Since we left New Zealand in 2001, my relatively mild interest in food has developed into a gluttonous fascination. Beyond the obvious pleasure of eating, food is an expression of identity, so throughout our travels it's provided a culinary window into local culture.
Markets, restaurants and meals have punctuated our travels with some of our most memorable experiences: Oistin's fish market in Barbados, where locals fillet flying fish while egrets stand sentinel, a trattoria in the Marche countryside where the wine is on tap and the waitress filled a plastic water bottle for us to take back to our agriturismo, a lean-to in the middle of arid Astypalea beside an azure lagoon where Matt forced down a disgusting meal of boiled octopus, a backyard in Thailand where we ate blood clams with lime and crushed chillies, a Balinese take-out joint serving up cold Bintang and Padang delectables of young jackfruit, beef rendang and cassava leaves, a square in Venice where a hole in the wall served thin-crust pizza, deep bowls of caldo in a colonial town nestled in the clouds of Mexico, and a shantytown in Kampala where we ate Talapia, cassava and avocado with our hands.
Each day when we stayed at a bungalow operation called Joy on an island in Thailand, we would wander into the fishing village for lunch, eating every meal at the same restaurant. We were the only customers at the dusty shack, the owner spoke no English and would simply gesture for us to follow her to the side of the building where buckets of the day's catch sat in the shade. We would point to the blue-striped crabs or the glistening prawns and she would nod and take the designated bucket to the kitchen while we waited at a wooden table.
Soon she would emerge from the kitchen with fragrant spiced seafood dishes. Day to day we were her only customers on the isolated island - we knew this because at the end of every meal she would show us our tally in her ledger so that we knew what to pay. Our meals were the only entries.
One day, hankering for a taste of home, Matt ordered poached eggs. A comical exchange took place with each party clearly not understanding the other. Finally, she nodded and headed off to the kitchen. I asked Matt if he thought she understood and he was adamant that she did, despite my suggestion that poached eggs were unlikely to feature in the average Thai's diet. Ten minutes later, she emerged with a schooner glass filled with hot oil, into which two raw eggs had been cracked, accompanied by toasted soldiers of green bread. Gallantly, Matt thanked her profusely then set about forcing down the oily, gelatinous, raw eggs, dipping the green soldiers into the glass before each mouthful. He stuck to the seafood after that.
The octopus in Greece was a similar disaster. We'd spent a sweltering day exploring the island on a scooter when, covered in dust and sweat and tired of the relentless shuddering over the corrugated dirt roads, we stopped at a collection of buildings alongside a pristine lagoon. We found a small empty restaurant and followed the owner into her kitchen where she opened fridges and freezers, indicating that we should choose what we wanted and she would cook it for us. A plastic bag in the fridge contained some suspicious-looking squelchy octopus. I quickly decided that the safest bet was 'salata'. To my surprise, Matt ordered the octopus which I understood her to say she would 'boil'. We sat down at a table to await our lunch, reaching into the ubiquitous bread basket only to find, ominously, that the bread was rock hard.
My salad was first to appear - sweet slices of onion, tomato and peppers, topped with a slab of white feta drizzled with olive oil and scattered with oregano. Impossible to blunder with the wonderful local produce. Next came Matt's octopus. One huge tentacle sprawled across the plate in a pool of inky looking liquid, like a bloated, bruised, water-logged amputee. True to form, Matt took a deep breath and attacked it with gusto while I looked on in horror. As he made the first incision, the purple casing split to reveal a creamy interior. I don't know if it was dogged determination not to offend the proprietor or if Matt simply refused to let the meal beat him, but I watched with equal measures of disgust and admiration as he devoured the flacid invertebrate.
I am particularly excited about eating in Mexico again. We visited Mexico in 2007 and found it to be an incredibly culturally rich and diverse country, with layers of colonial influence as well as strong pre-Hispanic legacies. The food is as complex and intriguing as its peoples, arts, music and cultures.
The market at San Cristobal de la Casas is the most wonderful food market in the world (according to me). Even Matt, who patiently but relatively disinterestedly accompanies me to markets at home and abroad, was moved to suggest buying things despite the fact that we were about to embark on an overnight bus journey to the coast. At his insistence we bought watercress and homemade chorizo, which were eaten a couple of days later on the beach at San Agustinillo, cooked by our cabana chef and shared with our fellow patrons.
As many of the world's fruit and vegetables originally came from Mexico, we could have procured the ingredients for whatever exotic cuisine we desired. Local indigenous women with thick black plaits and doghair skirts sell live chickens, lustrous bunches of basil, parsley, cilantro, mint, rosemary and oregano, pyramids of tomatoes, avocados, passionfruit, coconuts, lemongrass, tamarillos, tamatillos, mangoes, limes and apples, trays of multi-coloured beans and sacks of dried chillies, strings of chorizo and whole chicken carcasses coloured yellow by a diet of marigold petals - the quality and diversity of the produce is staggering.
I'm researching already and have found a very good programme on the food of Oaxaca, produced by Gourmet magazine. Ignoring the cringe-inducing title 'Diary of a Foodie', the programme provides a fascinating insight into Oaxacan cuisine - from the stone soup that local men make when they want to give their women a 'cooking vacation' to the wonderful 92-year-old Natalia Bautista Martinez, from the Zapotec village Teotitlán del Valle, who cooks the traditional breakfast feast of Higaditos de Fandango (chicken and egg stew) and Chocolate Atole (a layered drink of maize broth and frothy chocolate).
No doubt on our travels through this food mecca we will encounter the odd meal that we will remember for the wrong reasons. Last time we were in Oaxaca we visited the food market and managed to inadvertently order some sort of entrail soup. I ate the broth and left the white tangles of tubes and veins as our fellow diners noisily slurped, chewed and swallowed, but Matt characteristically forced his way to the bottom of the bowl. As we were leaving, I somewhat tentatively raised the question of what the soup contained and was sharply cut off by Matt demanding that I never mention it to him again.
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