Auckland seafood festival

Just across the harbor, right there in our backyard, the city put on its annual seafood festival on the wharfs this weekend.  They even floated a pedestrian bridge to connect the piers and make browsing easy.  The sky looks all threatening here, but that was just a passing squall.  Really, it was very bright and hot.  I got sunburned through my SPF 30, as usual.

Here are some of the things we ate.  First, some fresh calamari rings flavored with sea salt, lime and kawakawa.  What's kawakawa?  A local herb, claimed to have medicinal properties, but also with a pleasant flavor, somewhat sharp and astringent. 

 

Notice the starving child pleading for sustenance.

Here's a good platter.  Flame-grilled scallops--so sweet.  Then also there are some scampi.  Scampi are actually not shrimp (aka prawns), but are instead a local deep-water and heavily-armored species that lives in underwater burrows.  Here, they were flame-grilled whole, split down the center, and were served with a toothpick for digging the tail meat out.  And the black bit is a deep-fried paua treat.  Paua are a type of abalone (Can you imagine just finding abalone at an outdoor food stall??  We felt lucky).  There is a fishing limit on abalone:  you can (only!) take ten a day from the ocean.  Here, the rich black meat was minced and battered. 

 

We tried a few other things that I didn't get pictures of:  Some seared ahi tuna and a salmon kebab.  A raw green-lipped mussel on the half-shell from a bucket that was unloaded directly from the fishing boat that snagged them early this morning.  (It was salty, oddly crunchy on one end, and completely offputting on the other end due to its 'feathers'.)  And a scoop of ice cream for our big boy, who'd very gamely trotted along with us the whole time.

 

I think they both enjoyed themselves.