Food for sport
On cut oranges, Saturday morning sports and stadium chips.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter, presented in partnership with Eat It! - K Road's restaurant month.
Mānawatia a Matariki!
There’s an orange tree on my driveway, branches heavy with fruit, branches that droop over the garden fence to drop their bounty on the wet concrete. Most days, I will pick one up on my way from the bus, either from the ground before the insects find it, or plucked from the tree.
Over Matariki weekend, the stars aligned (pun intended), delivering dry weather and a group of miraculously unoccupied friends keen to meet at the local tennis courts and hit some balls around (or sit on the sidelines and gossip). Someone brought a box of pamplemousse La Croix, someone else brought the obligatory chippies, I baked comically large shoyu peanut cookies, and much fun was had. Afterwards, fingers freezing from clutching cold cans as the temperature dropped, we shuffled back to my place to warm up over cups of tea. My boyfriend went to the orange tree for fresh fruit that he cut into perfect, pith-free, bite-sized pieces. When he emerged with the bowl, we all exclaimed at the Saturday morning sports nostalgia of it all, popped segments into our mouths, and licked the sweet juice from our fingers.
These oranges got me thinking about the relationship between food and sports, not in a “food is fuel” way – more like “all my sports memories revolve around the tuckshop.” For me, the standout memories are of sausage sizzles outside the clubhouse after teeball games in summer and pooling pocket money with my friends to buy Trolli gummy pizzas and packets of Twisties at the netball courts. When I ask my tennis coterie for their own sport-adjacent kai memories, the group chat blows up:
“For me it was always wedges with sour cream and sweet chili from the grandstand tuckshop. You’d get them between finishing hockey practice and watching someone else’s game.”
“After waterpolo practice, Mum would make me a soft white baguette with leftover chicken and gravy.”
“Blue Powerade from the pool vending machine after swimming.”
“Also a Powerade girly after soccer (the silver All Blacks one) and K bars after netball from the Columbo Road courts in Masterton!”
“After swimming I would always get what seemed to be a huge chunk of rough, homemade fudge from the Mt Eden pool candy bar.
“In Christchurch at Jellie Park they had a hot chips vending machine. After swimming I would BEG but we’d never get them. But when I did, it was the perfect post-swim snack.”
“Hot chips from the Windmill netball courts.”
Hot chips. As a grown-up who is no longer obliged to participate in organised sports, I suppose the equivalent is watching sports – something I have only come around to in recent years – and when was the last time I watched a game without hot chips? When FIFA-mania took over last year, and we bought tickets to a random match, I was comforted by the knowledge that if the game was dull, at least there’d be hot chips – and stadium chips are the best, always crispy, fryer baskets dropping constantly to feed the hungry hordes.
Winter sports watching goes hand-in-hand with golden brown foods, pints of lager, buffalo wings and fat cheeseburgers, but there’s also after the game. On Saturday night, while the Warriors were busy defeating the Broncos, I was eating fried pancake and dried tofu cucumber salad at a near-empty New Flavour. But by the time we left, the place was heaving, every table filled with folks wearing Warriors jerseys and ordering hearty plates of fried dumplings. It made me wonder, had the Wahs lost, would their fans have gone home with their tails between their legs to reheat leftovers or have beans on toast?
It’s funny because when I saw all those jerseys flooding into the restaurant, it somehow confirmed our boys had won, even before we checked the score. Not that they were whooping or being rowdy, more the energy that entered the room with them, as well as their presence in such numbers. On this night, dumplings were the food of victory.
EAT IT: Karangahape Road's month long pleasure party
Head to K Road this month for Eat It: twenty events that cater to every foodie fantasy. Think kinky cocktails and playful dishes that celebrate this iconic strip's colourful history. For opening night tonight, check out the metre long sausage at Apero and the 'Show us your Melons' cocktail at Caluzzi. Over the rest of the week find wagyu wedges at Candela and other naughty snacks among other naughty nights. Send your receipts here to go in the draw to win $200 in K Road vouchers – attend two or more events and you'll be in to win $1000 in vouchers!
Check out the full Eat It schedule, here.
Weekly bites
We’re six months into our reader-funded editorial project, What’s Eating Aotearoa. People have spent over 470,000 minutes absorbing all the different flavours of food writing across the 26 features and stories published so far.
Readers have been well-fed of late with two new in-depth cover stories as part of our 2024 editorial project.
In my hometown, Eda Tang spent weeks interviewing shop owners and digging up archival news stories to unpack the rise and rise of the road I call home, explaining how Dominion Road became the destination for authentic, regionally-specific Chinese food in Aotearoa. It’s a brilliant piece, filled with specific historical details that can still be glimpsed along the road today and glimmers of the future.
Preyanka Gothanayagi’s has taken a deeply felt deep dive into how Pōneke became a cornucopia of Malaysian food. Gothanayagi traces the history of Malaysian immigration to Aotearoa before discussing specific restaurants and dishes, their best dishes, their practices and the challenges they face. As a hapless jafa whose only Wellington Malaysian kai experience is repeat visits to Aunty Mena’s for creamy dumpling laksa, I am excited to subsist on roti canai, mee goreng and rendang next time I’m in the capital (although I wonder if any can beat my favourite rendang from Chef Rasa Sayang in Birkenhead).
A lot of food news items this week so here’s the round-up: Cadbury has announced the end of Chocolate Fish; Air New Zealand flights to be fuelled with recycled cooking oil; local Chinese chefs are grappling with food safety rules that could see them prosecuted simply for preparing Peking duck in the traditional way; and finally, in what may have been a service to the community, a Ronald McDonald statue was stolen from a South Auckland branch of Maccas.
- Speights, apricots, oats – Otago is a bread basket, and there’s plenty of interesting work happening around the region to keep it that way. Food security and sustainability are top of mind for Miranda Mirosa, Head of the Food Science Department at University of Otago, and Rory Harding, founder of George Street Orchard. Join our guests and host Sophie Gilmour to celebrate and eat local kai and to explore a better food future for Aotearoa.
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Snack of the week
Roka Gouda Cheese Sticks 80g for $4.99 from New World Mt Roskill
After years of trying to turn my partner into a gourmand, this finally happened. I was mulling over the supermarket’s specialty cheeses when Tim proffered this chic, European-looking little box of savoury biscuits and suggested we try them. For context, Tim likes food, appreciates good coffee beans and artisanal deli products, but he doesn’t usually offer much of an opinion. His understanding of food is often perplexing to me. He confuses vegetables that don’t even look alike, you know? So you’ll appreciate just how special this moment was. Teary-eyed, I tossed them in the trolley.
We ripped into them as soon as we got home, intending to have just a couple but quickly devouring the whole pack, which included a far more generous number of sticks than we had assumed. From Tim: “There was an incredible amount of layers. I don’t know what you’d call it, pastry… with just a millimetre between them, so it felt really dense and crunchy.” He’s right; they were buttered and layered like a good American biscuit, with a pleasing cheesiness that meant they were delicious all on their own, no accompaniments needed. When I asked Tim if there were any negatives, he couldn’t think of any. “They were nicely cooked as well, on top and things,” he muses. A final rating? “They are something I’d probably have again, so I’m going to say a 9/10.” (I agree – I’m not sure how a packaged cheese biscuit could get much better.)
Mā te wā,
Lucinda
