A long time ago, we had eggs Benedict at a cafe in Takaanini every Sunday without fail for over two years.
It was basic, but it was the best. When the cafe closed, we couldn’t quite find the same kind of eggs benedict ever again that didn’t use fancy, hard-as-rocks toasted to an inch of its life ciabatta or sordough (they used traditional English muffins), unnecessary wilted greens, watery hollandaise and horrors, potato rosti. We had a bowl of hot chips on the side to mop up the generous sauce.
My GP once told me that my ‘healthiest’ period was, ironically, during this time that I had a steady diet of basically liquefied butter and trans fats (also snacked on chips and ice-cream on the non-work nights of Friday and Saturday and stayed up til 2am playing PlayStation).
But never again. You have to be smart to know that you can get away with shit only once.
Today, it’s either coffee at home, or (really good) coffee at the petrol station, or a rare pie.
We had both, but only after dropping by to see the new exhibits at The Arts House Trust, located in the historic Pah Homestead, within Hillsborough's Monte Cecilia Park.
Yvonne Todd had a food-themed exhibition, and she captured exactly how we were feeling; the act of eating becomes emptied of pleasure and transformed into a performance of restraint, an obligation rather than a desire.
I wanted to touch it so bad because we couldn’t tell what Heidi Brickell’s sinuous, organic sculptures were made of; leather? Bronze? Turns out, they’re made of New Zealand Bull kelp (rimurapa in Maori), or brown seaweed.
Essence by Freya Burnett; her work places viewers within an immersive projection-mapped environment that operates as a loosely defined interior. The projected surfaces build a reflective atmosphere, nesting textures together; Jewel tones, carbonated liquids, speckled light and mirror-like imagery that build on Burnett’s existing visual language (Plomacy).