Food to Revel in

And now, at last I had found the way, or thought I had. At the next darkness of the moon I would find out whether my years of study had been in vain. I would realize my heart's desire or I would find my hopes dashed to pieces...
- The War of the Flowers by Tad Wiliams

I have a new find!! There is this cafe on K'Road called Revel and they have heaps of vegan food! I can't believe it! The worst of it is that I used to live just round the corner from this cafe and walk past it every day on my way to work and I never even went inside!

I didn't really look at the menu but the cabinet was filled with delicious vegan delights. I spent ages trying to decide what I wanted (okay, to be honest, what I really wanted was to have ALL of it!). In the end I decided on this...


A mini chocolate cake with berries and a lush chocolate icing. It was divine. I cannot even begin to describe how delicious this was.

The next time I stopped by I was in need of a takeaway lunch and their vegan sandwich caught my eye.


Filled with a decent amount of veges and hummus, it was perfect heated slightly in the microwave at work.

I couldn't go past a sweet treat too...


...a Chocolate and Pumpkin cupcake! It had a kind of a jafa flavour to it which was cool.

I got an apricot and almond cupcake another time I popped past Revel which was pretty good (although there was something about the taste that was a bit weird...too much almond flavour perhaps?).

Now, beans on toast always remind me of this old TV ad about being a poor student living on baked beans and weetbix and many weekend lunches as kids of baked beans in our toastie pies. I'm guessing it was probably a Watties ad but I can't remember. Anyway, I was in Revel this morning and feeling rather down and in need of a good breakfast and I was faced with a choice and one of them was beans on toast. Normally I would pass this by because it always seems to sound so boring but after Moira from An Auckland Vegan gave them such a highly favourable review on her blog I thought I'd give them a chance (after all, she did say it was the best vegan brunch in Auckland which seemed like pretty high praise).


So what did I think? Actually, I think it might quite possibly be one of the best breakfasts I've ever had! Sorry about the bad photograph but basically it's a mixture of several different kinds of beans in a delicious sauce of some kind sitting on deliciously thick grainy bread and topped with a whole lot of different toasted nuts. I cannot even begin to describe its awesomeness! Definitely improved my morning! Eat this if you are ever anywhere near Revel okay?

By the time I'd finished breakfast it was hosing down with rain outside and I wasn't really that keen to head out on my way so I picked up a sweet treat to look forward to once I got home.


This is their Midnight Chocolate Cake (well, it's more of a tart really but hey, names aren't really that important). Very rich but oh so good. Chocolate could brighten my day just about any time!

Keep up the good awesome

'I could tell you my adventures - beginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly; 'but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.'

- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

I'm so excited I can barely sit still to type this...my piano arrived a couple of hours ago!! It stayed at my parents when I moved out but I finally have room for it where we're living now so after many years apart (okay, so I would go round to their place pretty much just to visit my piano!) we are finally reunited...and I've been playing pretty much nonstop since then!


The keys look like slabs of white chocolate with licorice strips...I must be hungry! Actually, it reminds me of when I was quite little and my eldest brother made me a piano cake for my birthday. Mum joked it was his first engineering masterpiece!

Anyway, as you may know, J and I were away last weekend competing in the Great Lake Relay round Lake Taupo. The night before we left for I had dinner out with a group of friends at Thai Eden. Thai has to be one of my favourite foods. You can't go past a creamy coconut milk curry filled with tofu and veges. Fills in all the gaps.


By the time we ordered I was starving so I shared a starter with another of my friends doing the relay with us...Pak Tod, a selection of tempura vegetables with sweet chilli sauce. They even had tempura baby corn!


For my mains I decided to indulge in the Panang Tofu, a rich coconut milk red curry. When I make curry at home I don't use nearly as much coconut milk so it's a real treat when I go out to a Thai restaurant. Not the best of currys but hey, it was still delicious.

The weather was not looking too promising when I got up on Friday and our drive down to Taupo was often in torrential rain. But arriving in Taupo itself the weather seemed to have cleared up quite a bit and there was definite promise of some easing in the weather. Our event started at 2am (the start times depend on the grade you are entered in - anywhere from 9pm on Friday night to 3am on Saturday morning) on the Saturday morning so the night crew (J and I included) were up by 1am and piling into our support van to get to the start.

The early hours saw us pulling out some crazy "encouragement" for the other runners and our team mates. "Keep up the good awesome," and "The sun rises from the East for everyone," were some of the most memorable ones.

Fueling up on a lara bar before my first run at around 6am - a 10.1km leg mostly of steady uphill as the sun came up. See the leg here. The best thing about this leg is you start off in the pitch black and as you run the sun slowly comes up so by the time you get to the transition area it's broad daylight!


Above was our first view of the lake after several hours on the road. It must have been about 9:30am but it felt like the afternoon considering we'd been up since 1am! The first part of the course winds along farm roads and it's not until you turn onto SH41 and head up the hill that you finally get a view of the lake (and a sense of scale of what you're doing since you can't see the other side of the lake except for the odd misty shadow on the horizon.


Above is the grind of Hatepe Hill, a steady 3km climb in the middle of my 6.1km second leg around 1 in the afternoon. Pictures always make hills look flatter than they really are! You can see the leg here.


Here's Lake Taupo near the finish line as we wait for our final runner to come past. What was scheduled to be a cyclone never really turned into much. Look, blue sky!

Coming in with a total time of 13 hours 1 minute and 39 seconds we came 30th out of 157 running teams and were nearly 40 minutes faster than last year - we rock!

Speaking of the lara bar I mentioned above, Katie from Chocolate-Covered Katie (which is a truly awesome name because being covered in chocolaty goodness would be delicious...and did that just sound really weird?) has this amazing competition going at the moment to win a box of Jocalat bars (they're kind of like the chocolaty, decadent version of lara bars). Go here for more details.

Back to my piano now...

I promise I'm not crazy

It's important to know that no one can give you self-confidence; nor can you give it to someone else. You can't inherit it or hand it on to your heirs. You can't borrow or steal it; nor can anyone take it from you. Confidence is something that only you can give yourself.

- The Confident Woman by Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz

How do you fit training into an incredibly busy schedule? Well, you incorporate it into your daily commute (okay, not every day but once a week?). J meets me at Mt Eden and we run the rest of the way together. The best thing is some times I get to pass traffic. That's enough to keep you buzzing the whole way home.

Of course, with all that training you've gotta have some good food to fuel you up. Training often doesn't leave us that much time to cook anything exciting during the week so nights with takeaways or eating out are always exciting. There's a food court near J's work in town that has claypot.

What could be in here I wonder?

It's spicy tofu and vegetables on rice - one of my all time favourite dishes to have when we eat out. I love how the rice goes crispy on the edges of the pot!

Pizza is also awesome. Though nothing beats homemade pizza, Hell is not too bad. Plus they do kumara chips which I can never pass up.

Here is their vegan pizza, with the enticing name of Sinister, with added mushrooms and cashews served with kumara chips and sweet chilli sauce on the side. Awesome (and quick)! Of course, this only shows about half of what I ate. It's pretty easy to devour an entire snack-sized pizza especially when you've had a hard day.

Of course, I have been concocting the odd thing in the kitchen...cupcakes!

These are based (very loosely) on the hazelnut cupcakes from VCTOTW. They're more almond and coconut cupcakes with mocha vanilla mousse filling and a plain vanilla icing. I've never seen hazelnut meal in our shops and I didn't have the time to make my own so almond it was.

Above is a terrible photo of the inside. We now have a whole lot of mousse in the freezer waiting to be eaten. Don't you love how battle-worn our kitchen bench looks?!

It's only a couple of days to go until the Taupo Relay and I'm already lacking in sleep. Since the grade we're entered in starts at 2am on Saturday I'm not exactly hopeful of catching it up before the race. I can't wait but it sure could get interesting with a tropical cyclone on its way!

Anyway, for those of you interested, we spent our Valentines day putting in some mountain bike training. Funny that!

Just a little stroll around the mountain

The sun struggled feebly with the mist, tried to impart a little warmth here, shed a little light there, but clearly today was going to be just another long haul across the sky.
- Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

J and I have several events that we are training for in the coming months which is certainly keeping us busy (and in a constant state of tiredness).

The next big event is the Great Lake Relay, a running race around the edge of Lake Taupo in the central North Island. J and I are the team organisers (part of this role is organising who does what leg which is always a logistical nightmare). Another part of our role is getting the team motivated (or at least trying our hardest!). As most of our 10-person team is based in Auckland some of us have been doing team training runs round One Tree Hill in the weekend (random fact: U2 wrote a song named after this hill).

The best part of the team training is, of course, the indulgence afterwards...


How about waffles with berries, various indulgent sauces and topped off with various chunks of chocolate? I love my waffle maker (so does my team naturally!) ☺

Our last team run was on Friday, Waitangi Day over here. What better way to finish off a training run than with a traditional kiwi BBQ in the summer sun.


An awesomely huge vege burger filled with baby spinach, avocado, grilled mushroom, onion, grated sheese, J's Mum's spicy tomato sauce and this very tasty new vege pattie J's Aunty discovered for us in the freezer section of the supermarket. We stocked up and bought several packets!

As an aside, at the Ocean Noise presentation last night all the food was vegetarian...I was quite amazed! Also impressive was the almost full house. Yay!

Whale songs and leftovers

Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely and sometimes against the moment’s reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?
- The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon

Not that there are many people who read this from Auckland, but if you are then please think about coming to this event. Whales are embedded deep into traditional Maori and Pacific history and culture and thus into the hearts of many New Zealanders. At work I have been working with images taken during the recent whale stranding on Perkins Island in Tasmania and it's pretty heartbreaking.

Right...moving on to food.

Despite having quite a lot of refried beans and nachos while I was away one of the first meals I made upon returning home was nachos!


Admittedly these were a lot more luxurious than those on the trip with Pico de Gallo flavoured corn chips and sheese grilled in the oven. Gotta be one of my favourite dinners (plus it makes leftovers for lunch the next day although J and I have to fight over who actually gets to take the leftovers)!

The smell of curry is always tempting and when you don't have much lying around in the pantry and fridge, well a chickpea curry solves everything (we always have some green curry paste in the fridge - it's so strong that you can only use one heaped teaspoon at a time!).


Curry is also one of the prime candidates for leftovers since I always end up making heaps. Leftovers for lunch at work are like paradise!

It's been really hot here recently so often you don't feel in the mood for something heavy at dinner. Homemade pizza is awesome (I swear the heat is turning my brain to slush so I can't form decent sentences)! 


The dough mixture I make is usually enough for two medium-sized pizzas (one for J and one for me) and if you're good and don't eat the whole thing at once then you'll get leftovers (yes, I like leftovers)!

I haven't had quiche in a long time and had been eyeing up one of the recipes in The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook.


I couldn't be bothered making the crust so I decided to attempt it without one. It kind of fell apart when I tried to serve it (hence no pictures of it on a plate 'cause it looked more like a scramble by then!) but I still thought it tasted okay. Could definitely do with some tweaking though.

Of course, if you don't really want to cook, you can always pop to your nearest Indian grocer (we have two only a few minutes walk away!) and pick up something there. Put some couscous on while you pop out and by the time you're home and your meal is heated it'll be ready to serve!

Relaxing in Oceania?

It wasn't that they didn't take an interest in the world around them. On the contrary, they had a deep, personal and passionate involvement in it, but instead of asking, 'Why are we here?' they asked, 'Is it going to rain before the harvest?'

- Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

I'd like to think that the beginning of the year starts gradually and slowly winds its way up to full speed by, well, maybe March? Unfortunately this year it's not really going to plan. We've launched into it at full speed (so much speed I have the bruises from coming down a sandy hill, losing control and then tumbling off my bike head first into the ground!). Clearly I'm not a particularly good blogger when my head is desperately trying to keep up so you'll have to forgive me a moment while we travel back in time to the beginning of the year here (seriously, is tomorrow really the last day of January? Where did it go?)...

Like I said in the last post, I spent half my holiday hanging out in Christchurch and the other half orienteering at the Oceania Orienteering Championship which is basically the Australian New Zealand Challenge.

Early on the 2nd I bused up to Nelson where I met my parents who were staying at Kaiteriteri Beach and also competing in Oceania. It was such a hot day we all ended up going for a swim before dinner. The water was beautifully warm (once you'd managed to get in).


We stayed at the Kaiteriteri Beach Motor Camp and I had this cute little "boat shed" all to myself! Luxury! The camp itself was completely booked out so there were people everywhere but somehow we always managed to find we had the kitchen nearest to us to ourselves at night!


The first day of orienteering was at a place called Canaan Downs and was a completely wild piece of land. There was so much missing off the map it felt like a treasure hunt at times! Oh well, always entertaining.

The following day we heading off to Blenheim to a place called Brayshaw Park for the 2nd event. If you look at the map you'll see a river to the left. Yeah, my course crossed it about 8 times. No point trying to keep your feet dry.

The next day was a bit of a drive as we had to get to Christchurch by the afternoon for the sprint race at Lincoln University. On the way Dad took a detour to show us the saltworks at Lake Grassmere. It's facinating looking at the different colours of the various ponds as some are much more pink in colour than others.


The salt, once collected from the ponds, ends up looking like some great big iceberg sitting on dry land!


Day 4 was a relay event along the coast at Kairaki Beach just North of Christchurch. I've never been a fan of relays but this was pretty good. The terrain is really similar to what we mostly run on up in Auckland at Woodhill which helped for the sanddune section. I saw a lot of, well, mostly Australians to be honest looking terribly lost on the dunes!


I was running the first leg for our relay team. It's pretty crazy because all first leg runners on all courses head out at the same time so there was well over 100 of us heading out into the bush all at once. Luckily my course was placed near the front of the crowd and I managed to get away pretty quick before getting trampled!

For the 5th event we headed out towards Arthurs Pass to Craigieburn. You may not be able to tell from the photo below but the terrain is steep and incredibly rough. The start triangle was at the bottom of the hill and if you were able to zoom in on the photo you'd see tiny dots of people making their way up the hillside to get to their first control. It was crazy!


This event was impossibly difficult. Not only was the terrain steep and very rough but it was also a terribly hot day. I don't know if I've ever been so happy to see the finish before! Unfortunately J and Dad were lined up with their cameras to catch me coming into the finish - not exactly glamourous especially after I'd just crossed a marsh and ended up knee-deep in mud!

On the drive back we stopped to check out the amazing scenery. Below is the Broken River which passes under the hillside at one point.


The rock formations below are part of Castle Hill (also on the way back from Craigieburn). We couldn't really be bothered walking all the way over to them to check them out closer up but they were pretty stunning even from a distance.


We had a day off after the Craigieburn event (I totally needed it) which involved driving even further down the country to a little holiday park quite off the beaten track, the Dansey's Pass Holiday Camp. If, somehow, you end up down this part of the country this camp is a little jem. It is such a quaint and peaceful place and the waterhole is amazing.


It's about the size of a full swimming pool but very deep and seriously, despite not being a super hot day, the water was really warm. I think we were in there for ages just paddling around and enjoying the peace.

Of course, peace never lasts for long as the next day we were off to Duntroon for the 6th event. It was, again, a terribly hot day and the event was set on rocky open farmland. I think I got a touch of vertigo at one point as we had two controls at the top of a line of cliffs and then had to make our way, somehow, down again to get to the next control.


Steep seemed to be a bit of a theme of the last couple of events. Above is the route from the last control down to the finish. It was quite a challenge to stay upright coming down at any kind of speed!

After the event we headed along the narrow, winding round over Dansey's Pass to Naseby in Central Otago. The views on this road were stunning especially with the darkening sky. I have this thing for power pylons marching across the hillsides in the middle of nowhere and these were particularly good!


Now Naseby is a tiny little town (population of about 100 but there are heaps of holiday homes here that are rented out throughout the year - summer for mountain biking and winter for skiing, ice skating and curling) that I've only ever visited in the winter to use their outdoor ice skating rink but it has a very special place in my heart.


Naseby may be really tiny but curling is big here. They even have a full-on indoor facility to use during the summer months! I love the sculpture they have outside the rink. He's so cool!


We had the two final events in the forest at Naseby, known as the most technical and most difficult orienteering map in New Zealand. How about that for encouragement?! Apparently the forest (unlike much of the forest orienteering maps in New Zealand which are generally pine forest, Naesby is made up of conifers) was planned to cover up the scars left by gold mining so the terrain is full of erosion gullies and steep dirt banks.

So all in all it was a pretty amazing trip. One of the things I love about orienteering is how you get to see places you'd never even think of going to (often places you could never visit normally anyway).

Of course, most importantly, New Zealand won both the ANZ Challenge and the Schools Competition! We rock!

Now I realise I have said nothing about the food on this trip. Well, dinner on trips like these is never flash (well, none of the meals are flash but dinner always stands out the most). You have to make do with the pots and utensils you bring with you and what the campground provides in the way of cooking facilities. You also have to make do with what the local supermarket can provide (if there even is a supermarket otherwise it's the local small-town dairy).

Tins of beans are great as they fill you up, have heaps of protein, and taste pretty good too. Although after a day outside orienteering, well, anything can taste good! Served with pasta, rice, potatoes, bread or even corn chips and a salad or some boiled veges, you have a complete (if not terribly exciting) meal.

This is my dinner from the first night at Kaiteriteri Beach: blue corn chips with refried beans and capsicum along with a salad.

Right, well that was a ridiculously long post. Things will resume as normal (if I can work out what normal is) shortly...

Adventures in (mostly) flat Christchurch

When he was in this sort of mood, Chacko used his Reading Aloud voice. His room had a church-feeling. He didn't care whether anyone was listening to him or not. And if they were, he didn't care whether or not they had understood what he was saying. Ammu called them his Oxford Moods.
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I finally got back on Monday after 3 weeks in the South Island for Christmas and the Oceania Orienteering Champs.

Christmas Day was spent with J's family in Christchurch where I had made another tofukey (this one much more successful than the last one) as well as another chocolate trifle for my contribution and flown everything down on the plane with me the night before.


We spent Boxing Day with lunch in town...how could one possibly pass up a souvlaki?


Then we headed off to Sumner Beach where we played in the sand digging tunnels and exploring the caves by the sea. It wasn't quite inviting enough for a swim although one of J's friends did go test the water out. He didn't stay long so I'm guessing that said something about the temperature!


One of J's relatives was celebrating her 60th birthday at a fancy restaurant just out of Ashburton so we got to dress up for the evening. I got a very fancy vegetable stack...


...and green apple sorbet in a brandy-snap basket among other delights.


Christchurch is probably New Zealand's most cycle-friendly city so we did quite a lot of biking around town in the perfect summer weather (which naturally arrived a couple of days after Christmas as usual...it pretty much always rains here on Christmas Day despite being apparently summer!).


Christchurch is a beautiful city with heaps of lush green parks and lovely gardens...but it's just so flat!


We also fitted in a fair amount of training with several events coming up in the new year. J was taken out for an epic bike ride over Okuku Pass into Lees Valley whilst I ran up to the top of the pass and back as the summer sun really began to beat down before moving the cars around to meet the riders at the other end.


As I said before, Christchurch itself is really flat...but if you head out far enough into Canterbury you will find some pretty big hills as I discovered on my way up to the pass!

J and I celebrated the new year with brunch at The Lotus Heart. We were a bit late to try out the breakfast menu (we got there after midday) so had to settle for lunch food. I got the Bengal Burger with fries ('cause who needs to be healthy on New Years Day and choose the salad?!). It was awesome...but I was starving by then so potentially anything would have done!


Did I mention that I got a new compass? It was my belated Christmas present from J and is truly awesome (sometimes I really am an orienteering geek)!