It is possible to eat your weight in food...

'I should put a bolt through you just to be safe.'
- Shadow of a Dark Queen by Raymond E. Feist

In preparation for my food being reduced to this for most of a weekend (yeah, terribly appealing)...


...on Friday I had a day of extreme eating out with my mate B in Christchurch. After all, I needed the fueling for my epic race the next day (which turned out to be a bit more epic than I imagined!).

Last time I visited we attempted to go to The Orange Tree but it was closed. This time luck was on our side...yay! The Orange Tree seems to specialise in all kinds of special diets but the main attraction was that it could make vegan pancakes. They were served with caramalised bananas, fresh fruit, jam and maple syrup. Oh man, they were seriously awesome. I have to come back here again!


I also had a ginger chai latte with rice milk on the suggestion of the waitress and it was delicious. The ginger gave it a real, um, zing (?). Yum.


We went climbing after breakfast so got lunch to takeaway...at Soul Food where I just had to get the vegan BLT again (which was served with 3 different salady things). If you come to Christchurch...go here and get this. It's good.


I also got a ginger slice to take away for afternoon tea. Perfectly decadent and unnecessary but it had to be done.


Then came the main event...dinner. We decided (okay, I decided and B agreed) that we had to go to The Lotus Heart. I think this has to be my favourite vegetarian food place. I can never visit Christchurch without eating here at least once. I started with their wonderful house-made ginger beer.


B was getting some fancy entree but I was feeling like fries. Don't know why. So I ordered their fries with house-made tomato sauce and vegan cashew aioli...their aioli is so incredible. B was impressed with my powers to almost demolish the entire pots of both sauces!


I really wanted to order the Sun Burger again for my main but I resisted and ordered something different instead...the Masala Dosa which is a South Indian lentil and rice pancake filled with potato masala filling and is served with rasam (which is apparently like a sort of soup) and coconut chutney. It was HUGE and defeated me (well, I'm sure I could have tried harder to finish it if I wasn't planning on dessert). But boy was it delicious. Definitely one to order again!!


I couldn't decide on dessert so I listened to my stomach which was calling out for chocolate so I wasn't very original and ordered the vegan chocolate cake with some kind of berry sorbet. It was delicious.


Yep, that's a lot of food (and very few veggies in sight) but boy was it worth it!

So what was I doing this past weekend? TWALK - a crazy twenty-four hour orienteering event held every year in Canterbury somewhere...and you get to dress up!


Yep, there was snow (think patches of nearly waist-deep snow at 2am on the top of a mountain...it was cold!)...and it was awesome fun (okay, there were some patches where I hated it but that's the same with any race). Can't wait until next year...


Anyway, I won't bore you now (or have you think I'm too crazy) but when I get a chance (and have caught up on some much needed sleep) I'll post a race report over here.

Blue moon adventures

This water gladdened the heart. It was something other than a mere beverage. Its sweetness was born of our march beneath the stars, of the pulley's song and the exertion of my arms. It was good for the heart, like a present.
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

So really, when you have a bit of a cold the best way to recover is to rest, take care of yourself and keep warm right?

Hmmm...I'm not known to be good at resting or taking a break. Instead I travelled to Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula with my trusty teammate O, and we embarked on a mega mission which was quite the opposite of all the ways one should look after oneself with a cold - the ARC Operation Blue Moon adventure race! You could expect nothing less really... Rest? Not happening. Taking care of myself? Well, that all depends on how you look at it right? Keeping warm? Well, I did have to swim (clothes, shoes, pack and all) at various points and tramp up a river so that also was not happening. I survived (clearly) but the cold is still lingering around which is frustrating with an off-road half this Saturday. Oh well, still a few days to get rid of it!

Anyway, onto real food ('cause you don't really want to hear about race food!)...

The Chef and I seem to eat out a lot (although it goes through fazes) but we tend to often go to the same places. We're pretty much regulars at The Blue Bird 'cause it's always quick, has good food and is fairly healthy. Plus they sometimes have my favourite dish in the whole wide world (okay, that might be an exaggeration but I do love it) - the kumara chip-topped tofu spinach pies (try saying that 10 times fast!).


There's not a great deal of places I can go and get vegan dessert but you can rely on The Blue Bird for awesome crumble with soy ice cream. I have been known to come here for dinner and just eat crumble...one hell of a big bowl of the stuff!


I thought it was about time I did another shoutout to the claypot place in Food Alley too which I regularly eat at with my cousin D. We are so regular that they know my order asking, "number 27?" every time either of us goes up to pay. Perhaps it's because the tofu dish is not ordered very regularly?


Across from the claypot place is the fresh juice place. D has her regular order but I like to mix it up every now and then.


This is rockmelon and apple. Really good and I like how you can see them juicing everything while you wait.

But I do still cook! I think I like home-cooked meals the best personally but going out is still fun. One of my flatmates described my cooking style as chilled out which, although made me laugh, is probably true. She was referring to the way The Chef was watching me cook and that I wasn't to let him change my style. I'm too lazy anyway so there's not much chance of that. But if he can teach me how to chop things faster then I'll be thrilled...sometimes it's all about timesaving! This is a good example...tofu stir-fry with boiled then fried potatoes. I've never pressed tofu in my life. I generally drain it and squeeze some of the liquid out with a paper towel. Then marinating. My tofu would be extremely lucky to get marinated for more than an hour. It's still delicious!


But basically I get home and ponder what I'm feeling like eating then open the fridge and pantry and see what's there and off we go. Then I just chuck in a little bit of this and a little bit of that and generally wing it...works (almost) every time!

Hmmm, this post is a tad disjointed...sorry about that. My head is all over the place going at a million miles an hour! Anyway, The Chef is cooking me dinner tonight so I should get to relax ☺

Calamity in Cambridge

We are disappointed that you see fit to make light of our latest research on communication between the living and the living impaired. At this very moment we are rolling out Hades Explorer 4.0, heralding an unparalleled increase in the volume of living-dead communications. You will be communicating with us soon, one way or the other.
- How to Make a Tornado edited by Mick O'Hare

Wow! What an awesome, busy and exhausting couple of weeks it's been but here I am, still alive and still (vaguely) awake! 2010 is shaping up to be amazing. This past weekend I've been orienteering down in the Hawkes Bay (and sleeping in a leaking tent!) but the weekend before that I was hanging out around Cambridge for an adventure race that my friend SO dubbed the Death Race! At times during the race I wondered if he might have been right but here I am, still alive and loving it (my teammate and I clearly forgot all the pain and suffering and have entered our next one in March)!

Ever wondered what kind of gear you take on an Adventure Race? Well, here's some of my gear out ready to pack for a roughly 16 hour race (no, you don't get a break...I got asked this the other day and I thought it was quite amusing) I did a couple of weekends ago. Yes, there are 4 pairs of shoes there (different shoes for different stages - super-light offroad shoes, offroad shoes, running shoes and mountain bike shoes).


What did I eat during the race? Hahaha! I think I worked out it was 4 protein bars, a small handful of vegan gummy bears and 3 energy blast cookies (recipe to come when I am more organised). Oh, and I drunk a truckload of electrolytes. Yeah, felt pretty good apart from one section where I hadn't been paying attention and had gone nearly an hour and a half without eating anything. Probably should have eaten something more than a cookie before I collapsed into my tent at 2am but sleep seemed more important at the time!

My awesome flatmates had vegan chocolate cake from Blue Bird waiting at home for me the next day. There's no photo because it didn't last long enough!

Fueling up on the days before a big race is always super important. I'm still on a stir-fry for breakfast kick (listening to your body is always important). Breakfast on the day before the race was stir-fry with a chopped up veggie pattie and quinoa. Awesome!


My favourite pre-race dinner is always satay tofu on brown rice and this race was no exception. Ah, I love this meal! It even ended up being my breakfast before the race too (eaten cold out of a plastic container in the car on our way down during the early hours of the morning).


I swear it's way tastier than it looks! I even used a mixture of cashew and peanut butters just to mix things up a bit.

Racing through time

Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.
- Nation by Terry Pratchett

Ooo, today is a good day! I've just entered a longish adventure race in mid-January with a friend of mine so am very excited about that (yep, people do say I'm slightly crazy but everyone needs a slice of craziness in their lives). Better start getting my milage up in preparation! This is also my last day of work for the year (scary thought...not back till mid January unless something comes up earlier).

Anyway, back to the food. It was my brother's birthday earlier in the week so naturally that called a celebration and cake.


I made my go-to carrot cake from The Damn Tasty Vegan Baking Guide (this time I used pear puree instead of apple sauce and dates instead of raisins) and, as usual, it was delicious and perfect. I love this recipe (if you don't have this book, it's almost identical to the one in Kris' other book, 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes).

We had dinner at my parents house and I brought along some Fry's vegetarian sausage rolls to add to my dinner.


My cousin D decided she wanted to try a bit and reckoned they tasted remarkably like the real thing. I'm never sure if this is a good thing, a bad thing or just a thing but I guess if your average person thinks they taste good (whether it tastes like the real thing or not) then that's gotta be a good thing.

Cake...good for my tummy!


We've got our family Christmas party on Saturday night...ARGH!!! I can't believe how fast this year has gone. It's crazy. Feels like only a few months ago it was Christmas last year! Come back next time for lots of Christmas food...there are going to be a few busy days in the kitchen ahead.

A nak'd trek?

Was it her imagination, or did he seem slightly less thrilled to see her than she was to see him? No matter; men were silly about things like public displays of affection."
- The Temptation of the Night Jasmine by Lauren Willig

I arrived home last night cold and wet after some training in the rain to discover a package waiting for me inside. I was so excited that I started opening right there and then, all the while dripping on the carpet! Yay, my package swap from Emma of Student Vegan from the UK had arrived (Emma, I hope mine hasn't got lost in the mail!). It totally made my night!


The package was filled with a whole lot of bars from Natural Balance Foods which we can't get here in New Zealand, an apple pie lara bar and some stir-fry sauce. It all looked so delicious and I can't wait to try everything.

Now over the weekend we've been down at a place called Mountain Valley which is, if you know your way around New Zealand, between Napier and Taupo off SH5. We stayed in this gorgeous little A-frame chalet looking down towards the Mohaka River.


The scenery was so beautiful and everything was so peaceful and still...but I wasn't down there for a relaxing weekend. My team and I were down there for the Macpac Autumn Challenge Women's Adventure Race, quite the opposite of relaxing and peaceful!

The race starts off with a mad dash to the rafts where you pair up with another team and paddle 18km down the Mohaka River. It's incredibly scenic but it's difficult to take in with burning arms and the sound of your rafting guide pushing you to paddle faster!


Once at the end of the rafting you've then got to hop on your bike for a very steep ride/push pretty high up into the surrounding mountains before decending back down to the river for the final stage.


The last section (our team's strength) is on foot where you must navigate yourself to the checkpoints marked on your maps and then back to the finish. We made it back just as the light was beginning to fade to be greeted by the cheers of our support crew and the wafting smell of dinner being cooked. Awesome :)

After the race they provided dinner which, unlike last year, had some great vegetarian options. I fueled up on vege burgers and an awesome curried rice...much needed after a hard day's racing. No pictures but trust me, it was delicious!

Tonic and Grin

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.

Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked.

A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!

Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?

How much can you lose? How much can you win?

- Oh, The Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss

It's been pretty hectic round here lately...

The weekend after we got back from our South Island adventure I was competing in TONIC (The Orienteering North Island Champs), 4 days of full-on racing on various maps in Woodhill Forest. From fast, open forest to thick native bush to the Maze, an open area filled with impassable patches of scrub that proved a technical minefield it was one very intense weekend.

Here's the last control on Day 2 (this course was one hell of a bush crash) peeping out from the forest.

The view down towards the West Coast and the Kaipara Harbour on the road into Day 3.

Fruit salad in the sun after Day 3's racing. Glorious.

The next weekend was spent putting in some last minute mountain bike training at Woodhill before competing in the P6 the following weekend. The P6 is an annual 6 hour adventure race held North of Auckland by Lactic Turkey, known for some pretty fun and crazy events. This was no exception. The event involved mountain biking (always my bane), running and tubbing (swimming down a river inside an inner tube from a car tyre) as well as mystery activities to earn extra points all while trying to navigate your way around the course.

Chaos as the beginning of leg 2 as everyone tries to work out exactly what's going on.

The P6 was our first race together as just the 2 of us and hopefully not our last. Just next time we'll remember to bring sunblock!

While visiting my new local health food shop, Huckleberry Farms, in search of lara bars for the various races I discovered they now also stock a selection of Clif and Luna bars so obviously I had to get some to test...

First up, Luna Bars. So far I've tried Caramel Nut Brownie, Cookies 'n Cream Delight and Chocolate Peppermint Stick. Honestly? They taste kinda artificial or something but I keep desperately trying to like them (they look so pretty after all!). Perhaps a non-chocolate flavour will be better. I have an Iced Oatmeal Raisin flavour so I'm hanging great hopes on it!

Clif Bars. Here I've only tried the Chocolate Brownie and Oatmeal Raisin Walnut flavours and J has tried the Cranberry Apple Cherry. I definitely prefer the Clif bars to the Luna bars but the Chocolate Brownie was way too dense and sweet, especially before a race! Next time, stick to the fruity, oatmeal flavours!

So basically, Lara Bars win hands down! I've yet to meet a flavour I don't like.

Amongst all our adventuring we've still had to eat. Here's last night's dinner - Pumpkin Gnocchi with soy sausages, capsicum, courgette, mushrooms, baby spinach and tinned tomatoes. One day I will have to try my hand at making gnocchi but for now Delmaine make a pretty good version for those days you don't have much time to spend in the kitchen (like every day lately!).

Challenging autumn in pink

In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do. Kate covers her mouth with her hand. She backs out of the kitchen door, bumping into my father, who fumbles by cannot catch her as she scrambles upstairs. I hear the door to our room slam shut. My mother, of course, goes after her.
So I do what I do best. I move in the opposite direction.
- My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

I've done quite a few different sporting events in my time: orienteering of all descriptions (even relays in the dark!), rogaining and both road and off road running races but up until recently I'd never tried my hand at adventure racing. The Macpac Autumn Challenge Women’s Adventure Race seemed like the perfect place to start. You compete in teams of 3 and the race involves rafting, hiking/running and mountain biking all the while navigating where you are supposed to go. Well, I’m terrified of falling into the water (I’m fine if I’m swimming in it) and I truly suck at biking, let alone mountain biking. But hey, I can run and I sure can navigate so there was nothing really to lose.After a 2 hour crash course in mountain biking with J and his friends at the Woodhill Bike Park (as well as a bit of road cycling and spin class) I was fairly confident that I could get round without too much disaster. After all, the event info had said that limited experience was fine as it wouldn't be too tricky. Little did I know what was ahead...but hindsight is a wonderful thing!

The race was based in Taupo and the night before involved a crash course in rafting followed by race briefing and the handing out of maps. At briefing we also got our race packs which, for once, contained something I could actually eat, mini Lara bars!! I managed to score 3 different types: pistachio, cashew cookie and cherry pie.J and my friend from Palmerston North were on support crew duty which basically meant making sure everything was ready for us at transition points like moving the bikes (and pumping tires, testing gears and any other bike maintenance between thrashings), lining up clothing or footwear changes, and making sure liquid and food were waiting ready for us at each transition. Oh, and taking photos of us looking rather the worse for wear!!

The race started at the Taupo equestrian centre with a 1.5km run to the rafts (over some equestrian water jumps!) where you then paddled 8km down the Waikato River to the next transition point. You then hopped onto your bike for a 15km mountain bike back to the start area. Here you dumped your bikes and set off on an 11km run along the edge of the river up to the Huka Falls to the third transition area. Here you jumped back on your bike and headed up into the Craters of the Moon (Wairakei Forest) single track mountain bike trails. Once at the Craters of the Moon car park you ran round the boardwalk to collect clues then picked up your bike again and rode back to the transition area again where you then navigated your way to Spa Park where there would be a short orienteering course leading to the finish. Confused yet? Exhausted?!

I could give you a run down of the event but that would take ages (well, it was a LONG race…we finished in about 8 hours 54 minutes) so I’ll give you some highlights (or lowlights depending on the angle you’re standing at!).

• the weather was not exactly pretty but not awful. It mostly drizzled all day. At least it wasn’t too cold though.
• wetsuits are not flattering on ANYONE but for some reason J enjoyed taking photos of us waddling around in them. They are also hellishly difficult to run in.
• the water level of the Waikato River was down quite a lot which meant not many rapids and therefore a whole lot more paddling to keep the raft moving. But I didn’t fall in so it was all good!

• getting out of wetsuits and wet socks in a hurry is no easy task especially when your arms are dead from paddling hard out for an hour.
• my first fall from the bike came in the first section where I arrived at CP1 and skidded round the corner in the gravel right in front of one of our top adventure racers (and orienteers). I felt pretty embarrassed.
• somehow my tyre managed to be a bit flat by the end of the first mountain bike stage despite checking everything before the race. Lucky for support crews I guess (thanks J) so I didn’t have to fix anything!
• the first running leg was along the edge of the Waikato River (after a brief struggle through some blackberry). One of our team members was struggling a bit so we just took it nice and easy (that’s what happens when you head out madly at the start).
• we crossed the Huka Falls (always an impressive sight) twice – once during the first running leg when it was nice and quiet, and one on the last leg to the finish when it was covered in tourists and their umbrellas oblivious to the fact that we were in a race and therefore in a hurry to cross the bridge.
• I don’t think I ate very much at all during the race; just drunk water and Mizone Rapid and ate a little bit of Whittakers dark Ghana chocolate and a couple of mini lara bars. You don’t really seem to feel like eating, just quick bursts of energy to keep you going. The main thing is not to get dehydrated which is where the Mizone comes in.
• the second mountain bike leg was an absolute killer. Not only are the tracks in there rough, narrow, incredibly windy and steep but the map we were given of the tracks was not particularly accurate.

• I had a few impressive falls off my bike in the forest during the second mountain bike leg. One of my team mates was not so lucky as she came off in the gravel and ended up with blood everywhere.
• my other team member had her bike break on her about two thirds of the way through the second mountain bike leg! The back gear thingy (see, I know heaps about bikes!!) broke and we had to break the chain off so she could wheel it out.
• by the time the chain on my bike came off and got stuck I was too weak to tip my bike over to fix it but the spirit out there was amazing as another team stopped to help me. Luckily it was fixable (but took some serious work).
• I had no idea there were places in Taupo like Craters of the Moon (the board walk we had to run around after the second mountain bike leg). It’s a highly active geothermal area NW of Taupo and really awesome.
• we finished the third leg of the mountain bike just slightly too late to do the orienteering section.
• Ironic really since this was going to be the part I was going to (finally) excel in!
• the final run to the finish was beautiful. There are parts of the Waikato River which are so clear you can see right down to the rocks at the bottom.
• our support crew were asleep in the car by the finish line when we came in…
• even my jaw was weak by the time we finished ‘cause I was exhausted just trying to chew through my dinner!
• we all got a free lunch the following day! Which we followed up by eating copious amounts of sorbet!!

So after all that will I do another adventure race? Hell yes. But next time I will do a whole lot more mountain bike training!