Pea, Pie, Pud

 

 

Food.  It's a big deal. When we travel or when we decide to live somewhere else in the world, certain foods have a way of bringing us comfort.  That brings me to the humble meat pie.  

My experience with the humble meat pie was the frozen, convenience food variety that we were fed as kids ... to be specific, Swanson Meat Pies.  I loved those bloody things!  I thought savoury pies were the perfect food until I grew up and came to realise how unhealthy they probably were for me.  I never had one again.  That is, until I moved to New Zealand.

Imagine my delight when I arrived in NZ and heard that savoury pies were a normal thing.  These weren't frozen, round, mini-pie shaped things filled with a gravy-like sauce and a few bits of meat.  Pies in New Zealand are (usually) fresh, warm, pastry filled goodness of many varieties.  They are the king of all comfort food, in my humble opinion.  For some, they are like NZ's "fast food" ... the go-to food for a quick meal on the go, increasingly competing with the likes of KFC, MacCers (MacDonalds) or BK (Burger King).

 

When a female teenage family member came to visit years ago, we took her to Milford Sound for the day.  On the drive home that evening, she consumed three mince and cheese pies in the backseat of the car.  That proved to me how much a teenager can eat in one sitting.  I was secretly envious.

A few years later, my sister, Cindy, came to NZ to visit.  I took her to Arrowtown Bakery, which at the time, was the best pie I had ever eaten in NZ.  We bought a few pies and drove to Wanaka to eat them at the shoreline.  They made a chicken and apricot pie that stole my heart.  Cindy couldn't make up her mind between that one and the steak pie.  She enjoyed them so much that she wanted to hand-carry pies home with her when she flew back to California.

I don't live in Queenstown anymore, but I've found a couple of places near my home that are also world famous for their pies.  I try not to partake too often, but the cold weather and the uncertainity of life during this ongoing pandemic drove me to seek out comfort food recently.  So on a winter outing for lunch, we visited our "local" (cafe) for pea, pie, pud.  The pie ... flaky pastry, chunks of chicken, delicious sauce.  And those mashed potatoes ... well, they may just be the best mashed potatoes I've ever eaten.  Well, except maybe for the mashed potatoes that Cindy used to make when I was a teenager.