Virgil Evetts

It started off so well, one of those effortlessly lovely warm-weather meals. Pan-fried gurnard, fresh tomato sambal, gently sautéed slices of Perla new potatoes (more on them here), and a generous sprinkling of milky, sweet pine nuts.

And thus began four bitter, bitter days – as in everything I ate and drank tasted appallingly bitter and rankly medicinal.  Ever the optimist, I assumed the universe had simply grown tired of merely cuffing me and had seen fit to dismiss me altogether with a wee stroke or perhaps a touch of the old brain tumour. But, just in case, I decided to indulge in a little web-based self diagnosis.  After about a day of increasingly jittery clicking I established that I was almost certainly not dying, but I almost certainly did have a case of the absurdly named Pine Mouth. I kid you not.

Around a decade ago Doctors in Europe and the United States started seeing cases of otherwise-healthy people reporting an unpleasant bitter taste whenever they ate or drank. The effect lasted from a few days to almost a month. The only common factor among the cases was that the subjects had all consumed pine nuts around 24 hours before the symptoms began.

As the plot thickened it also became apparent that the pine nuts in question were exclusively of the low (ish) cost Chinese kind. It’s a little-known fact that China is one of the world’s largest producers of pine nuts, and until a decade ago, without incident.  So what gives? What happened to Chinese pine nuts 10 years ago? The most obvious answers- pesticide contaminations and rancid nuts – were both quickly ruled out as possible causes. The most popular and plausible current theory (as yet unproven), is that around 10 years ago Chinese growers started adulterating (quite possibly unknowingly) their harvests with a small percentage of a previously untargeted species of mildly toxic pine nut.

There is some evidence to suggest susceptibility to the condition may be hereditary, and even then appears to be highly random. The majority of Chinese pine nuts – fresh or stale – will not cause Pine Mouth. Interestingly though, despite thousands of reported cases (and undoubtedly many more undiagnosed) of Pine Mouth, neither the Chinese pine nut industry nor wholesalers worldwide have  shown much interest in stopping the problem, or at least identifying the cause.  Fortunately, European pine nuts (pinus pinea) do not cause Pine Mouth;  unfortunately they are hard to find and are heinously expensive. Never the less, in lieu of some pretty compelling persuasion, I won’t be taking the risk with the Chinese product again.

On a lighter note: now that my sense of taste is about 95% restored, I’m very much looking forward to Taste of Auckland 2010. This event, held at Victoria Park from November 18th to 21st is effectively (and quite smartly, I think), a hybrid of an expo and a food and wine festival, and features the edible and quaffable wares some of the region’s finest food producers, restaurants and wineries.

A number of things about Taste of Auckland appeal to me:

It’s at Victoria Park, a lovely and a woefully underutilised venue.

I missed the Food Show this year, so this should satisfy my grabby need for free samples.

Most Food and Wine festivals are held in high summer when it’s too bloody hot to be outside, and too bloody easy to get sozzled.

What’s not to like?

To win tickets  to Taste Auckland click here.

Virgil Evetts

The following are some of my least favourite arguments against eating meat.  Included are my standard responses. Hopefully this will save us a bit of time and effort later on.

• ‘Eating animals is cruel’: Come on, really? Nature is cruel. Get over it.
• ‘You have no right to take the life of another animal’: Yes I do. I’m an omnivore; I’m designed to consume flesh. I have both right and motivation.
• ‘Eating animals makes you a murderer’: No, killing another person makes you a murderer. (The jury’s still out on killing dumb-dumbs though.)
• ‘How would you like to be kept in a cage, awaiting your death?’: Obviously I wouldn’t like that much at all, because I’m a fully self-aware organism . Most free-range or open-farmed animals in all probability have no concept of their captivity, let alone the finality of their situation. You are confusing farms with death row. I hasten to add that the same cannot be said for factory-farmed cattle, crate-raised pigs or battery chickens.

And so the naivety goes on, and my interest in engaging dwindles.

The thing is, I know that my opinions are just MY opinions, but as is rather de rigour with agitators in general, animal-rights campaigners tend to regard their opinions as absolutes. I don’t believe in absolutes: there is simply what you believe and what other people believe.

I firmly believe that it’s ok to eat animals, but take the ethical provenance of any meat I consume very seriously.  In other words, I do not believe that it’s ok to eat factory-farmed pork and chicken, nor battery-farmed eggs. And you better believe I judge you if you don’t agree. But hey, what do I know?

This week sees the official launch of the RNZSPCA Blue Tick animal welfare accreditation programme, for providers of cruelty -free egg and meat products. I like the RNZSPCA – well who doesn’t?  I particularly appreciate their realistic approach to commercial animal welfare. They don’t judge meat eaters – nor farmers for that matter. They provide guidelines for humane farming practice and animal husbandry. This is infinitely more constructive than ‘liberating’ chickens and hurling abuse at anyone who enjoys a crispy rasher or two. The Blue Tick scheme is a way of identifying producers (with a distinctive Blue Tick, no less) that offer the highest possible level of care and humane treatment to livestock. I trust the RNZSPCA unreservedly, and the Blue Tick now forms the basis of how I choose pork and chicken products. No Blue Tick, no sale. To say that I urge you to do the same is the extent of my animals-rights campaigning here.

On a less preachy note, I went along to the official media launch/brunch for the Blue Tick programme, held atop the Hyatt Regency in Auckland the other day. Keynote speaker, and the nation’s favourite chefing son, Peter Gordon, talked at length and with some conviction about his personal commitment to ethically raised animal products. Hopefully a patron of his calibre will give serious cache to the Tick. He also designed the not-insubstantial brunch menu, which consisted of various clever ways with free-range eggs, bacon, ham, pork and duck. Star highlights for me were the smoked salmon with ham on a kumara rosti, with a quite-miraculous clear tomato jelly; and crispy deep-fried eggs served with a spicy citrus dressing. The boy sure can cook.

I will leave you now with a rather sobering story PG told about pigs. A group of pig farmers he knows in Spain kept losing pigs from one particular paddock. Convinced that swine-rustlers were to blame, they set up night-vision cameras and waited to pounce. But the cameras didn’t capture any night time raids, but instead revealed some alarmingly clever hams-to-be. The pigs had outwitted the normally impassable barrier that is a cattle-stop. They dropped and rolled. Simple yet brilliant! Thank god chickens, sheep and cows are so blissfully dim.

For more information about the Blue Tick, click here.

A few months ago after getting a book out of the library about Afghanistan food and recipes, we had a go at making Afghani bread and a beef kebab. Not having a charcoal grill handy in the kitchen and it being winter, I made the beef into meatballs. The bread worked out well, but after checking some images on the internet, it appears I didn’t do enough dents down my flatbread. What we needed was a baseline to compare our Afgan food to. What is it supposed to be like?

Just up the road from us is a little Afghan restaurant, and we have been meaning to give it ago. Our friend Liz, who has lived for a long time in Pakistan and travelled in Afghanistan, was keen to come and we welcomed her guidance. We decided to try it this week. Karl went in to see if he could book a table, and the guy at the counter said yes and said he would reserve a table for us.

There was a pause and then Karl said “Do you want to take my name?”


“No, no” he replied. “I’ll remember you” and heartily shook his hand.


We turned up at the restaurant the next evening and took our seats. Liz hadn’t quite arrived and from the kitchen came the question;

“Shall I cook for your friend?”


“Yes please.” We replied.

No ordering—we were in the hands of our chef!

So we waited to see what would come to our table. Liz arrived, the kids watched the goings on in the kitchen and then he bought our food over. He had made big plates of seasoned rice and on top were chicken and beef kebabs. We had lettuce with half a lemon as a side dish. He had made smaller helpings for the kids with the side for them as well. So no difficult menu to negotiate. The taste? It was really good. The chicken was charred on the edges but still juicy in the middle. The meat was beautifully spiced but not overly chilli. The beef was tender, delicious and aromatic without being too hot (the kids did find the beef a bit too hot for their tastebuds but not until they had eaten most of it)!

We had heard the bread here was fabulous but unfortunately that night they hadn’t made bread, so another trip will have to be planned if we want to try that. Next time they said just to let them know we wanted bread and they would fire up the big tandoor oven.
Liz taught us Tashakkur – which is thank you in Afghani.
We finished with a cup of green tea and some raisins. Afghanistan used to be known for its high quality raisins and sultanas, a real delicacy. Before the Soviet invasion in 1979 they were one of the biggest exporters of raisins.

It was far from a high class restaurant meal. It was a bit odd, the ambience was a little lacking, but the food was absolutely top-notch, and isn’t that what you go out to a restaurant for anyway? We were sure we were eating the best Afgan cuisine in Christchurch. And I think it’s worth having a bit of an adventure into some of these lesser known places. You have to be a bit brave, but the rewards are worth it when you stumble onto a local gem! We’ll be back!

 Fiona Summerfield

Summerfields Foods
207 Waimairi Road, Ilam, Christchurch

open 11am-7pm Tues – Sat
[email protected]
ph 03 357 0067

Virgil Evetts

Curse the universe and to hell with synchronicity. I had written a lengthy, but on reflection rather dry, piece about the ethics of eating seafood, but then opened the Herald on Wednesday morning to find what was effectively the same article. Only better. So I was thrown into a flurry of re-tooling.  The things I do for your reading ‘pleasure’…

It’s an oft-quoted absurdity and truism that New Zealand, although largely a maritime nation, is not a nation of fish-eaters. Oh sure we can talk the talk, about fishing, about our ‘national love of seafood’, fond memories of  kai moana by the sea, blah blah blah; but when it comes to action most of us don’t stray much further than sporadic F&Cs.  To a certain extent this has applied to me too. My local fish shop keeps very peculiar hours (when I asked what time they closed recently I was told “sometimes six o’clock, sometimes seven, maybe four. It depends…”) and their prices are extortionate even by fresh fish standards. My only other local option is the supermarket which is open pretty much all the time and offers a decent enough variety of fish at passable prices; but the shoddy quality and dubious freshness has until recently been the stuff of local legend. So for quite a few years, buying fish has just been too much bloody bother most of the time and I’ve invariably ended up opting for a nice bit of lamb instead.

But lately, and rather abruptly, the quality and freshness of the fish being flogged at my local supermarket has improved dramatically, putting fish back on the house menu again. 

As a cook I am at my least adventurous when it comes to cooking fish, but not for lack of imagination. Quite simply, it’s nigh on impossible to improve upon fresh fish, so why try? For this reason I believe deep fried battered fresh (or ‘wet’ fish) can be pretty close to perfection. Sadly, really good examples are rare, with freezer-burnt mass-processed hoki and tarakihi predominating. 

For my own return to cooking and eating fresh fish I’ve been enjoying a dish I was practically raised on – fish floured and fried in butter, a quick deglaze of the pan with white wine, served with Pommes dauphinoise and  a fuss-free little salad on the side. It’s old fashioned bistro food ( the sort my mother cooked in bistros back in the olden days), but remains as tasty, smart and pretty as it was way back when..

Thai curries, made from perfectly decent premade pastes, have been  on weekly turn-around in my house for years. Usually I make these with prawns or chicken breast, depending on what’s lurking in the freezer, but just lately I’ve turned my attention to fresh fish. The trick is to drop the fish into the spluttering sauce just moments before serving, leaving the fish only barely cooked and still brimming with sweetness and flavour.  A whole steamed snapper served with sesame and ginger sauce or similar is pretty fine too, but for reasons of grave ethical concern, I no longer partake of snapper. It’s been grossly overfished and needs a rest, or possibly an all-out ban on harvesting.

I can’t categorically say why, as nation we are so reluctant to eat fish (nor why we like to convince ourselves otherwise), but I rather suspect it’s mostly to do with price. Fresh fish is very expensive, but then so it should be should be. It’s almost entirely wild-caught, from an environment that couldn’t be less hospitable to humans. The costs of catching fish and getting it to market are huge – fishermen have to purchase quotas and then fuel, insure, crew, register and maintain ships.  A patch of bad weather can ground entire fleets and cost the industry tens of thousands of dollars. On the flipside one might argue that as rapers and pillagers of the sea, the fishing industry should be scuttled rather than thanked.  You might very well say that…

But as I said at the beginning, this blog is not really about the ethics of eating seafood…not anymore. For more on that see the excellent piece in Wednesday’s Herald.  All I’m going to say on the matter is if, like me, you have neglected fresh fish for a while, then to get thee to the fishmongers  to rediscovers one of life’s true pleasures. But shop responsibly, be informed, and follow this link…