What I ate (over the long weekend)

  1. All Indian restaurants in Auckland seem to use the same recipe for their dishes which doesn’t really matter because 99% of the time, it’s good. It’s the kind of goodness that’s impossible to replicate. And don’t bother with pre-made mixes or sauces; they never come close to the real thing. And because the dishes seem identical wherever you buy them, I don’t quite remember where we get our favourite curries - mine is ALWAYS a lamb madras - except that it’s local. This is the one time I go all out on carbs - basmati rice and three garlic naan - because the sauce is so rich, that one serving (at less than $20 for the whole combo), lasts me THREE meals. People always joke about Filipinos eating a whole pot or rice with one cup of gravy and well it’s true. Very satisfying.

  2. There’s a Malaysian restaurant that serves crispy chicken skin, but theirs is battered which in my mind, probably doubles up the fat content. Occasionally, I save the skin from my chicken and cook them in one go, but in the oven at a low temp until they’re completely rendered. I just season it with sea salt and pepper; dipping sauce is Pinakurat vinegar.

  3. Moustache cookies.

  4. For Sam’s birthday dinner, we went to the most basic French restaurant there is Le Garde-Manger. But basic probably works because it has outlasted every other fancy French resto since opening in 2010. It probably defies trends, but the menu has changed very little; the same old classics are there with occasional specials written on the board. While not French, I ordered the fish special which was a perfectly cooked piece of snapper fillet. The accompanying side of ratatouille was so good, that I replicated it the next day. Just don’t make the mistake of having them make a cake (which turned out to be a tiny, dry forgettable chocolate cake) and order their desert crepes instead.

  5. For Sam’s birthday cake, we decided to make Ina Garten’s (in)famous Mocha Icebox cake.

Sunday

We finally took down the Christmas trees, took the mattress that Dylan slept on when he was here back to the garage, re-arranged the plants and cleaned up my desk. The holidays are officially over.

It’s too hot to work from home (we don’t have AC) even if the second floor has plenty of windows and two sliding doors that open to the deck- but what is 26 degrees compared to a summer’s day in Pangasinan or maybe Dubai??

And yet here I am, topless, sipping water every hour and feeling that heat lethargy where half of your brain feels like mush.

And yet I have fallen in love with summer, with sunshine. I read somewhere that a man needs vitamin D to boost testosterone; so maybe I had been feeling the ‘boost’. But I’m still wary of it. A decade ago, people I knew were laughing at my SPF 80 sunscreen but look who’s laughing now. The last three years, the sunscreening has expanded to include my neck and my hands.

They say there’s a hole in the ozone right over New Zealand, so even if a 31 degree day in the scheme of things isn’t really hot, we got it worse.

It’s a bitch to deep fry in the heat, but the easiest meat in the deep freeze to cook are boneless chicken thighs so fried-chicken it is. I have the recipe for ‘popcorn chicken’ down pat which is really all in the batter. I never used to have a measurement for it, hence, the inconsistency but now I do. The ratio of flour to tapioca starch (or cornstarch) should always be one to one with a teaspoon of baking powder. From there, I just make variations on the flavouring. I’ve always been partial to Chinese five-spice or plain salted- this is because I always eat it with rice and a buffalo-ranch style of coating doesn’t really suit.

We bought the viral KMart mini rice cooker and it’s perfect; I don’t eat any more than a cup of rice and it makes enough for dinner and for lunch the next day.

Today

Finally and literally got to the root of the problem as to why our 6-year old calathea plant was feeling the blues; her soil was water-logged (what looked like clumpy clay was mixed in her soil mix) and her roots had started to rot.

So we spent the better part of the afternoon splitting her in two, repotting two other indoor plants that I got as gifts as well as an olive tree that I got for myself as a New Year gift.

Tuesday

I had a consult today with my GP.

The horror stories you normally hear about the health-care system in New Zealand isn’t about insurance (the NZ government pays for health-care services) or lawsuits, but about a lack of doctors and long waiting lists. So you try (and pray) your damn hardest not to get sick, and that if you did, knock on wood that it’s just the common cold.

I went for a different matter - I’m fine by the way - and I was surprised that there was an immediate opening. My current doctor is old, like senior citizen old, just like my previous GP who I think, got sick on the job and was now probably and definitely retired (I hope) and enjoying sunny Brighton (in England) where he’s originally from. But old doctors are the best. They have a relaxed and cheerful demeanour even when they’re desperately trying to find you a good systolic reading using a manual blood pressure monitor.

Jaqueline - my current GP - is a tall and statuesque lady who occasionally lapses into citing current studies that she’s read about, or diagramming on paper, the relationship between enzymes and bodily organs. She also patiently listens to my attempt at self-diagnoses and neither contradicts nor reproaches me (I wasn’t wrong anyway, just saying).

She saw me at 9:50 when our appointment was at 9:30 and we wrapped up at 10:45, but I didn’t complain; the whole session was worth the $50 it cost (in New Zealand, this is relatively very high).

For dinner, I thought, why not a salad? And no - it had nothing to do with my doctor’s appointment - I was still having flashbacks of that salad I had at Brewd Hawt, and the realisation that we have been doing our dressings wrong.

I didn't have iceberg lettuce - and it’s really the ideal type of lettuce for this - but use whatever you have because the point is, you need to eat those goddamned salad leaves before they go off. I had curly lettuce which I washed, dried and roughly chopped up. For the dressing, it was mayo, hot sauce, mustard and miso with some EVOO.

Drizzled that over the lettuce, did a generous sprinkling of that bagel seasoning and just because I was feeling extra, grated some parmigiana reggiano on top. YUM.

PS: my cholesterol levels were amazing the doctor said and the figure did make me gasp (a 2.2). To think that for the last 6 months, I’ve been eating butter as if it were cheese. See? There are some small miracles there…

My Saturday

I think I’ve mentioned before that Saturday is my only true ‘free day’; so it’s all about me and about relaxing a little bit. Catch up on reading, streaming and a nice lazy dinner (and snacks = a tub of ice-cream).

A very loud wedding

Three times I got an alert from my Apple Watch saying that the sound in the hall exceeded 95 decibels (just FYI, anything above 70 is harmful).

But Pasifika weddings have never been small affairs; literally everything is big, the venue, the participants, the food, the tears and the unabashed show of affection and love.

You go home full, albeit with a slight ringing in your ears.

The weekend

We had a lunch catch-up with Bertam her mum Val and Jenny at Winner Winner Chicken in Pukekohe. I had such high hopes and probably bit into the piping hot fried chicken way too soon and burned my mouth. But when it cooled down, it wasn’t any better unfortunately. I took some photos but none of them turned out to be worth posting (the iPhone 14 Pro Max’s wide-angle shots are just too distorted) because everything looked BROWN. For sides we ordered Mac and cheese, tater tots, fried mushrooms and the loaded fries which was the best one of the bunch.

They had good gravy which made me think that should we come this way again, the chicken to order would have to be their grilled one which is their signature chicken anyway.

The fried chicken pieces were just too small with a heavy batter and the chances of over-cooking them high which I think happened in our case.

We skipped dessert- they have famously good cabinet pies- because we brought Farro Fresh sticky-date pudding which we ate at Berta’s house, served with vanilla ice-cream and do-it-yourself-instant-coffees as we all talked about the upcoming elections, the public transport system and dealing with burial plots.

Berta gave me some pretty purple broccoli to take home (she said it tastes slightly more bitter than its green counterpart).

Sunday was a trip to Mitre 10 for some pots (we have a calathea plant with new shoots that we wanted to repot) and another opportunity to ooh and aah at all the plants we couldn’t afford. On my Wishlist are:

  1. Variagated monstera

  2. A 1.5m olive tree

  3. Swiss-cheese plant

  4. Philodendron Birkin

  5. Fiddle leaf fig

We had been mulling to buy a cherry blossom but we couldn’t decide which one. There were a couple on sale, but at over a meter and a half long, how were we going to transport it home in our little, compact cars??

We also looked at some mobile pools. Apparently, El Niño is going to bring in a scorching summer so we need to prepare for it- plus we don’t know what to do with the empty ex veggie patch; a pool might just cover up that bald patch!

We thought of an actual pool (starts at $50k for those trendy, shallow lap ones) but someone told us that should we think of putting our property on the market, a pool doesn’t actually push the price up nor make your listing more attractive. You’re better off using that $50k for interior renovations.

End of the week

The Weekend

The winter sun in this part of the world looked like 4pm even if it was only 12 noon.

We drove through places that were now familiar to me; the place with the quirky shops, the place with the great pies (there was a long queue), and the place with the salmon fish. After that, a big blue lake appeared on the right and it seemed never-ending as we drove alongside it.

At one point, we drove past what looked like tourist vans parked on the lake shore. A mass of white, naked bodies- teens, adults I couldn’t tell- were actually swimming in the cold water. Good on them.

I never sleep on these trips, but this time I did with the soft 4pm sun caressing my face.

When I woke up we were nearly there and you could see the mountain or the mountains, standing guard like a gate to something. Before them, a vast plain of bush and grass, rocks, and a single road that led to the village.

And it wasn’t really a village in the true sense, but accommodations for tourists and scattered housing for conservationists, scientists, and maybe the military.

We stayed at the best one- the oldest one, and it looked like it was in the middle of shedding its age and donning new retrofits for the future. Half of the hotel wasn’t even done- we could see mattresses lined up along the corridor from the large windows in a connecting wing- and we stayed half a kilometer away at refurbished cabins.

We settled in (there was a buffet for dinner) and in my room, I could see the mountain looming high and shadowed.

It was’t at all inert- it was alive.