Stuff Digital Edition

Too much food, too little time

Lorna Thornber lorna.thornber@stuff.co.nz

When Stuff Travel news director Juliette Sivertsen asked the team to share their favourite international food experiences, I didn’t know where to start. Was it biting into a big, white ball of burrata in a dream of an Italian village on the Amalfi Coast, so delighted by the delicately sweet mozzarella with its cream-soaked stracciatella centre that I abandoned plans to use it in a salad for dinner, and devoured it whole on the steps of the piazza?

Or was it tucking into a brick-size slab of saffron rice cake stuffed with chicken marinated in yoghurt, and ruby red barberries in an ancient mudbrick village in Iran?

Discovering snails are delicious at a celebrity chefowned casino restaurant in Las Vegas, which served them encased in puff pastry made extra decadent with the addition of garlic butter spiked with Chartreuse?

Slurping a boozy bowl of ‘‘drunken sauna shrimp’’ (steamed shrimp soaked in rice wine) outside an authentic Chinese restaurant in an authentic looking Portuguese neighbourhood in the original home of fusion cuisine that is Macau?

Semi-curing a severe case of jetlag with a plate of fresh mango, coconut cream and sticky rice dyed pale blue with the edible flowers of the butterfly pea plant at a healthconscious cafe in Chiang Mai?

Or was it donning an adult bib to catch the inevitable blood-red spatter that came from four ravenous travellers attacking a giant crab swimming in chilli-infused tomato sauce, at the No Signboard Seafood restaurant in Singapore?

Each of these experiences was a revelation of sorts; an edible insight into how the locals live their daily lives.

I returned from Italy determined to make caprese salads for my work lunches, but it’s not quite the same when you are using exported supermarket mozzarella, watery tomatoes, and basil from the plant you are barely keeping alive in your kitchen.

I am not a good enough cook to attempt the other dishes, although I have come up with a semi-decent cheat’s version of mango sticky rice using instant basmati.

In the end, I settled on a buffet at a busy tourist attraction for the food piece, which may come as a surprise given they are not exactly renowned for their cutting-edge cuisine.

But that didn’t matter. The one I over-indulged in, in Rarotonga, was filled with enough local comfort food for guests to help themselves to mammoth portions.

You can read about my colleagues’ selections on pages 34-35. Just don’t start it on an empty stomach.

January 23, 2022

en-nz

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://stuff.pressreader.com/article/282265258808458

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