Four weeks and counting ...

Wow, its been four weeks already, time is flying at a slightly faster rate than we'd like. The kids are on summer vacation and having a blast. Cecile is visiting us from San Francisco and its the holidays, so Nelson is way more crowded than it was a few weeks ago!

We visited Blenheim last weekend, Mari contributed an excellent trip report. For Christmas, we visited Mapua beach which was quite deserted and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We went back earlier today and it was very crowded. Had a pretty good lunch at the smokehouse (smokehouse platter, fish cakes and the fish chowder). Mari and the kids visited the aquarium, and thought it was pretty good and worth a visit. We then had dessert at Naked Bun Patisserie. Unfortunately they had run out of croissants and bake bread only on Sundays!. The tiramisu and brownie were quite good though and the coffee met the excellent standards of most NZ cafes

Its awesome to have Cecile around. The kids love her company and it spread the workload across more folks and makes things easier on us :) We hope to do quite a few day and overnight trip with her in and around the Nelson / Tasman / Canterbury area over the next few weeks.

This weeks we've been showing her the sights and sounds of the local area including the excellent farmers market. Fish farming is indeed quite a big thing in NZ. I did some research about the organic salmon we purchased a few weeks ago and found the company, Organic NZ Salmon. Would have been good to visit them when we were in Blenheim. Their salmon was incredibly tasty (in general farmed salmon is quite blah), so this week we purchased a whole salmon (just 2 lbs) and will grill part of it with a soy-ginger marinade and prepare the other part using Sukhi's curry paste and coconut milk


We've been taking the kids swimming to Riverside Pool quite regularly and they enjoy it. It also gets them significantly tired and they go to sleep much earlier and sleep longer. I suspect and hope they become good swimmers before we leave NZ. Would like to take them on a kayak trip at Abel Tasman if possible. Speaking of water, I've found a local sailing school, SeaSense. We plan on taking classes there early next year and hopefully do a few sailing trips and get some experience. Should be a good activity to do with kids.

We've been doing quite a bit of baking and cooking out here. Mari is definitely using her Tartine cook book. Next up on the list is gougiere's We also bought the Morrison Street Cafe cookbook, and hope to make a few dishes from there. Maya insists on cooking stuff from her cookbook (thanx Jill!), so we made some great pizza earlier this week. Tasted almost as good as Pizetta 211 (which is definitely the BEST thin crust pizza place in the Bay Area and is worth a visit). Next up on our list is Mexican food night later this week.