Happy bloggiversary, Puku

Well, the puku has turned one year old. My first proper food post was a year ago this week, and was about the spiced oil I’d made as xmas presents. What fun!

I’ve been less frequent with the postings than I’d like, been involved in less foodblog events than I’d like (every month I look at Is My Blog Burning and think of all the interesting events I want to be part of, and then… do nothing), and actually not even cooked as much as I’d like (moving states, surgery etc), but I’ve had some fun, some great conversations, been warmly welcomed by the foodblogging community whenever I do get my ass into gear and get involved, and been inspired to do plenty more.

I love that in WordPress you can check the site stats, including referrers and search engine terms that have lead people to your site. It’s quite addictive. I tend to get several visits a day from people searching for ‘puku’, ‘papaya’, ‘risotto’, ‘mashed potato’ – even a ‘why eat fresh mashed potato’ the other day (which had me wondering why anyone would prefer eating off/rotting mashed potato until I remembered powdered instant mash existed in some revolting alternate world), and ’snow pea/fetta/avocado salad’ which leads to my highest hitting post to date.

Every day or two there are ‘dragonfruit’, ‘fruit salad’ ‘coffee’, ‘lentil soup’, ‘kedgeree’ and a growing variety of ’smoked’ searches. Then there are the totally weird ones – lately; ‘Pizza’ – I’m pretty sure I don’t have any pizza posts on the puku, ‘Fiji hospital’, ‘poor hospital’ (WTF?), 2 searches for ‘insipid food’ and on Friday alone ’sachet food’, gross food’, ‘awful food’ and 2 searches for ‘eating gross food contest’!! ummm… is Google trying to tell me something?!

On the other hand, in the past couple of days there has also been a ‘love’ and a ‘pleasurable eating’, so I can only hope, dear reader, that this is what you have found here.

Aroha nui, ka kite ano, bring on 2008!

xxx z

a peck of pickled peppers (ok, smoked actually)

Tom and I decided (ahem, and our bank balances strongly suggested) more homemade xmas presents this year. Roddi gave us an idea with his mention of chipotles during our smoker craze (admittedly, ongoing)… so we thought we’d have a go at smoking our own chillis.

Traditional chipotles take several days to slow cold smoke and basically dry out, but we couldn’t be bothered spending 48 hours straight attending to and refueling our small smoker every 20 minutes. Instead we simply hot-smoked a selection of mixed chillis and capsicum-y things (banana caps, long green chilli, long red chilli and birds eye chilli), and jarred them up prettily in olive oil.

The finished product was distributed to Sydney friends and family, unfortunately the Ikea rubber-sealed jars we used were not as tightly sealing as one might like, but hopefully the contents is ok!

Interestingly, we left a couple of the un-jarred smoked chillis in the fridge and they are still sitting there in a ziplock bag, looking quite unblemished (about 3 weeks now).. so the smoking process does quite a bit of preserving.

We kind of made it up as we went, so no recipe for this, but roughly; hot smoke chillis for 20-30 mins, squash into sterilised jars, cover in olive oil (add garlic cloves, herbs if desired). Easy!

someone was spoilt rotten this xmas…

it was me!

processed to date:

xmas day handmade lime mayonnaise, xmas day finely sliced fennel, celery & toasted almond salad, boxing day hummus, more hummus, oliebollen (NYE/birthday doughnuts) holiday mushroom pate, more hummus(!), carrots grated in seconds, thai beef salad dressing…

I love processing stuff! thanks Tom! (I love Tom!) xxx

GRAINWAVES – a food puzzle resolved

the mysteriously textured foodthing in the previous post was correctly identified by Ves as a Grain Wave. She even guessed correct with Sour Cream and Chives flavour! But she also had a Kiwi advantage…

as Grain Waves are a beloved kiwi snack – well, beloved by me, and Vesli, at least!

They are super crunchy, thick waves of grainy crispy goodness, and are pretty irresistible.. for those not in NZ, if you are traveling to Aotearoa/NZ any time soon, I highly recommend doing so, and making your way straight from the airport to the nearest Dairy (=cornershop), Foodtown or Pak’N'Save and grabbing yourself a bag.

or…. you can buy them online! woot! AND apparently, you can buy them in Sydney!!

and just because the Bluebird advertising theme has been buzzing around in my head the whole time I’ve been writing this post, here it is for you to enjoy too:

the ad on youtube (I can’t seem to embed it, such a noob!)