a food puzzle

dear puku readers,

as we plunge headfirst into the holiday (and birthday!*) season, the foodblogs around the blogosphere are full of cookies, mince tarts, the Northern hemisphere’s ubiquitous turkeys, stuffing, revolting canned(!) pumpkin pie and sweet potatoes with marshmallows(!) and the Southern hemisphere’s altogether more appetising prawns and seafood, lush salads, cold hams and turkeys (ok, we are preparing stuffing too), berries, stone fruit, mangoes and melons (soaked in bubbly, of course!).

here at the puku, we are a little bare on holiday trappings so far.. my apologies. I will blog some seasonal food things, but I am a bit behind the ball, and seasonal eating is only really beginning today for us, although I ate my first mango of the season on Friday, so that’s a start, right?

in the meantime, and as a distraction perhaps, I am posting a photo of a mystery foodthing**. I will update with the full story soon.

any guesses?

MERRY CHRISTMAS, SEASONS GREETINGS & CHEERS, XXX Z
* mine!  ** I do know what it is 

what the smoked fish did next, a Fable.

the smoked fish became PIES.

I have oddly vivid memories of being a very small child living on Waiheke Island, and my favourite thing to eat when I went with my mum to Oneroa (the only place on Waiheke (”why-heh-keh”) with a largish grocery shop when I was a child, although I understand now there is a SUPERMARKET. WTF?) was smoked fish pie at some hippy cafe (long closed). (the whole island was hippy in those days actually. not anymore!).

I can so vividly remember eating smoked fish pie, which I’m sure some people do not consider a very child-friendly food, but then again apparently I also demanded (garlic and parsley laced) omelettes, so I definitely did not suffer from ‘white food syndrome’ as a child!

anyway, I could tell you how my pies were made, but since I didn’t take ‘during’ photos (I was actually too busy having lie downs every 5 minutes, because being up with my recently surgery-ed leg for that long was still very tiring and painful), and in fact it is ridiculously easy, so instead here is a diagram demonstrating the pie-structions.

which leaves me time to tell you another riveting smoked fish pie related story. Once upon a time, in 2002, while living in Nelson Bay a princess (me) went along to the really quite wonderful Red Ned’s pie shop to grab some lunch. I asked Mr Red Neds (AKA Barry Kelly) if he had plans to make my favourite, his Smoked Haddock Pies any time soon, as I had a pie hankering which his teriyake kangaroo, honey-lime-chilli scallops and prawn, fiji curry steak, nor any of the other 50-odd regulars just wouldn’t fulfill.

Mr Kelly looked at me for a minute, then told me to come back in the next couple of days. He had just been pottering around the bakery, mulling on which pies to enter in the upcoming pie competition, and yes, my favourite would just fit the bill, so he would make some for the competition, some for the shop and one for me (I am a princess in this story, remember?).

Needless to say, because I have extremely good taste, my favourite pie not only took out the Gold Medal for Gourmet Seafood Pie, but also Gold Winner Overall. Best Pie In The Competition. seriously - check out their awards list! The day after the competition Mr Kelly called me in to gave me a complementary Smoked Haddock Pie, and the whole village rejoiced. well, ok, mostly the Red Neds peeps. and me!

the end.