Shall we go to Temptation Island?
New Zealand's best pies and other good things that have delighted me so far in 2025.
Happy New Year dear readers. I hope you’ve had a gentle start to 2025. As you might have guessed from the lack of noise, I’ve been luxuriating in a deliciously long holiday. Getting up for work today was a struggle (sigh).
I’ve never forgotten a friend showing me his cycling holiday photos in a European city, in which every inch of the journey was documented with forensic detail - starting with ‘here are the bikes being assembled at the airport’ - so I’ll spare you all the mundane details of our travels from one end of the country to the other. But please do admire my husband’s magnificent potatoes, which he lovingly prepared and cooked on Christmas Day. In proof that there is no such thing as too many spuds, our party of about 20 adults made short work of about 8kg of them.
We ate magnificently well at Christmas, mostly thanks to my gorgeous family and The Spreadsheet. We ate well at New Year too, thanks to some wonderful friends (and an incredible Ottolenghi meringue roulade that will make you look at bay leaves in a new way).
I’d love to say that I have started 2025 by achieving great wonders in the kitchen but that would be a lie. I did make Claire Thomsen’s spicy panforte (a hit, I recommend bookmarking the recipe for next Christmas) and on a very cold day in early January I made a better-than-average baked pasta. Tinned cherry tomatoes and ravenous hunger, plus an unseasonably cold day, are the secret ingredients.
Mostly I’ve made salads, washed dishes and relied on the kindness of others. At various stops on the road I tried to eat the least worst thing available (difficult, in some locations). I ate surprisingly good, if inauthentic, variations of shakshouka and tacos in places like Taupō and Morrinsville. We stayed with my Westport in-laws for a week, where I managed to Jackson Pollock a half-completed baked Spanish rice with chicken and chorizo dish ALL over my mother-in-law’s surgically clean white kitchen. There’s nothing like scrubbing the floor on your hands and knees to help work up an appetite, is there?
Westport, population 4250, isn’t the sort of place you go for culinary tourism, though my mother-in-law could probably boost visitor numbers by selling her criminally addictive Florentine slice.
It does, however, boast New Zealand’s best pies, which encase various kinds of wild game (think pork, venison, tahr, goat) in exceptionally buttery and flaky pastry. The West Coast Pies Company HQ has become a magnet for tourists and locals alike since it opened back in 2022 – on this visit I noted that several other cafes on the town’s main street now have ‘we have pies’ on their street signs in a desperate bid to capture some of the attention. Take it from me, only the genuine article will do.
I made another new discovery while we were down there: Temptation Island, aka the prepared food section of the Fresh Choice supermarket. Temptation Island! Just imagine… “What shall we have for dinner tonight darl?” “I dunno, shall we pop to Temptation Island and pick up some beef rissoles with onion gravy?”
T.I, as it’s probably known to frequent local flyers, offers all manner of ready meals and treats for any hour of the day or night – sushi, chicken korma, mushroom stroganoff, different kinds of roast dinners for one with all the trimmings, a decent-looking rhubarb crumble and packets of brittle meringues. There are even tubes of fresh pastry (presumably in case you fancy a DIY chicken korma or rissole pie?) A week later it’s still making me smile, even though the thought of someone putting a roast dinner for one in the microwave and waiting for it to ‘ping’ is enough to break my heart.
Anyway, I’m now home and tonight my dear daughter is making tteokbokki for dinner (who knew that listening to all that K-pop and watching all that K-drama would have such a useful outcome?) I might not have been cooking much over the holidays, but I have been thinking about it - and I hope to bring you some of the results when normal service resumes next week.
Good things
If you like to make things, or you’ve resolved to make more things in 2025, let me introduce you to Lauren Macdonald and her newish newsletter, Things To Make. Lauren is best known as a textile artist but she is much more besides (full disclosure: she’s also my niece-by-marriage).
This recipe for charred lettuce with Chinese sesame dressing comes with a generous side order of intel about Chinese sesame paste (no, it’s not the same as tahini) and an enlightening lettuce family tree.
A novel about The Plague might not sound like an uplifting read, but Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks is the best book I’ve read so far this year (I’m slow to the party, it was actually published in 2001).
Those POTATOES