Did you know?

Hello, everyone.  This week's post is mostly about New Zealand, or Aotearoa.  I've compiled just a few facts that I've run across and I'll throw in a few pictures to keep it more interesting. I'll end with a very American bit that you may not know much about either.   

New Zealand has more cars per person than any other country in the world.  

That surprised me. Wikipedia says that a few places, like Guernsey, a bailiwick of the U. K., located off of Normandy, France, has more, but they have a population of 67.  In my book, that doesn't count. 

As far as 'real countries' go, NZ heads the list with 1,086 cars per 1,000 residents. The U.S.A. comes in at only 908.  

Jeanne and I had intended to buy a car when we decided to stay here long term, but changed our minds years ago. Now that we are living in this retirement community, we are doubly glad that we don't have one. For one thing, the buses and trains are free for old folks, and the cost of a spot in our below-ground carparks is enormous. 

Hmmm.  Allie, Amiri, Arram, Jeanne and I all have only one car between us. That means somebody else out there really owns a bunch of them. I bet their yard is congested.

    

Over 150 locations in New Zealand were used in the filming of LOTR movies. 

I know that not everyone is a fan of those movies, but we were, and are. 

I took these three pictures at Hobbiton.  

We were also lucky to walk along the path in Wellington that was used (I don't know exactly where) to film the sequence at the very beginning of their journey where the four Hobbits hid from the Nazgul.

The ambulance service here is run as a not-for-profit enterprise.  

St. John Ambulance, because it is not for profit, charges a fee of only $98.00 for a run to the hospital.  They do rely on memberships to allow them to do such a thing. They ask for a donation of $75 per couple per year.  And with your membership, if you need a run to the hospital, you are transported free of charge.   

  

New Zealand gave women the right to vote in 1893.

The U.S. didn't get around to it until 1920. Of course, England didn't give women the right to vote on the same terms as men, with a property requirement, until 1928, although they could be elected to Parliament in 1918. Doesn't make much sense, does it?  

The word Kiwi can refer to the people of NZ, to a flightless bird, and a fruit.  

Citizens of New Zealand call themselves Kiwis. 

This is a kiwi photo that I found from the National Geographic    

I don't think I need to show you a picture of a kiwi fruit.  Those, happily, are all over.  I don't know though, whether the gold and red varieties are available world-wide.  

The sun rises here first. 

That also means that birthdays and the New Year get a head start on the rest of the world.  

These shots were taken on the morning of April 10, 2024. (Of course, it was still the 9th in the U.S.A.  

I love looking directly into the sun like this picture allows me to do.  
If I were going to be an astronomer, I think I'd want to study the Sun. It would be enormously interesting, and just think, I could do it during normal working hours. I wouldn't have to stay up all night on some freezing mountain top.  

 

There are more vending machines in Japan than the entire population of NZ. 

Actually, that statement that I found on line might be a bit out of date. I think it is now pretty close to equal. One article I saw said that Japan has well over 5 million machines. I just looked up the 2024 population of New Zealand, and found it to be 5.25 million.

Hmmm.  I wonder where my vending machine is?  I hope it's next to Jeanne's.    

Finally, to end my post for today, I want to tell you about Scrapple. Nothing to do with Aotearoa of course. This is the Pennsylvanian Dutch meat product that they call Pennhaas. (According to Wikipedia.)  

I had never made it, or even tasted it for that matter, and I thought, when I ran across a video about it on YouTube, that I ought to give it a go. I didn't take any pictures of the process while I made my batch, but I can describe it briefly.  There are lots of steps, but it's quite easy to do. I enjoyed myself tremendously, and my final product turned out great.  

• Buy some assorted pork. I used a hock, some tongues, and a little bit of liver. I added two large onions, plenty of garlic, a large jalapeno, dried sage, paprika, and a bay leaf. Then, lots of  black pepper. (In case you're interested, it was 70 twists of my pepper grinder.) 
• Boil it all for about two hours in water to just cover, then take the meat out and let it cool. 
• Strain the broth and save it. I also kept the onion and jalapeno and added them to the meat in the next step. (The chopping part) 
• Pull the bones out of the hock and skin the tongues. Chop everything else.   
• Put the meat/onions/jalapeno in a food processor and blast it until it's like ground meat. 
• Measure your broth. I had six cups. For that, I added 7/8  to 1 cup of cornmeal and boiled for 20 minutes. (I could have gone to a full cup and it might have turned out even better.) 
• Then I added 1/2 cup of white flour and boiled for 10 minutes.
• Next, I added back in all the ground meat and boiled lightly for 10 more minutes. (Stirring that very thick mixture was quit a job.) Add salt/pepper to taste.  
• I lined a glass cake pan with aluminum foil and poured the mixture into it. 
• When it was cool enough, I refrigerated it overnight. 
• I cut it up into squares, wrapped and froze most of it.  

Jeanne pronounced my attempt to be very tasty. 

If you're interested, here is one of the video's I saw that got me interested in trying it. If you watch it, you'll notice that I did things a bit differently than Sam did. I'm sure there are a thousand ways of doing it, but they all have pork, corn meal and flour and some sort of spices in common.

One thing I noticed about Sam's presentation that I strongly disagree with. He said early on that it would take 2 gallons of water to cover his meat.  Then, he said later, that he used 5 cups of the broth. I think that is a terrible waste of flavor. If he had too much broth, he should have reduced it. It would have been even better.  But who knows, maybe he did something else with the excess broth.  

I just barely covered my pieces of meat and used every bit of the stock.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSq8NHhRAsY

Well, I  hope that you feel slightly more informed now than you did at the beginning of my post. 

I just looked up my monthly 'hits' on my blog's statistics page and found that last month I had 4,802 and so far this month I've had 575. I wonder if any one of those that will read this post during the rest of May might try to make scrapple because of it. If so, Sam would be pleased.  

-djf