New Zealand, Why Not?: Bread to the Birds

Our week between Able Tasman and our next workity wwoof wwoof was mainly spent either camped out near the beach cooking from one pot, or hiking in the mountains, and cooking from one pot. Beautiful meals seem to be much easier to make when we are staying with a friend or when we are staying at a "campsite" that has a kitchen. Bread is part of a beautiful meal.

One thing I've learned from a kiwi cookbook, is that NZ flour is much lower in gluten than Canadian flour and therefore does not rise well, especially whole wheat bread (so it turns out that the past bricks that have come out of the oven were not totally my fault!). An easy way around this is to add ascorbic acid (a.k.a. Vitamin C) to strengthen the gluten bonds...and voila! beautiful bread.

Another revelation in bread making was the bread itself. I make bread because it's a nice pass time, it's relaxing to knead, and there is generally less "fake" stuff in it that ends in orbitol, anthem, and other words that should be reserved for NASA astronaughts and Dendrochronologists. This past week, we've also discovered yet another reason to make your own bread, because the stuff from the store tastes horrible (in comparison). After four months of home made bread, we had forgotten how much superior the home stuff was.

On another topic, since being in NZ, we've seen a lot of birds but had not yet actually gone looking for them. What better spot than the Farewell spit, a place where heaps of shorebirds come to rest on there way back from North America (also a place where hundreds of whales come to beach themselves...). After spending a few hours walking along the spit, the two big players of the day (which weren't even shorebirds) was the Caspian Tern, and the hundreds of Black Swans.

After all that birding, we decided to take in the Golden Bay Agricultural and Pastoral Show, held in Takaka. What a riot! The whole town was there, it was unbelievable. The rural sense of community in the South Island is very strong, especially in comparison to Canada. We saw everything from show jumping, to cow competitions, to wood chopping.

We have now just arrived at our new work station, but more details will have to wait until later...
see ya soon!