My goodness, we have have had two sunny days in a row here in Dunedin - during summertime. I am sure that's a record somewhere. The ODT may report on it at some stage. I promised a mutton bird tale and here it is, rather short and sweet, the pics say it all really. I arrived home at Hawkes' Bay after Christmas and dad had scored a couple of muttonbirds from somewhere or other. Now I have never tried muttonbird but did have to fish them out of a 40L plastic drum as a 15 year old working in the Avenue Dairy. All I remember of the things is that I'd get stinky grease over my hands, the newspaper I had to wrap them in and the spunky blue tunic I had to wear at work.
Anyway, dad had already performed the multiple boilings to reduce the salt and thought he'd crisp it up on the bbq, seeing as how it was out and being used for dinner.
It was browning up nicely, but seemed to be producing an endless supply of fat. Like the Tardis its innards were out of sync with its outsides (outtards???). We bunged the sausages and steak on too, a little bit of extra fat never hurt anyone. Well, not quite. The top drip tray started belching black, muttonbirdy smoke and flames a foot high were escaping the lower drip tray and curving up the outside of the bbq lid.
Hmm. Not good. Using the knowledge acquired from Mrs Werner in Form 1 Manual, I managed to douse the top tray with about 3 tonnes of iodised salt ('never use flour as this can catch alight in the air'). The lower drip tray was still flaming and mum was busy exhorting her grandchildren to get away from the imminent explosion. Funny that she wasn't exhorting any of the rest of us to escape death by muttonbird conflagration...
To cut a short story shorter, we retrieved the never before used extinguisher from dad's Civil Defence emergency pack ('Are YOU prepared?') and tamed the bird of mutton. After my salty heroics, all that remained for me to do was to get the camera and play war zone correspondent.
It may not be a weapon of mass destruction, but I do feel that the preserved sooty shearwater may need to come with a health warning, a la tobacco products, complete with disturbing scratch'n'sniff photographs of blackened, greasy soot-flavoured sausages.
After all that drama I can now equivocally say however that titi does not taste like chicken. Meaty anchovies maybe, but definitely not cluck. Quite tasty really. Don't forget the fire-retardant foam.
