Food & Travel 2024
First Trip of the Year, "Society of the Snow" Museum, Ottolenghi's Cauliflower Cake Recipe, Rarotonga Tripnotes.
Hello lovely subscribers and welcome to the first edition of The Olive for 2024. I hope you had a peaceful and happy break.
Rarotonga
I hit the ground running with a trip in second week of January to Rarotonga, one of the Cook Island group. It’s never been on my radar. Not for any particular reason, I’d just not considered it as a destination, nor heard much about it. Then I got a commission to do a travel story there and I’m so grateful I got to go, because I absolutely loved it.
The island’s in the Pacific, about 5.5 flying hours from east coast Australia, between French Polynesia and American Samoa. It is a self-governing country but has a ‘free association’ with New Zealand, which means the currency is accepted there, among other things.
It has this wonderful retro charm - slow paced, friendly, and in January anyway was absolutely lush, with beautiful tropical flowers everywhere and roadside trees of papaya and avocados.
And of course, that sea! The island is ringed by a reef, enclosing a placid lagoon, so clear and with so many fish species, it feels like you’re swimming in a giant aquarium.
Apparently, December and January are the months when some of the Cook Island diaspora returns to the islands (there are more Cook Islanders living in Australia and NZ than on the islands) and these returning locals definitely outnumbered tourists as far as I could tell.
I had a great time, meeting musicians and farmers and craftspeople and snorkelling in the lagoon.
Watch out for an upcoming piece on Rarotonga in Explore Travel or, if you’re a paid subscriber, scroll down to the end for a suggested itinerary.
The 1972 Andes Museum
And speaking of “Explore Travel,” they also recently published one of my South American pieces, on the Andes 1972 museum in Montevideo, Uruguay. I actually pretty much went to Uruguay to visit this museum. I’d been fascinated by this story since the 90s, when I read the book by Piers Paul Read “Alive” that detailed an air crash in Andes in 1972. The passengers were a football team, heading to Chile for a match, when pilot error saw their plane go down in the Andes, on the Argentinian side. The search for the plane was called off after 8 days, but incredibly, there were 16 survivors, rescued after 2 of them walked across the Andes for 10 days. These survivors made the heart wrenching decision to eat the bodies of the dead, to survive. It’s something that is explored quite sensitively in the new movie about the event, “The Society of Snow.”
I really appreciated the museum; a private collection of items from the crash as well as lots of video interviews with the survivors and other artefacts. It’s owned by Jorg, who was a friend or acquaintance of many of those people on the plane. But as he told me; “Montevideo is a very small city, everyone knows everyone.”
Interestingly, the little red shoe, seen above, an important talisman to the survivors is never mentioned in the movie!
Anyway, if you ever find yourself in Montevideo, check out the Andes 1972 Museum.
ExtraVirgin Food/Travel
If you’re a follower of Extravirgin Food & Travel Podcast, you might have noticed some changes.
I decided to separate the two topics into different podcasts, just to create more work for myself. Just kidding. I did it because, to my surprise I found that people tended to be interested in one subject or the other, but not necessarily both. If you’re a subscriber to ExtraVirgin Food Travel, you’ll automatically get updates for ExtraVirgin Travel as I’ve just changed the name, otherwise go here on Spotify or here on Apple if you don’t already subscribe.
If you want to subscribe to ExtraVirgin Food, you’ll need to do so at Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can, of course always listen to either at the ExtraVirgin Food & Travel website which aggregates both podcasts and hasn’t changed.
Recently, I’ve featured the amazing chef, Ben Williams of Agnes of ExtraVirgin Food, and the utterly charming and very persuasive Caro Ryan, an “outdoors advocate,” among her many other talents and titles!
As always, do feel free to let me know what you’d like to hear about in the food and travel sphere: extravirginfoodandtravel@gmail.com
Yottam Ottolenghi’s Cauliflower Cake
This is an oldie but a goodie. It sounds improbable, but this savoury cake is delicious and so easy to make. I made it for dinner last night and served it with a simple salad of green leaves and avocado. I didn’t have any regular flour, instead I used a “high protein”/low carb flour that I’ve been experimenting with (it has some oat flour in it and thus 25% less carbs) and I did have some concerns this might affect the outcome, but it didn’t at all. Mind you, this cake uses 10 eggs, so it’s always going to be moist! The texture’s actually a bit like a less eggy frittata. I also didn’t sieve anything or separate the wet and dry ingredients, I pretty much just put it all in a mixer on a gentle speed. Because I am an inherently lazy cook! Trust me (and Yottam) and give it a go.
Cheers to my free subscribers, that’s your lot for this newsletter, I hope you found something of interest here.