This blog is local knowledge about eN-Zed food, drink, places, people; present and past. So the posts on eN-Zed.com could be about the fire-engine red boiled crayfish wrapped in The Marlborough Express, bought from the caravan on the side of the road up past Hapuku. Or the gold-coloured Jimmy’s Pies from the cafeteria in the Dunedin Railway Station during the Southerner’s pie-stop. Or the Fairlie Bakehouse pies. Or Lydia Ko. Or those ratbag keas that’ll pick the rubber seals out of your car if you give them half a chance. Or the sublime organic Pinot Noir from the Rippon Winery on the edge of Lake Wanaka. Or watching an albatross playing in the wind at Taiaroa Head. Or John Britten and his breath-taking motorbike or Burt Munroe and Oreti Beach. Quintessential eN-Zed things and places and people, right? And each one as wholesome and profoundly good as a handful of freshly-picked juicy sweet blackberries
Or swimming and barbecues and beach cricket on Waihi Beach before shark attacks there were invented. Or a cup of Bell tea and some oven-warm, buttery, soft shortbread, looking out at the Pacific from the Conway Flats with Molly and her husband Charlie. Or how I was shown how to make the perfect pavlova in Hororata. Or a plate of Whitestone cheese, dried apricots, walnuts, grapes and a baguette while watching Goodbye Pork Pie (again) with a glass of crispy, cold Chardonnay. Or rhubarb crumble and custard for pudding. Or… fish & chips with a few wedges of lemon from Riverton.
Do you remember toheroas? Not eating them, but the whole expedition? They were the best of times, but look up toheroa and google will tell you they’re a North Island beast. I remember community toheroa expeditions to Te Waewae Bay, which is no more North Island than Lake Hauroko, Tuatapere and the Takitimus. There are some things that internet just gets wrong – local knowledge will always trump google and wikipedia.
So it’s called eN-Zed dot com because it’s all and always will be about eN-Zedders, eN-Zed food, eN-Zed events like whitebaiting and crossing Cook Strait on the Aramoana and the vast, windswept and almost-always deserted Te Waewae Bay out the back of Tuatapere, and the many eN-Zedders wrapped up in these. So it could’ve also been called Crayfish, Waihi Beach and Mehrts dot com. Or Pies, Putaruru and Paua Patties dot com. But not Tip Top, the BNZ and Cadburys dot com. Obviously. In the end, I decided eN-Zed.com summed it all just right.
eN-Zed 