Mouth-Watering Pavlova (May 9)

Sometime shortly after we arrived in New Zealand, we heard about Pavlova, considered to be the Kiwi national dessert, the antipodean answer to the apple pie, if you will. Nevermind that Australia has also laid claim to the dessert’s provenance; as more than a few Kiwis have reminded us, who can trust a country of convicts? (To any Aussies reading this, please don’t have your pet kangaroos beat us up…) As Pavlova is basically a giant meringue topped with fresh fruit and cream, though, its origin seems moot since you’d have to imagine the concept of meringue was developed at some point before anyone was baking anything in Australasia.

Anyway, we decided that, strictly in the interest of furthering our cultural awareness, we would have to sample Pavlova at some point. And for authenticity’s sake, not just any grocery store-bought version would do. To get the real experience, we felt it would be best to have a real home-made, Kiwi-made Pavlova. Not to mention that having made many a meal at a hostel, we knew we’d feel a little out of place eating a grand dessert whilst people around us ate beans out of cans, instant noodles, and spaghetti out of the pot (to save cleaning another dish, natch).

Isabel spreads out the pavlova for the oven

Up to date, we’d struck out so far. Apparently making a good Pavlova is a dying skill, or we’d just been unlucky where we’d stopped. However, when we got to Lawrence, we found out that a good friend of Thomas and Alex’s, an elderly local woman named Isabel, not only made a mean Pavlova, she often had their wwoofers over to show them how to make one. Becky was eager to see, so she had Thomas book us a visit on one of our days off. We suspect Thomas was happy to arrange it as he mentioned eating a huge portion of the last Pavlova from Isabel.

After trekking across Lawrence (that makes it sound far; in reality a 10-minute walk) we arrived at Isabel’s small hillside home. Isabel is a spry and lovely 83-year old Kiwi lady who knows her way around the kitchen. Besides Pavlova, she has a repertoire of heaps of other desserts. It isn’t often you meet someone who’s an expert on plum pudding these days. She recounted stories of past baking exploits, and it certainly sounds like she deserves a plaque of gratitude from the local hospital for the goodly sized portion of it that her donated baked goods must’ve paid for.

Her plum pudding was a special hit at the annual bake sale when she prepared 27 of them for the raffle one year. Becky, in her naivety, asked Isabel where she got all the plums to make the pudding (as Kiwis often have fruit trees in their backyards). That was the funniest thing Isabel had heard recently, as plum puddings apparently contain no plums at all. She was kind enough bake (or rather boil) us one of these as well. Isabel recommends only a small spoonful of her brandy sauce with the dessert, but we think you can hardly go wrong with a ladleful.

Plum pudding only looks like a plum. Or a brain, which is decidedly less appetizing.

Isabel was a really terrific host; we had a relatively proper tea with scones after she baked the Pavlova - I knew I should’ve brought my white gloves along. OK, maybe not that fancy but quite nice.

Pavlova in the beard, you know it's good!

Pavlova turned out to be really pretty simple to make. Beat egg whites, sugar, and some other ingredients (including vinegar for a dessert?) for awhile, then bake for an hour and leave in the oven overnight. Afterwards top with whipped cream and fresh fruit. Becky was happy to get a new, novel recipe, and I was happy for dessert, erm, to enjoy the cultural experience the next night.

As for the Pavlova itself, we found it to be tasty and quite rich. It had a nice crunchy outside and was soft like a giant marshmallow on the inside. Since it’s basically a ginormous meringue it’s really light, so you feel you can eat heaps of it. It should come with a warning not to do that though, as eating too much will leave you with the “wow I didn’t realize it was that rich” feeling you’ll regret for awhile.

The finished product... Diagnosis: delicious!

P.S. In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll admit that a good part of the reason that I wrote this post was because the title basically wrote itself. Much like pavlova itself, who could resist?

Recipe:

Ingredients:

4 egg whites
Pinch of salt
4 tablespoons cold water
1 large cup of sugar
4 teaspoons cornflour
1 teaspoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Beat the egg whites, salt, and water until soft peaks form. Add the sugar gradually beating all the time until stiff. Fold in cornflour, vinegar, and vanilla. Put damp grease proof paper on oven tray. Gently pour mixture on to the paper and form a high round cake. Place in the middle of an oven set at 355 F for 3 minutes. Turn down the temperature to 210 F. Leave in the oven for an hour. The pavlova may sit in a cold oven over night. The pavlova should be topped with fresh whipping cream and seasonal fruit (although, we must state a preferance for the kiwi).

Keep us posted on all your pavlova making ventures!

A Lemon Tree Grows In Lawrence (Apr. 26 – May 15)

Leaving the dusty fields of the Alexandra area behind, we headed south to Lawrence, site of our next wwoofing mission, working at The Lemon Tree Café and Restaurant. In a bit of an unusual twist, the owners of the café were a German couple who rely on wwoofers to do much of the café work since the town has few eligible workers from which to draw.

Lawrence, a wee village of 500 nestled in a small valley an hour inland from Dunedin would seem to be the quintessential sleepy New Zealand town. It’s a fairly unremarkable town, but has a quaint charm with verdant sheep farms and logging-pine laden hills surrounding the town. In the town itself are a heap of churches and a main street, on which all the town’s shops and surprisingly numerous cafes (3 in a row!) are located. Walking around town at night, the nighttime sky is brilliant and full of stars, if you don’t mind the smoky haze from burning coal that most locals use to heat their homes. The locals like their rugby, their Speight’s, and their duck hunting, if our time there is any indication.

Becky, Andrew and Andrea in front of the Lemon Tree. Our last day of work!

As with many towns in the South Island, particularly in the Otago region, Lawrence was formerly a gold town, and like so many of those towns has all the obligatory historical memorabilia, tourist sites, and businesses with names in that vein that inevitably follow. We took the historical gold mining ‘interpretive walk’ in nearby Gabriel’s Gully one day, and while it made for a nice bushwalk, the informational plaques scattered around the trail didn’t really make it a ‘must-visit’ spot. One wonders whether there is that much interest in the New Zealand gold rush among travelers that it can sustain basically the same tourism activities in what has to be dozens of towns on the South Island.

Our buddy, Cam, the sous chef at the Lemon Tree

Not that Lawrence seems to be banking on that most days. As it’s a popular route from Dunedin to Queenstown, Lawrence does get a fair bit of traffic from those travelers, especially on weekends, but other than that it’s a somnolent little burg. We were told that in summer the café really gets hopping with over 100 lunches served a day, but while we were there in the chill of autumn we generally served only about 30-40.

The Lemon Tree Cafe and Restaurant

We found our hosts to be pretty interesting, as you wouldn’t expect to find too many German transplants running a successful café in what can only be described as the middle of nowhere in Otago. Their house, for starters, is a nice, big Victorian-style home with bookshelves in seemingly every room, which are necessary since they must’ve brought a whole shipping container of possessions here. Without trying to be too unkind, you could describe their home as German-Attic-Exploded-In-Kiwi-Mid-Century-Victorian.

They both must love New Zealand, though they seem horrified by small town attitudes and the lack of amenities. Perhaps we shouldn’t have told them about some of our happenings at the pub, as it only seemed to galvanize their opinions even stronger. I didn’t really mean to instigate there, but couldn’t help it… It seems pretty apparent that they would readily move back home except for the café and having a young family.

A view of Gabriel's Gully on a beautiful fall day

One funny anecdote that encapsulates their experience is story of the Giant Ice Creams. When our hosts bought the restaurant property it was the local fish and chips shop that featured giant ice cream cones (an advertisement prominently hand-painted on a shed along the highway a few miles outside of town that is so damn cute and NZ-country you’d be hard-pressed not to want to stop). While they were renovating the property, one day two rednecks roared past in their pick-up and shouted “Where the f*** are the giant ice creams?!” as they looked on in horror. As he said to us, “I was thinking, what have I gotten myself into?”

As far as the actual work went, since we’d just escaped the fields o’garlic, we were hopeful for a better wwoofing experience at the café, especially since Becky is so fond of restaurant work. As I noted in the last post, working for only room and board has served to enhance our appreciation for work that you know, pays. I have to admit that my enthusiasm for wwoofing has been flagging, not to mention that I had to cajole Becky into not quitting garlic farming within an hour of our beginning to haul rocks out of the fields.

A squid salad, replete with ornate presentation. You should've seen the BLTs!

When we arrived in town at noon on a Thursday, we were quickly thrown into the fire at the café, starting work immediately, with none of the cozy get-to-know-you period that we’ve grown accustomed to (typically a dinner and night’s rest before the work begins). Instead, Becky and I suited up in the bright yellow Lemon Tree tee shirts and café aprons to begin our first day of wwoofing.

Our work at the café was pretty typical as far as café labor goes. When it’s busy with customers, Becky does a variety of things: baking, taking orders, running food, busing tables, washing dishes, prep work, etc. There’s also no shortage of cleaning to be done. Because I’m a dude, I’ve ended up with most of the grunt work, like chopping up heaps of pumpkins for their soup (Becky thinks I’ve earned my merit badge on that one), cutting frozen chickens, and other fun things. I actually don’t mind that work, as I’d rather do that then ferry coffees to the tables.

I’ve also done lots of groundskeeping work at their sprawling Victorian property, with some paint-scraping and sanding thrown in, as well. Becky thinks it should qualify as an “estate” by NZ standards, since most are nondescript ranch homes with no landscaping. Again, not bad work, especially when the weather has been nice, though they may have been a bit anal about the lawn, or they were just been giving me busywork. To wit, I raked the property twice one week, and nearly a third, while there were still leaves on the trees. The futility factor of such work gets dangerously close to rock-pulling in garlic fields.

We’re not actually sure how much we enjoyed our time at the Lemon Tree. We found Lawrence to be nice enough, if a bit too sleepy, and despite long hours on our working days, the work was pretty agreeable, making time fly by, in stark contrast to garlic planting. When our hosts were engaging, we got along well with them and enjoyed talking to them, as they’ve had some really interesting experiences. Food at the café was also generally very tasty, and we enjoyed our daily coffees tremendously. One of the wwoofers, Andrea, made some awesome espresso drinks at the Lemon Tree that must be the best in Otago: we were hooked almost immediately and will truly miss our daily gratis mochaccinos/lattes. Camaraderie with our fellow workers was also great, as we really got on well with Andrea, Steffi, Cameron, Thilo, Jessica, and James and Vicki. They were all hard workers, full of good spirit, and a pleasure to work with. Special thanks to Steffi for the German lessons. We learned a bunch of useful German phrases, which will come in handy when we get to Oktoberfest someday.

We did indeed like a number of things about the café, as we asked to stay for a week longer than the two week period we’d originally promised. However, we soon regretted making the request, as we started to get a strong vibe from our hosts that they weren’t very keen to have us around. We often felt that we weren’t meeting some unexplained criteria, and so we just didn’t know how to improve the situation. We did wonder why they said we could stay on longer, and we joked together more than a few times that we wouldn’t really have minded if they’d asked us to leave. I guess not everyone will like you, but we really wish we knew what we were doing to offend them.

Our home in Lawrence for three weeks - "The Property"

Well, we don’t want to make this a completely whingey post, so we’ll skip it for now. We will take some good memories away from this experience and we certainly feel like we tried to make the best of it while we were there. However, our wwoofing days are probably over for the time being. Working hard for room and board and living in close quarters (where quiet hours are always in effect) with a young family and five other twentysomethings may not always be the best combination – we’re learning new things all the time here!

Put The Coach Before the Horses (Apr. - May)

Most nights in Lawrence (home of the Lemon Tree Cafe) were pretty quiet for us, but we spent a number at the local pub, the Coach and Horses Inn, with Andrea (the most senior wwoofer, having been here for almost a year), who couldn’t get enough of the place. Apparently they don’t have bars with pool tables, jukeboxes, and people dancing around in Germany. Who knew?

Andrea, the senior most Wwoofer at the Lemon Tree and Cam (sous chef at the Lemon Tree cafe and a Lawrence native), who really looks like he is enjoying himself

The Coach and Horses seems to be a lot like any small town NZ pub, full of boisterous locals on the weekends and after big local rugby matches, and with plenty of cheap beer on tap, trophies and mounted animals on the walls, and rugby on the telly. Most of the locals could be called Kiwi rednecks, and if you’ve been to a bar in the sticks anywhere, you get the picture.

Though we have to say we even were a bit surprised when one of the local rugby players, full of beer after a big win over a local rival, began to use the bar as a urinal, and no one so much as batted an eye or told him to maybe take it to the bathroom 15 feet away. Luckily, Andrea was able to capture it as she took a video with her camera. We’re sure her friends in Germany will be really impressed. I have friends who genuinely would appreciate a bar with rules like this, though; Eric, you’ve got to come to New Zealand, man!

We enjoyed a round with fellow Wwoofers James and his girlfriend Vickie

We did have one great time at the pub, on the night of the local duck-calling competition. We thought it would probably be some good fun, but it turned out to be even better, a hilarious display of drunken antics. The event was MC’ed by the ‘local expert on all matters regarding duck-calling’, who dressed, looked, and spoke like an English professor, albeit one who must’ve been a few sheets to the wind, who repeatedly referred to the bartender as ‘Lusty, busty, Dusty the Barmaid’, and carried a toy ray-gun to zap any hecklers.

Even after the MC introduced himself, we thought it might be a semi-serious competition. But then the competitors came forward to play the duck-calling kazoo, one by one, and it wasn’t clear whether any of them really knew how to call a duck, with some playing the wrong end. We, and the rest of the audience, thoroughly enjoyed the competitors trying to one-up each other with their hammy, drunken duck calls. We also thought their nod to sanitation was a nice touch, with the kazoo being dunked in beer between competitors. If any ducks were shot that weekend, it was probably due in very small part to their skill in calling the ducks.

Towards the end of the competition, some of the locals managed to pry Andrea up to the front of the bar to play the kazoo, so she could show them what a ‘German duck’ sounded like. She was mortified at first, but was a good sport and got up and played along by herself. Then, in a run-off to determine the winner, she played again in a bit of a duet with a local bloke, it what can only be described as a bizarre and hilarious combination of duck-calling, mating dance, and small-town inebriation that had the entire bar roaring with laughter for minutes. It was definitely a highlight of our trip so far. Needless to say, they won the competition handily.

Steffi and Thilo, fellow Wwoofers at the Lemon Tree

We had a few other memorable nights at the pub, including one where one of the locals, a middle-aged bloke named Ross, recognized Andrea and started chatting with us. At first it wasn’t clear why his companions at his table were grinning as he came over to our table, but we figured it out pretty quickly, as Ross was pretty sloshed. It wasn’t bad at first, as he was somewhat entertaining, but after about 15 minutes we learned that Ross was from the genus repeating drunk. So by the time that we heard him twice bring up his recent trip to China, how much he liked America, and how he thought George Bush was a great president, we were quite happy to leave him to his Speight’s. He did inadvertently give a great line that night, however. He had told us he had three children, so Becky asked him “So what do you have?”, to which he responded “One of each.”

So if you ever find yourself in Lawrence, we wholeheartedly recommend The Coach and Horses Inn, as it’s pretty much the only option for weekend night entertainment. That is, unless you’re invited to a woolshed party, where the local kids are known to throw back a few late at night in the mud. In either event, gumboots are optional, but if you have them it certainly wouldn’t hurt to bring them along.

Phillipa (Cam's sister and a Lawrence local), enjoys a jug at the pub. She also spent a summer working at Lake Dunmore in Vermont!

Checking In

By now at least a handful of you must be wondering what we’ve been up to over the last few weeks. We apologize for not being able to put up any real updates lately, but fear not, you dedicated few, as we haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. Although it’s felt that way sometimes over the past few weeks since we left Queenstown, traveling through Central Otago.

To be honest, the last couple weeks haven’t been the most thrilling, though there have been some pretty interesting moments. For the past week we’ve been wwoofing for a German couple at their café in Lawrence (more on that in a later post), a rural town in Otago. We escaped ‘to town’, Dunedin, on Tuesday, one of our days off to get back to civilization for a bit, where we tried to update the blog. Unfortunately Blogger wasn’t in the mood to cooperate that day, so we had to punt til today. We’ve just been to a rugby match between Otago’s team, the Highlanders (in a town named Dunedin the Scottish influence is strong), and an Australian side, Brumbies. The Highlanders were unfortunately crushed by a score of 22-10, but we still enjoyed the match.

As far as our trip goes, right now we’re at a bit of an impasse, trying to figure out what to do until the winter season really starts. Becky has an interview for a ticketing position at Treble Cone coming up soon, but bummer for me as I didn’t score even an interview. Hindsight being 20/20 I probably should’ve applied for less sexy positions than lift operator without previous experience, theme park or otherwise, but oh well, perhaps it will work out better somehow?

You can definitely feel that it’s in-between seasons here at the moment, with colder weather gradually making its presence felt, and not much going on of note. (As a side note, you can always tell when the weather is getting cold in NZ: the telltale smell of wood and coal burning in towns. We were somewhat amazed to learn that in Christchurch, a city of 300,000 people, they have a smog problem due in large part to wood fires in people’s homes.) Although our viewpoint may be at least partly influenced by the fact that we’ve been in some pretty sparsely inhabited areas lately.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to grab jobs in Wanaka, but even then that won’t start until mid-to-late June, so we have a bit of time until then. Which leaves us 5-6 weeks without much of a definitive plan. We don’t really feel like doing much more driving through NZ right now, as we’ve driven through most of the areas that are within about 8 hrs from here, and it would feel too much like backtracking to go back up the South Island now. We’d like to save some sights for when Linda visits in a few months, as well. Wwoofing has also been steadily losing much of its appeal, as it has been dawning on us why people generally insist on getting paid for their labor.

So, perhaps we’ll go to Australia for a few weeks now! But more likely we’ll just try to get some temporary work near somewhere like Dunedin. I’m sure we’ll figure out something to do over the next few weeks, and I’m not just comment fishing here, but if anybody has any brilliant ideas, the suggestion box is officially open!