The Boil Up and the Puha

So, when we went to the Saturday market down by the water, we found a man selling bags of two kinds of green vegetables.  One was called puha.  We had never seen it before, so of course we bought it.  The big bag was only two dollars.  Almost immediately, people started asking us if we were going to have a boil up.  We are getting better at understanding the New Zealand accent, but when they start using words we don't know, we are usually at a loss.  In this case, I understood that we were being asked if we were planning on doing something mysterious with the mystery vegetable, and I could tell the right answer was, "yes, of course."  We then started getting lots of advice.  "Make sure to give them a good rub."  "You'll need pork bones."  "Two hours of boiling.  Last half hour, add some kumara and potatoes."  "Throw the puha in at the end.  Very good."

That was enough for us - we decided a boil up would be our dinner that night.  Turns out, a boil up is a traditional Maori meal.  You boil a bunch of meat and vegetables into a kind of hybrid soup-stew.  Then you eat it.  One thing that is a bit hard to describe (and I'll do a post on it later) is the role of the Maori in New Zealand.  We live in a place with many people who live in a way that honors the traditional Maori way of life.  A huge percentage of folks around here have some Maori in their family.  Most of the people approaching us at the market looked like they were likely Maori or part-Maori, though not everyone who looks Maori is Maori and not everyone who looks pakeha (non-Maori) is not Maori.  Facial tattoos are an obvious marker, but many people have tattoos and only a small number around here have the traditional tattoos that are obviously Maori.   Puha is a traditional Maori food - it is a member of the thistle family, it is often found growing as a weed in the yards around here, and it is fairly bitter.  I guess you could compare it to dandelion greens.  ("Puha!  Puha!  Got you all in check!") (No one in my family thought that was funny.  Help me out, Hillside Place.)

Pork bones are not exactly traditional, but it seems the major reason to buy them in New Zealand is for a boil up.  I found them at our local butcher.  When I asked which bones (there was a choice) I should use for a boil up, the other customer turned to me and gave me advice, as she was also making a boil up that night.  She happened to also be in the produce market next door just after I left the butcher, so she also pointed me to the right kumara.  Kumara are small sweet potatoes - the best ones are purple, of course.  I also bought potatoes, small dark brown ones that she suggested.  Between the pork bones, the potatoes, and the kumara, I was definitely setting a personal record for most food weight per dollar.  All in all, I spent 20 dollars and had some seriously dense eats.

When we got home, I got to work.  Here are the bacon bones:

Here is the bag of puha:

Here is a kumara:

Here is a suspect bacon bone.  It is strange to be in a situation where best case guess is pig tail:

Here are pots full of soon-to-be-boiling bacon bones.  I don't have a big pot, so I used two:

Boiling produced an attractive scum on top.  In retrospect, I should have removed this scum.

Here are the peeled and cut up kumara.  They were hard as rocks.

And then I peeled and added the potatoes:

Then I threw them all in the boil up:

A traditional Maori sourdough potato bread is called rewena.  We also bought this huge hunk of a loaf at the market.  It was also extremely dense.

While the potatoes and kumara boiled, I prepared the puha.

The stalks exude a natural white latex.  You can see it below.  I tasted it.  Man, it was super acrid.  That was something I regretted doing.

I removed all the stalks and then rubbed the leaves under running water.  I read if you did that, some of the bitterness of the leaves was removed.  Seemed to work, because the puha was delicious.  Here it is all together:

It was a lot of work to remove the leaves and wash them, so I didn't use all of the puha.  In fact, here is what was left - most of it:

After five minutes of boiling more, we took it out.  Here is what it looked like:

And here is the full meal with a piece of rewena next to the boil up.

In the end, we liked some of the boil up, but not all.  The puha was great and Evelyn put a bunch more into the leftovers after dinner.  I thought the kumara was amazing and I wished we had more of it.  The potatoes were good, but not too exciting.  I also boiled them too long, so they were a little soft.  The pork lent a delicious taste to the broth and to the vegetables, but the meat itself was not really to my liking.  Maybe I just don't like boiled pork parts.  I liked the rewena, though eating potato bread with potato soup was a lot of potato in one meal.  The meal was certainly filling and it was definitely thrifty.

In the end, we removed the remaining pork parts, added more puha, and put the leftovers away for another meal.  And no, we did not eat the tail.  I couldn't bring myself to do anything other than remove it from the pot and dispose of it.  Maybe next time.

Hangin' 'Round Lake Taupo

Hello, Tom here.  We spent this weekend local after a few consecutive travel weekends.  We'd always wanted to see the local Saturday market and there was a cafe on the north shore that we wanted to visit, so we did that with our Saturday.  Before we get to that though, the big news this week was....

JASPER LOST A TOOTH!  Here he is, happily showing his gap-tooth grin.

First thing we did on Saturday morning was head for the market.  It was very fun.

We bought crazy-colored carrots from Ohakune (carrot capital of New Zealand, of course - see giant carrot here), a traditional Maori bread called rewena, some fudge, and some puha (more on that later).

We also encountered a couple who had with them a couple of alpacas.  The woman of the couple was spinning the wool of the alpacas into thread right before our eyes:

We headed up to the north shore of the lake from there.  We live on the east coast, in a bay way in the northeast corner, and we'd never gone around to the north side of the lake before.  There is a well-known cafe there with an outdoor sculpture garden, so we ate a very nice breakfast there.

Evelyn was impressed with the hot chocolate.  A common accompaniment to coffee and hot chocolate around here is the small chocolate fish you see on the saucer.  It is filled with something pink that has the consistency of a Peep.  Not my favorite.

Here Aidan is outside warming his hands by the mosaic fireplace.

We ran into one of the only people I know in Taupo (this is a small place) and he told us about a walk down near Acacia Bay.  That's about where we were headed anyway, so we followed his advice and found this path entrance:

Can you spot Aidan?

The first beach we came to was very hard to walk on - many small rocks.

But the view across at the mountains was nice.

Next we came to bigger rocks to climb on:

Here is Evelyn looking across the lake at Mt. Doom, covered in snow (Sauron must be chilly):

More pretty views:

Boys, probably performing in a Beckett play:

One danger in the area is the boy-gopher.  Watch your step:

We stumbled upon this Maori carving.  Pretty scary in the jungle:

The last point we encountered had very large rocks and more nice views:

Jasper, shuffling, as he does every day:

 Aidan, challenging the gods, yet again:

Jasper's shadow even dances:

Aidan single-handedly stopped this sailing ship from smashing into the rocks:

And Jasper gave the sun its due:

It was a great hike and reminded us how much scenic beauty there is we haven't even explored yet just 10 minutes from our house.

In Coromandel for the Earthquakes

We read about the earthquakes in Wellington in the newspapers and had heard bits and pieces on the radio, but for the most part, we have been fairly blithely unaware of what was happening at the southern tip of the North Island.

Shortly after we arrived in New Zealand, we took a guided tour of the Te Papa museum, the national museum in Wellington. Our guide was a slightly kooky Maori woman, who liked to talk about which animals the Maori ate, and whether people in other cultures would eat those and other animals. It was an unusual way to wander through a natural history museum. Our guide also told us that every year in New Zealand, there are over 3000 earthquakes! A little quick math and you're probably thinking what we were thinking at the time: "Absolutely no way that's true, kooky museum lady." We had been in Wellington at that point for several days, and had experienced nary a single tremor.

Turns out, she was right. By a lot. Every year in the new Zealand area, there are about 20,000 earthquakes. If you don't believe us, check out:
http://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/felt

I love that the page is a list of quakes that may have been felt. It's not by any means an exhaustive list. It also will ask you after each listing to click on a button labelled: "felt it?" presumably if you've felt it. I am waiting for the day when I can click that button. I'm wondering what happens at that point...

Anyway, there sure are a lot of earthquakes in New Zealand. Now we've learned a bit about the pattern of earthquakes and that they do occur in clusters, and we haven't really shared much of what we've learned with the children. Oh, except what to do in an earthquake. We actually looked that up online - and then reviewed it with the boys To sum up, in case of an earthquake, drop, cover, and hold. This means -- get to the ground, wherever you are, crawl along the ground to a safe (i.e. covered) area, and then hold on to something if you can. So now you know, too.

We may have been in an area where people could feel the earthquakes that occurred Wellington, but we were driving on unpaved gravel roads, and any tremor we felt beneath us was as likely attributable to the unevenness of the road as to the motion of tectonic plates. Tom did all the driving, of course, and thank god he did, because it was at times dizzying and terrifying -- which of course, translates into incredible views of the mountains and ocean.

Some photos below:

This is the only photo I will include of our hike up the mountain at Te Aroha. It started raining while we hiked and we were covered in mud by the end. The forest was amazing, though, and the hike made all our dry hikes so much nicer by comparison.

The view from our balcony in Coromandel - those are grape vines around the top.

The first of several beaches where we stopped. We were often alone on the beaches.

Boys pretending to be crabs on the beach

This beach was my favorite

This is me saying: "And we have it all to ourselves!!"

The perfect picnic spot for a chocolate break! (We did, actually, just have chocolate for lunch that day - later the boys reported that having chocolate for lunch was their favorite activity of the day!)

I took some photos out of the car windows as we drove home, a little bit afraid of getting home too late for restaurants to still be serving dinner, and having eaten only chocolate all day. Tom wouldn't stop the car.

The next day we went to the Driving Creek Railway -- for the trains, the views, and the eccentric history. These rails were built by one man who is a potter by trade. I know, totally random, but marketed proudly as a prime example of "Kiwi ingenuity."