The morning after we arrived in New Zealand, we lurched, jet-lagged, down an Auckland street and stumbled into a café for breakfast.
The dawning realisation that my strict food budget really wasn’t going to go that far put a severe downer on proceedings, but I perked up when I saw a bottled smoothie of an unknown fruit for sale.
The cross-section illustration on the label was disturbingly similar to a cucumber, but I was feeling optimistic and took a generous swig.
When me and the boyfriend decided to visit New Zealand as part of our “We’re Having an Early Mid-life Crisis Freak-out Tour 2011”, I fell to researching straight away.
I devoted perhaps 25% of my time to hotels and tourist attractions, and the rest to tracking down must-eat food tips. From Chowhound to random Google searches combining place names and cunning key words such as “food” and “blog”, I gradually created lists of restaurants and notes on treats to try.
Our strict budget meant many delicious-sounding venues were discarded, but for the benefit of fellow cash-strapped food lovers, I’ll be posting on some of the thriftier edibles we’ve sampled.
A mere day after my recent post relating my ambivalence towards desserts comprising things floating in coconut milk, I was forced to eat my words.
Roti is something that may be familiar to you from the breads section of a UK “Indian” restaurant menu. It is a round, flat, slightly layered bread, which is good for soaking up curries.
It clearly shares roots with Roti Canai, something ambrosial I first encountered in Malaysia. This is a puffy, crispy flat bread which is heavenly dipped in dahl, fish curry or topped with condensed milk.
So when we passed a Rotee stall near the lower end of Phra Pok Klao Road, Chiang Mai, by a Siam Bank, I was irresistibly drawn to it. The options were fairly limited, standard (which comes topped with condensed milk), egg (where an egg is broken into it and cooked), banana (filled with sliced banana) and a few other choices which I think were mainly combinations of the above.
Love at First Bite is a bakery café in Chiang Mai.
Continue reading Thailand Food Exploration: Love at First Bite