A Taste of Hangi

Well the Whitianga Scallop Festival  is now 7 weeks away.  The site is paid for, the menu set, now all I need to do is set up Aunty Umu.  She needs stabilising and certification and I expect to  be able to have her ready in at least 3 weeks at the most.  Aunty Umu will  have three roles to play.(i) as the cooking vehicle of A Taste of Hangi Oil and Fresh Meal, (ii) as the vehicle for spreading the word of Te Reo Maori.  The last week of the month is the annual Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori.  I plan on taking Aunty Umu out to spread the good songs Utaina; Poi e and the haka Ka Mate and if the mokos want,  they can have A Taste of Hangi lunch - kumara-chicken- sweet corn on the cob and any other meal item of request subject to availability and (iii) as the place to hear the sound of the ukulele,  where yours truly will be singing a selection of songs from a home made songbook called 'Mo Nga Manu Korihi  o Te Moananui a Kiwa' in short a song from each of Tahiti: Tahiti nui,  Samoa: Tele ia a le sami  Fiji: Isa Lei   Hawaii; Kaimana Hila;  all in their own language.  Thank goodness all the Polynesian tongues are the same give or take a letter.  And Maori of course; He Puru Taitama e, Pono Koutou, Poi E and Poi Porotiti atu Poi porotiti mai.  Just to name a few.  See you all in Whitianga maybe.  We are going to be the guests of Te Awhi and Joe Davis for a couple of days at the marae Te Ra Matiki at Wharekaho. They are the mussel fritter King and Queen of the Waka Ama.  Exciting stuff.  I managed to score some mutton birds from contact with a cousin living on the Chathams so here's the Menu: $5.80 Packed Plate of 2 Chicken Drums Potato Pumpkin Stuffing 2 Fried Bread Gravy $2 each item in Look and Point Make a Plate options - Kumara- Pork-Beef-Lamb-Muttonbird-Sweet Corn on the Cob- 4 Steamed Dumplings with Scallop filling- Slice of Wally Bread with Scallop Pate- Stuffing- Greens Arohanui na Mapuna

I have just discovered how the website works and now want to relate the changes that have happened since the last blog- seven months ago.  Well the first item to be noticed is the actual web page and the contents of it.  There are no new products just a re-arrangement of them.  I am about to embark on an extension to A Taste of Hangi by the purchase of a mobile food cart.  I am going to name this food cart 'Aunty Umu'.  She will represent the above the ground nature of A Taste of Hangi.  I understand that Umu is the name the relos in the islands use for 'hangi' .  I think it is appropriate.  Do you? Email me and tell me.  Anyway 'Aunty Umu' is scheduled to appear for the first time in public at the Whitianga Scallop Festival 28 August at of course in Whitianga.  Another innovation is the creation of a bread which I have named 'Wally' because there are walnuts in it plus two other secret ingredients.  I absolutely love Mackenzie Grain bread but at $5 a pop I thought about creating a bread of my own.  My neighbours and whanau tell me it is very nice so I shall be including it also as a first timer at the Whitianga Festival.  I needed to create some recipes to match hangi and scallops, so come on over to Whitianga and try my Club Scallop and Kumara Sandwiches on Wally, Wally with Scallop Pate and Wally with a steamed hangi flavoured scallop souffle.  I have plenty of time to refine the recipes and already have volunteers to sample and critique.  Today is 23 May.  The day is special for two reasons.  It is the anniversary of the death of my darling nanny Mickey 38 years ago.  And the winter weather has set in with a bleak cold rainy day.  Great hangi weather in fact.  So, keep the hole in the ground hangi for the tourists and buy my products for every day.  Oh and if you a marae supporter, $5 per bottle donated to the marae of your choice.  Kia ora and arohanui from Mapuna of Te Aroha Aotearoa New Zealand.

I managed to find a free listing on the search engine www. hotfrog.co.nz, so if you want to see my products google hotfrog then insert hangi in the what window and hotfrog in the where window.  I am actually having trouble loading this website outside of the yola website.

On this day there was a town promotion called The Classic Cars.  About 700 cars had registered to attend but the rain kept many of them away.  For the past week the rain that fell in Te Aroha reminded me of the flood of 1985 when three of the Barbarich family were killed when their house disintegrated in the path of rocks and water.  The rain held off for the day.  We put on a hangi in the hangi keg.  Into separate muslin bags went potatoes, kumara, cabbage, pumpkin and ham as the meat.  Instead of the usual two litres of water in the steamer, I poured in half that amount.  I wet the sacks that went over the lid, turned the gas burner on full bore and off we went to the car show.  Two hours later I returned to find the sacks burnt to smouldering embers and the hangi keg completely devoid of water and blackened from the heat on the outside.  BUT... the smell of the hangi food was tantamount to the smell of the underground hangi.  SO... I discovered that I should have been using less water to steam and cook the hangi.  The taste was supreme. 
HERE I was considering the addition of another ingredient to my recipe for the hangi flavouring, to get a stronger taste, and just by accident the secret was in the degree of heat to be applied to it. 

This is the first day that I write about my business project.  I have been busy building a free website on the Yola network so tht some traffic may be generated towrds purchasing one of  my 6 products.  Its been about five years since I greated the hangi flavouring so that women could make a hangi in the oven which actually tasted like a hangi in the ground.  The first bottle started out as an empty beer bottle; then to a v bottle and then to a square 200ml bottle which I then surrounded with a mini flax kono.  The latest design is a 375ml plastic bottle= plastic so that if it was dropped all of the hangi flavouring lliquid would not be wasted.  In the last couple of days more design techniques have been adopted in particular the plastic bag in which the bottle did not fit so I added a flax handle, to it.