Award-winning blog of Irish food writer and broadcaster Caroline Hennessy.
I spent Wednesday night last week at a cookery demonstration by the Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Vegetarian Society. No, I’m not going over to the dark side – I love meat too much – but their description of the evening intrigued me.
We weren’t very well organised for the last bank holiday weekend so it was Sunday morning before one of the boyfriend’s friends and his girlfriend came over and we tried to figure out where to go for the night. Despite fears that all accommodation would be booked solid for the weekend, a quick scoot through the Rough Guide to New Zealand and a few calls later and we had rooms for the night at Formerly The Blackball Hilton in the wee town of Blackball on New Zealand’s West Coast.
It’s not very often we go out for Sunday lunch but the fact that I had a voucher for the Riccarton House Café in Christchurch made our minds up for us last weekend. The café only does lunch but that’s well worth the hour-long walk from our house.
In the Salvation Army shop the other day I discovered the one thing that would make me look the part while marketing – a wicker basket!
A big thank you to all at Athena Olives in Waipara who took a complete olive picking novice under their communal wing today and gave me such a wonderful – and painful! – experience during a very busy time for them.
The days when you get a call from your boyfriend saying “don’t plan anything for dinner tonight. I want to take you out” don’t come too often so, no matter what you’ve been thinking about cooking, it’s time to put it aside. Especially when you discover that you’re going to New Zealand’s only Moroccan restaurant – Simo’s in Christchurch.
The days when you get a call from your boyfriend saying “don’t plan anything for dinner tonight. I want to take you out” don’t come too often so, no matter what you’ve been thinking about cooking, it’s time to put it aside. Especially when you discover that you’re going to New Zealand’s only Moroccan restaurant – Simo’s in Christchurch.
One of my fondest autumn memories from childhood is of my siblings, my cousins and myself as small children, bundled up in warm coats and wellies (aka gumboots in NZ), being handed a couple of buckets by the adults and sent down my grandparents’ farm to go mushroom picking.
