We we welcomed back with hugs like old friends and it was great to see familiar faces there and a few new hair styles. We were out of view of Kelda (boss chef) but somehow she got wind we were there and came out to say hi and welcome us back – we felt Very Important.

Didn’t have a date scone (gasp!) as it was breakfast time, so had my old fav toast and peanut butter – something I hardly have at Nikau with us never usually being there for breakfast. Their homemade milk toast is really good – I only need one slice as it’s delicious and thick and you can actually taste milk in the crust.

My coffee was delivered in my special cup (even after all these months!) – good texture and well made although I have decided I really don’t like the flavour of Supreme’s Fair Trade Organic beans – it has a very distinctive ‘green’ taste, quite acidic, but I have no choice until they switch beans which I don’t think they’ll do being an organic cafe. It was great to be back and next visit will have to be for a date scone.

I’m thrilled to see Nikau is blogging again too – well done guys!!

Have been introduced to Yummy Mummy’s Cheesecakes – a little store in Woodville that now has cupboard of a store in the James Cook Arcade off Lambton Quay. Got our first little cheesecake-for-2 on the way home from work and it was divine! Not baked cheesecake, just regular, passionfruit – YUM!

We are definitely portraying that. It doesn’t do us or anybody any good to fight the system on this one. Obviously we didn’t want to come home and would do anything within reason to get back there – and right now that means working more hard yards, saving up again and seeing where Xero takes us. We’re not about to chuck in what we’ve worked so hard on to live there, perhaps in time that will tempt us, but right now, Xero is still a driving force in our lives. It’s no good being anti-NZ and we may well be in the privacy of our own homes or if you manage to get my guard down, but being negative to everyone about Wellington or life in NZ just belittles the lives everyone has here. I might be fairly blunt but I’m not going to do that!

Even this weather is not getting me down today. It’s winter! Plus I’m walking around under my New York umbrella – something I wouldn’t dare put up while there, but it’s not so touristy here!

It was packed, and it’s tiny, and felt like a totally different crowd of people – not sure how to explain that – I guess a bit like when you go to movies at a different cinema, and even though you don’t normally recognise people at your own movies, you feel like it’s all different people.

Their coffee is from beans imported from Cuba, so not fresh roasted in Wellington, however it held it’s own although had a slightly sticky flavour to it, almost like a burnt caramel taste. Not unpleasant but a taste I often associate with ‘bagged’ beans. We ordered lattes but after observing the giant cups they seemed to be serving to other people we doubled checked the cup size of the latte, and changed our order to flat white to get something ‘normal’. We also had a slice of carrot cake, well I ended up having most of it because there was some spice in it that made The Mister’s nose turn up at it, but being a sucker for cake, I persevered! Something like amaretto or marzipan or something slightly perfumey.

Here’s a link again to the article in the New York Times that sparked our journey around New York espresso bars – we have the actual page from the New York Times and we worked our way through a fair few of them.

Perhaps I might even share some of these reviews on Twitter … have never tweeted links to my blog before because while it seems I have a bit of an online life, I’m still wary of that work/private balance. I know a few Xero customers and friends follow my personal Twitter thread as well as @Xero, and linking to my blog would open it and my Flickr account up to this audience. Not that I’ve got anything to hide, it would just be that nothing would be hidden any more. Oh well, perhaps I’m thinking there is more interest in my life than there actually is!

The challenge was to see if we could make it back here and after not being able to find pork shoulder at Moore Wilson’s on our first trip there when we got back we thought we’d not be able to. However, I had another look when we were there yesterday and there was 1. Yes ONE. Must be something rare, or very popular here. However, no pulled pork starter so we had to make that bit up – we knew that we needed about 600ml of reddy-brown sauce of a particular consistency involving smoke and a bit of spice.

So we assembled a bunch of things from Moore Wilson’s and home

I felt like a kid in a garage in the 70’s making feijoa ‘jam’ out of feijoas and water (Mother you know what I mean) as I just poured and glugged random amounts of stuff into a jug and stirred it up until it looked the right consistency and colour

The Mister browned some vegies and the pork like he did in Cousin Grant’s kitchen and we poured the sauce over and popped it in the oven for 4 hours.

The house smelled very smokey and restaurant-like and when we finally got it out of the oven (look away vegetarians) it was ready and pulled apart very easily.

Assembled the burgers with a bit of the left over sauce concoction and YUM – a great winter meal. Would’ve been perfect if we’d had buns with potato in them (seems most burger buns do in the States) but they were fresh enough so went well. The pork wasn’t as spicy as our first attempt (a good thing), just tasted smokey and tomato-y. Very good.

And here’s what I think I put into the pulled pork starter (for a 1.35kg boned pork shoulder):

300 ml tomato sauce (bottled pasta sauce of just tomatoes & salt)
250 ml smokey bbq sauce
150 ml ginger beer
3 large tsp plum jam
half dozen glugs balsamic vinegar

Make a vegie base of onions, celery, carrot and sweat down until well cooked; brown the pork on both sides which will also caramelise the vegies. Put the pork and vegies into the bottom of  a casserole and pour the starter over. Cover and cook in a slow oven (about 150*C) for 4 hours. We turned the pork over half way but not sure if that’s necessary.

The coffee is always good, the milk a great consistency, and it’s known all over New York as a benchmark and often other baristas train there (the guys at Saturdays Surf did … which explains a lot!). It got to the point at Chelsea Market that The Mister always ordered 2 coffees because they were so good! I have a Ninth Street Espresso pin I wear in my jacket and one time when I was ordering coffee the barista was very concerned that I wanted it in a takeaway cup, wouldn’t I prefer the experience of a real cup … I wasn’t sure why his concern that I get the best possible coffee until he pointed to my t-shirt! It was my Supreme shirt that used to be the official Supreme shirt worn by Supreme-qualified baristas in cafes in Wellington – it has a coffee handle on it so he figured I was some kind of expert. He also spotted my Ninth Street Espresso badge (only available at the 9th Street cafe) and was impressed to hear that we often went there to Chelsea Market from Murray Hill just for the coffee!

We have a bit of a history with them, having gone there on most of our visits to New York so I’ve dug out some photos.

Our first visit to the 9th Street cafe (November 2008)

Our first visit to Chelsea Market (November 2008)

Taking friends there for the first time (June 2009)

Some of the many visits to Chelsea Market this year

Our first coffee back in Wellington (apart from my own grainy attempt as the poor machine had to waken from it’s freezing 4-month slumber) was at Customs Brew Bar – man, that machine and that man Ralph are are partnership from the coffee gods. A flat white out of the slayer is like some kind of nectar. The consistency is like thick silk and the flavour is, hmmm, not sure how to put it without downplaying it, well it’s the pure flavour of coffee. No aftertaste or tones of something or aroma of anything other than good coffee. It was great to hang out in the cafe as well, it’s a cozy little spot, fairly quiet after New York, but nice to catch up with Ralph, eat his baking and excellent toasted sandwiches and use the wi-fi (snaps for that!)

Next day, I caught up with our Supreme Friend in the Supreme Woodward Street store (bit of a Supreme groupie for those who don’t know) to get some beans and deliver his present from Intelligentsia in Chicago – not really the weather for a t-shirt but he was so appreciative that I didn’t regret squeezing it into my suitcase and finding a place to bring the packaging for it back undamaged. We snobbed on about coffee for a while and I told him all the cafe stories, especially about Saturdays Surf and he was most intrigued by the style of making coffee that has each one made individually, using a single milk jug. I got some ‘different’ beans, some that he told me smelled like a Perky Nana (banana chocolate) bar, which smelled to me like a banana cake. It was a different taste indeed when I made coffee with the beans later in the week, and despite being laughed at once for my description of the taste of a Riesling (although commended not long after for such a great description) “eeeuuuuuwww it tastes like the smell of a lemon rotting at the bottom of the fruit bowl” I again pulled out a doozy for the taste of this coffee “oh, it tastes like compost”. I try to be honest, and when I reported this to our Supreme Friend he said that it was not the feedback he’d been hoping for but 10 points for the ‘unique’ description!

During the week we’ve gone back to Fuel and actually the coffee was better than expected; we’ve had very sweet Supreme-style flavour for 4 months so we though the harder more peppery Fuel roast would seem sour but it wasn’t too bad. The Fuel taste.

Gotham had a rocky start (coffee-wise) when we stopped by earlier in the week to meet our boss – it was the busy morning tea time and the coffee was full of froth, to the point that the waitress asked if we’d finished our coffee when she was clearing the plates because it looked like we’d left half of it. However, this morning’s cup breakfast was superb. Good and thick and the Saturday morning taste I remembered.

Despite the rain this afternoon we went across the park to The Garage a.k.a. People’s – we’d been dying to get back there deciding when we were away that it was probably the closest thing to a New York-style espresso bar, especially an Eastside one where people hang out in a cramped some-what eclectic cubby-hole. It was great! The big table, shared by everyone, one person proud of making good coffee, not much food apart from a few cookies and a constant stream of people coming and going. The windows were totally steamed up and as we approached I thought that you probably just wouldn’t go in there if you didn’t realise what the place was because you couldn’t see anything!

So far we’ve seen nothing too different, so it feels as though nothing has changed so it feels like we’ve only been away a couple of weeks. That’s a bit sad if you think about it, kind of reduces our trip of a lifetime to nothing, but for now it’s working. And it’s surprisingly enveloping being surrounded by orange again.

Some things we’ve noticed or done around Wellington since being back:

• First coffee was at Customs Brew Bar
• Moore Wilson’s was just the same

• The guys at Fuel remembered our order after 4 months (Jessie was still there)
• The Telecom angle-sided building on Willis Street is coming along.

• There’s some large stadium being built by the Kilbirne/Miramar/airport round-about.
• Dinner at Capitol was fantastic. The pumpkin and sage risotto probably the best risotto I’ve had there. The restaurant was so quiet when we arrived (about 6.30) and we worried things weren’t going too well for them but within half an hour it was full and bustling as normal.

• I baked! Made some orange cupcakes … and realised just how much orange we have in our kitchen!

• Been out for pub-ish lunches twice as people want to welcome us back to work. Which was nice despite lunching at places with rather large pub-ish meals (however managed to get a plate of veg rustled up at the first place, and pate at the second – had to leave half of both but at least I ate something!).

• Back in my same room at work but different desk. The Mister is back in his same spot. Mine’s OK for now, a little public on the edge and I haven’t got myself set up with keyboard, monitor etc and I have a new person to look at.

• Trying to think about whether we want to start up the same routines or not, seems we have a reputation for routine which makes us seem boring I guess, but we did give in to Hell’s Pizza last night (god it was good) and Gotham on Saturday morning, main reason being to catch up with our Short Dark Friend.
• Our tan lines are still visible for now in the brief moments of time when long sleeves or socks are off. The Mister has been rather upset that everyone says I look tanned but he doesn’t – his watch and jandal lines are impressive.
• Am making superb coffee again! The first one was a bit gritty but after that, glorious smooth milk and lovely rich taste. And I was very chuffed when someone I don’t know very well saw a photo of coffees I’d made and thought the photo was taken at a cafe!