WRITTEN ON September 7th, 2009 BY kiwivera AND STORED IN food, kiwiland
Tags: food, gastronomy, new zealand, portugal, sweets
If you don’t want to end up eating that whole bag of M&Ms you’ve been hiding on your desk or have to assault the cupboard in search of biscuits or chips, close this blog now.
still here? alright then, I shall start my ramblings… last saturday, I was asked a bunch of questions about my life as an expat. when the girl asked me what sort of things I miss the most about Portugal, I - of course - mentioned the food. Then I asked her to give me examples of traditional NZ food because I couldn’t think of any. I keep asking people here the same question and no one seems to be able to give me a satisfactory answer. I had my hopes on this girl. I was expecting to hear a long list of names I’d never heard before and was about to write them all down to try asap. Ha. Put your pen down, kiwivera. Her answer: roasts.
ROASTS?!?!
I’m not a food snob or anything but… come on! There’s gotta be more than that! A country’s cuisine is such an important part of its culture, Kiwiland has to have more to offer in that department. So, as always, I turned to Google for some much needed answers. So ok, there’s Kumara (sweet potato) but that’s not really a dish, it’s just an ingredient. And that’s Maori, which is only a fraction of New Zealand. So what else?
All right, the Pavlova is a good example. But it’s a dessert (and a heavenly one, I must add!). There’s gotta be more to NZ main dishes than roasts!
Fish & chips? Seriously? Did you read the bit about how food is a reflection of a culture, yadda yadda yadda? I suppose it does go well with NZ’s laidback attitude but still… there has to be more! Meat pies? Are you serious? Alright, I suppose I have nothing to say about that one but still… you don’t go to a restaurant to eat pie! (do you?) So what traditional dish can you ask for when you go to a proper restaurant? No, you don’t order hokey pokey ice cream as a main, no matter how much you wish you would.
So the search continues. In a country that is as multicultural as Kiwiland, it ends up being hard finding one common element of identity. If New Zealand food is the food you find everywhere in New Zealand, then New Zealand food is Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, American, Turkish, Italian, Thai, Spanish, Indian, British, etc.
The number of Portuguese people in kiwiland is, unfortunately, not large enough to include the nationality in the list above - which, if you ask me, is a big loss for all kiwis. Portuguese food is really one of the things I miss the most about my country. So much that, far from being a kitchen diva, I’ve been making some solid efforts to recreate that taste from home (even if the ingredients aren’t always easy to find). It may sound strange but it does help dealing with the distance. Yesterday, I made chocolate salami. Every now and then I try my luck at pastéis de nata and a few other things that remind me from home. Sure, I feel settled in Kiwiland. Home these days also tastes like pavlova and fish & chips eaten on the beach.
But my search for typical kiwi food will continue. I shall keep you all posted.
2 Responses to “yes, it’s a post about food”
Lua wrote on September 20th, 2009 2:11 am :
I had to laugh out loud with this post!
This is so, soooo true for many other countries as well.
After years of asking my romanian friends what were the typical romanian dishes they liked the most, they finally came up with the bomb that, apparently, Romania does not have any signature dish as it is all imported from neighbouring countries. So although the food is yummi, none of it is Romanian in its origin 
In Germany, a beautiful country to live in, has one of the crappiest cuisines in the whole wide world. People kept on saying just how good sausages, sauerkraut, potato cakes (boiled) and game food was but i was in disbelief! Ok, maybe it’s typical but for crying out lout! How can one compare a sausage to a dish like seeafood rice, green curry or even a fantastic cheesecake?!!!
In the Uk i’ve been pleasantly surprised. They do have much more than roasts and fish and chips! The problem is that not even brits know they do
I miss portuguese food soooo much! In Singapore nobody cooks at home anymore so the vast majority of places you rent don’t even come with good cooker let alone an oven I’ll miss it even more then! The good thing is that food is amazing there 
we also search for traditional food wherever we go
paulo tried finnish reindeer last week!