Special kai brings out natural flavours nicely (+recipes)

For a long time, when most people thought of "Maori food" what would have sprung to mind would have been the traditional classics such as rewena flat bread, horopito and pork and puha. However, chef Anne Thorp has been able to show Kiwis there's a lot more to this country's indigenous food through her popular programme Kai Ora on Maori TV and the Food Channel.
Dubbed the Maori Queen of Cuisine, Thorp uses fresh meat, seafood, fruit, vegetables and seasonings to provide simple, enjoyable food that is as healthy as it is delicious.
Growing up, she can remember eating a lot of seafood, cheap cuts of meat, fruit and vegetables. "There was no haute cuisine in those days," she says. Coming from a big family, eating economically was important - but so was eating healthily.
The family's focus on simple, healthy eating has been carried through her career with food - right from when she got the cooking bug at 9, when she took over cheffing duties for her family. Using indigenous foods such as snapper, crayfish, kina and shellfish, she cooks simply in a manner that lets the natural flavours come through.
She says it's hard to define what traditional Maori food is. "Traditional Maori ate the inner of the cabbage tree, pigeon, fern fronds, rotten crayfish and rotten corn." The latter is tasty - if you can get past the smell. "There's a stench about it. I could never get used to it myself [and growing up] there were other things that I could eat and enjoy."
Depending on where a tribe was based, their diets could vary widely. People living inland would eat more berries and roots, while those who lived on the coast would have a diet heavy in kaimoana.
As a child in the 1950s and 1960s, Thorp ate things Pakeha families would not have had - but it was more subtle differences than a completely different diet. Her father would buy a sack full of fish heads or some crayfish bodies - things left over from the more common fish fillets and crayfish tails. They would sometimes eat muttonbirds, puha and watercress. Their quarter-acre section was full of fruit trees, and kumara, kamokamo, tomato, beans and peas grew in the vege garden.
The family would also collect pipi, kina and cockles, which they would eat with bread and butter. "I never saw a scotch fillet or eye fillet when I was young, but we did eat rump or porterhouse steak, and lamb neck chops." Other cheap seafood would round out the diet.
Thorp said although it wasn't always the most desirable cuts of meat or fish, it was always nutritious and "full of omega 3 and 6". Snapper and eggs for breakfast was a common occurrence.
She says: "That taught me that you can eat whatever you want to eat any time of the day, as long as it's healthy."
Thorp uses herbs, lemons and limes to enhance food as well as more exotic ingredients such as star anise and chilli. "I don't use any sauce - the worst thing I use is salt." She's a huge fan of salt, saying: "You can do yourself a disservice if you think salt is so bad you can't use it."
It is, after all, the simple way to bring out the flavours in a dish. "Salt is very important when you're cooking and enjoying food ... unless, of course, you're diabetic."
While Thorp still uses many ingredients that make up "traditional" Maori food, she stresses her meals include more familiar ingredients too. If she is asked to provide a particularly "Maori" dish, she is likely to use a horopito rub on meat or pikopiko.
A Renaissance in "native" food recently has developed alongside growers markets, such as at Matakana near her Pakiri beach home, enabling people to interact with local producers - and buy right from the source.
Thorp's focus is on enjoying food - cooking and eating with friends. And despite the fact she now cooks with an eclectic mix of foods, some of the traditional staples are still close to her heart.
She was quoted as saying recently: "For me and many other Maori ... the smell of the ubiquitous 'pot' of pork bones and puha gently wafting down the hall provides the ultimate nostalgic childhood memory."
Anne's 5 favourite foods
If it were my last meal on Earth I'd have to have beautifully grilled honey-cured middle
bacon and two soft-poached eggs with a slice of very good ciabatta, toasted. A satisfying dish to go out on with a bang.
I love the beautiful kina when it's in its prime. Harvesting this creature at the right time is paramount to its delicious optimum flavour and texture.
Oysters would come next, again harvested at the right time. The Bluff oyster in season has always been my favourite but the oyster in the half-shell rock, too. Fresh Australian king prawns or even the delicate scampi.
I'm a sucker for pork belly with crispy skin, stuffed with fennel seeds and cooked in exotic flavours of the Orient before being roasted to crisp-up the crackling.
RECIPES
I have included this dish because it's quintessentially Maori. The Pot is something most Maori grew up with. When I was a kid, everything went into the one pot and this meal could be on the breakfast, lunch and dinner menu in the one day.
I consider puha a superfood as it has more than three times the anti-oxidant level of blueberries.
Personally, I like to cook the vegetables separately as they look much nicer on the plate, (the chlorophyll from the puha gives them a greenish tinge) and with steaming them they are much more colourful.
Hydroponic puha is now grown in Oz for the thousands of cuzzie-bros who live there. The aroma from the cooking of this dish reminds them of home.
A secret to this dish is to buy semi- lean meat although a tiny bit of fat on the bones makes for a tastier munch but do cut off any visible fat once on your serving plate. When the pork bones are cooked, we eat the meat, suck the bones and dig out the delicious marrow.
Farmers markets sell puha but, if unobtainable, use watercress instead.
Cook this dish up if you get an opportunity to because the flavours and smells are fabulous.
The Pot: Pork & Puha with steamed vegetables
2 kilos pork bones
Big bunch of puha or watercress, rinsed well, flowers removed.
2 carrots, sliced in chunks
2 kumara, sliced in chunks
4 small Maori or gourmet potatoes
1 tablespoon salt for the pot
1 teaspoon of salt for the vegetables

Put the pork bones in a large pot and drown them with cold water.
Add the salt and bring to the boil, pot lid off then simmer gently (blip, blip) for an hour or longer until the meat is almost falling off the bone.
Add the puha to the pot and cook for 15 minutes with a pot lid on.
In another pot, steam or gently boil the vegetables with a teaspoon of salt until soft.
Plate up and finish off with pouring a little of the stock water over the dish and enjoy. -Serves 4

Muttonbird (titi) with Watercress and Kumara
2 titi/muttonbirds
2 bay leaves
Large potful watercress/puha
6 baby kumara, unpeeled
Salt and pepper
Bring a large pot of water to the boil containing titi and bay leaves, then simmer for two hours on a gentle blip, blip simmer.
Leave the windows open when cooking as there is quite a strong smell.
Turn off the heat, take out titi and discard most of liquid to get rid of the fatty oil and add water to make a weaker stock and to cover the vegetables, or you can cook titi the day before and skim the oil more easily off the top.
Boil and bring liquid back to a blip, blip simmer, throw in watercress and kumara and cook until kumara is soft, about 15 minutes.
The birds can be roasted under a pre-heated hot salamander/grill for 10-15 minutes or longer at 220C. This not only crisps up the skin but gets rid of more oil.
Arrange a bed of cooked watercress on each plate and place some kumara on the side.
Break titi up into segments removing any fatty deposits and skin. Maori love the skin and, cooked this way, it's lovely and crisp. Place on watercress, season if necessary.
Some Maori eat everything except the bones and these too are sucked dry.
Tino reka. -Serves 3-4