, french fries and in real chip shops you get either a whole or a half scoop (and lots of places won’t serve a half scoop) serving.

It feels 200% different to be in another country with a car and a local.  Five years ago I was 25, alone, and for the most part just winging it.  I was staying in Wellington, a city uniquely friendly to travelers and foot-traffic, but I was 10,000 miles away from home and celebrating Christmas and New Years with near-total strangers.  Still, it was formative and critically important in my development as an adult; I don’t think you can know yourself well at all until you’ve traveled alone.

Compare this to arriving, getting into a car, having a local say, “Want to eat the best fish and chips around?” and then be off for it, and, well, there is no comparison.  It feels a little like cheating.  Scrumptious, scrumptious cheating.

Mike ‘s “dinner” portion of fish, which translated from Kiwi means “dinner plate sized fillet”.

But right she was, and I’m here to tell you: Americans?  We rarely do fish and chips right, and I’ve even bragged about places.    Plimmerton Fish Supply in (surprise!) Plimmerton soundly kicked the asses of any chips places I’ve been to in the last few years.  I mean, brutally murdered the asses of any other chips places.  The fish was incredibly fresh and flaky with a disgustingly delightful batter that tasted like a savory doughnut.  They do their frying in 100% rice bran oil, which is not only a relatively healthy oil, but has almost no real flavor of its own.

I ordered kumara (what locals call sweet potato) instead of potato chips and moaned my way through the pile.  They were, in a word, fuckingdelicious. I didn’t eat a drop of ketchup or tartar with my meal, it was so good.  Also up there, to the upper left of the kumara chips, was a single battered mussel ordered ala carte.  It was mediocre — oversized mussels can be hard to eat, and this one was no exception.  Normally I really like mussels and New Zealand is home to some of the best in the world, but if you can’t bite through a piece it takes a little bit of the fun out of eating.  I’ll try their oysters next time.  The cole slaw was also excellent, but aggravated my Crohn’s the next day enough that I won’t be risking it again.

Another attempt was made at a meat pie, this time a lamb curry and clearly inferior to yesterday’s lovely handmade specimens.  However, still fantastic.  Still buttery flaky pastry, still well-flavored meat and gravy.  This one suffered only in filling texture, being faintly too gelatinous to respect entirely.  And yet another reason to appreciate having Mike along: since we can share meatpies, I can sample twice as many.

And, quickly now before I am off to do something else: some hot nutz for your pleasure.

“Give me a flagon of your finest ale, and I want it served by a Hobbit!”

And that, folks, is why I wanted Mike to come along this trip with me.  The instigator was a rather bitchy bitch of a barista who disgustedly snapped at me that they didn’t accept credit cards and moreover that “hardly anyone” in NZ accepted credit cards and that I had “better start carrying cash.”  This is, of course, patently bullshit.

The best part was that my friend Marika, also an American by birth but as of late a resident Kiwi, had just moments before used her card to pay for her coffee.  And further better yet, I was staring directly at the credit card reader which was modern and, apparently, functional.

Not wanting to start any trouble, I glared at her, paid with cash and went to sit down with Marika and Mike, with whom I discussed that various possibilities of her cuntiness.  Did she hate all Americans, or just us?  To help her prejudices along Mike loudly made the above statement in his best Ugly American accent.

You should know that the experience was entirely uncommon and because of this, sort of hilarious for us.  Kiwis are by nature friendly and accommodating, and the entirety of our two days had so far been grand in every way.  In fact, it had been a whirlwind of incredible food and mesmerizing countryside, despite being the worst weather in months (it was near-freezing and pissing rain when we arrived, which as of this writing has become painfully sunny) and despite a less-than-stellar plane trip (the AC stopped working on the plane, which then heated up to about 90° leading me to wonder if we were flying into the sun, because shouldn’t the plane’s natural state at that altitude be freezing?).

Immediately after arriving Marika fairly demanded I order a plate of corn fritters with egg and Hollandaise from Ruby’s Cafe in Mana.  It was without question what made me begin to feel human again, even though I’d have foggy travel-brain for another two days yet.

Later yet, a return to my beloved meatpie.  Meatpies will have to be their own story, but know this now: my mindless food of choice is without question a meatpie.  Whereas some eat happily hamburgers when left to their own devices, meatpies are my drug.  But, as I am already about two days behind reporting on our trip, we’ll let it go at that for now.