On 2 August 2013, at the age of 55, I entered New Zealand as a new migrant.

Five years earlier, I met the love of my life on a train crossing the Nullabor Plain – 2,300 miles of mostly nothing in the Australian outback. The trip was an homage to my train-buff Dad, who had died of Alzheimer’s a few months earlier. Before I left the States, my mother, fretting as she always did before one of my many work-related trips, said she just knew I was going to meet someone and move to the other side of the world. “Mom,” I replied, “You’re worrying about nothing. No one really travels halfway around the world to meet the love of their life on a train. That only happens in movies.” Famous last words.

Simon was living in Invercargill, on New Zealand’s South Island. Leave it to me to find a soul mate who lived as far away from my home and job as geographically possible. After a brief courtship consisting largely of sleepy, 5am trans global phone conversations, we navigated the treacherous frozen terrain of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), secured a fiancé visa for Simon, and married on Waimanolo Beach, Hawaii in July 2009 – almost exactly a year after we met. Shortly before the wedding, my mother passed away leaving me – an only child – a rootless orphan.

Simon is an ethical vegetarian. He hasn’t eaten meat or worn leather for most of his adult life. I’m a slacker vegetarian. I like the idea of living “cruelty-free,” but over the years I’ve lost the plot, done in by convenience (it is easier to grab a burger and fries at MacDonald’s than to cook vegetarian meals in an electric kettle in the graduate student dorm), travel (how can I say no to a platter of fried fish heads or roast goat offered in a spirit of hospitality by Palestinians or Africans who barely have enough to eat themselves), genetics (I’m part German and part Italian: sausage is in my blood!), and, of course, the universal bane of vegetarians everywhere – BACON.

[Now that I am the proud mother of three kune kune pigs, I wouldn’t even think about eating bacon. Really, Wee Charlie, I promise!] Since my first husband and I decided to go veg after reading Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, in 1982, I reckon I’ve lived about half of the time as an herbivore.

While I have not always been a vegetarian eater, I have – for the most part (excluding the odd bit of bacon thrown into a nice mess o’ greens) – been a vegetarian cook. Again, I can’t claim the moral high ground. I just prefer to cook vegetables. Raw chicken gives me the creeps. While I do occasionally eat seafood, the only thing I know to do with a raw fish is Monty Python’s fish-slapping dance. My bestie, Susan, taught me to cook live lobsters; but if I cook them, I can’t eat them. And I usually cry. I grew up in terror of dying horribly, consumed by worms, as a result of undercooked pork. I haven’t even thought about eating beef since I saw those slaughterhouse videos – you know the ones. Offal? We won’t even go there. [Although I accidentally ate sweetbreads once, at a three star restaurant in France, when my French companion translated ris de veau, misleadingly vaguely, as a special cut of meat. I resolved, on the spot, to learn French.]

Over the years since I bought my first vegetarian cookbook (Mollie Katzen’s The Moosewood Cookbook), I’ve developed into a competent and, I think, creative vegetarian cook. I’ve taken cooking courses to master the basics, and spend almost as much time reading cookbooks as I do reading detective novels. Liberated from the tyranny of recipes, I can go to the farmers’ market, buy what looks fresh and beautiful, and turn it into something good to eat. I embrace the challenge of creating meat-free versions of classic comfort foods and pub grub. And PIZZA.

By the time Simon and I married, I had become disillusioned with my career as a Washington, DC-area policy analyst. In the midst of what had become increasingly common collapses in my professional morale, I would joke (usually after my second or third glass of wine) that, perhaps, I should just quit my job and write a pizza blog. Instead, I decided to move to New Zealand to try my hand at education. In the ensuing, not always pretty and, ultimately, disastrous process of discovering that tertiary education is definitely not my calling I discovered that food is.

So, in the space of two years, I’ve come from being a defense analyst with a six-figure salary, to being an academic with a five-figure salary, to end as an amateur vegetarian cook and part-time food blogger with a zero-figure salary. I live on the top of a hill with Simon, three dogs, three pigs, six alpacas, and uncounted Tuis, geckos, hedgehogs, and the occasional morepork.

I’ve never been happier.

Not surprisingly, pulling up stakes and moving to the bottom of the world has presented some personal and culinary challenges. It was easy to be vegetarian in Virginia, as long as I remembered to take detours around the most tantalizing barbeque joints. Most restaurants had a variety of vegetarian options. The frozen food section in most grocery stores had extensive vegetarian sections, with a plethora of vegetarian meals and play-meats. And the rise of “foodie” culture meant, if you had the dosh, there were plenty of sources of fine and exotic produce and vegetarian staples either close to home or a few clicks away on the Internet.

New Zealand is more challenging. True, most restaurants here offer at least one vegetarian option, but that option almost always involves one of two alternatives: make lasagna, take out the meat and replace it with kumara (sweet potatoes), or make lasagna, take out the meat and replace it with pumpkin (the generic Southern Hemisphere term for the entire family of winter squash). If, as Simon and I both do, you dislike sweet potato and/or pumpkin (unless it’s in a pie, and then, only on Thanksgiving), you are out-of-luck. Our local paper once ran a piece about a shop in a nearby town that made the best kiwi pies in New Zealand (and that’s saying something). The next time I was passing through, I stopped to check it out. “Do you have vegetarian pies?”, I asked, hopefully. “Yes: savory kumara and coconut.” Three words that, as far as I’m concerned, have no business being in the same phrase. There are plenty of Indian and Asian restaurants. For the first few weeks we were here, while I was shell-shocked and drowning in my new job and Simon was busy arranging for us to buy a house, we lived off of Thai and Indian takeaways. New Zealand’s deservedly famous Hell’s Pizza has some quite good vegetarian pizzas, but week after week of eating the same couple of combinations got old.
What New Zealand has in abundance is farmers and, as a result, awesome farmers’ markets. [Oh, and vineyards, but we’ll get to that in future posts.] I am a regular at the year-round Saturday morning Riverbank Farmers’ Market in the Hutt Valley, where I can buy reasonably-priced, fresh fruits and vegetables, raw honey, free-range eggs, crunchy baguettes, manuka-smoked garlic salt, sheep milk feta, fresh Thai herbs, New Zealand olive oil, handmade extra-firm tofu, chewy Chinese noodles, lovely Stewart Island smoked salmon (yes, I know, salmon is not a vegetable: mea culpa) and used paperback books and one-dollar DVDs.

There are some up sides. In northern Virginia, if you are lucky, you can get fresh-picked local asparagus for about three weeks between the last frost and the first 90 degree day, when the stalks bolt and become inedible. The season for lovely, tender, if somewhat bent (it’s very windy here in the springtime) Levin asparagus lasts at least two months, sometimes longer. Ditto: strawberries. So, it is possible to be a confirmed locavore and ethically serve asparagus and strawberries for Christmas dinner.

On the other hand, okra is not really a thing here. Neither are collard greens, heirloom tomatoes, jalapeno or poblano peppers, fresh Asian mushrooms, white field corn, spaghetti squash, shelly beans, or turnips – what they call turnips here, I call rutabagas, and they don’t come with greens. One of New Zealand’s favorite vegetables is silverbeet, a sort of nuclear-mutant version of white chard. It is a lovely, slightly sweet green – flavor-wise, a cross between spinach and beetroot. It is lovely, but it isn’t chard. I haven’t seen durian here, either, but, to be honest I wasn’t looking.

So, what’s a Southern girl to do, adrift in the Antipodes without her collards? The answer: kale. Over the past two years, kale has emerged from oblivion at the Riverbank Farmers’ Market. And I buy it in abundance: Tuscan, Russian, blue, and good old-fashioned curly green. On the rare Saturday when the beetroots come with the greens attached, I go nuts.

I assumed no one paid any attention to how much kale I bought. Then, one Saturday, the smoked salmon lady asked me what I do with all those lovely greens. “Do you make smoothies? That seems to be what everyone else does with them.” Gasp! Why would I take a gorgeous bunch of lacinato kale, throw it in a juicer, and turn it into something that tastes like steeped compost? A seed of a new calling took root in my mind – I would spread greens enlightenment.

A few weeks after my conversation with the smoked salmon lady, I was at the Asian greens stall where I buy most of my kale when I overheard a conversation that went something like this:

Asian lady to Asian farmer: What is this?

Farmer to Asian lady: It’s kale.

Asian lady: How you cook?

Farmer: I don’t know. I think they make it into juice.

Maori gentleman: It’s an American thing. It’s real popular in the States.

His Pakeha (Caucasian) companion: Yeah. I hear Americans in the South really like their beans and greens.

Me: I resemble that remark! I’m an American, from the South, and I live for greens! Greens are my life!

Asian lady, Mrs. Maori, and Mrs. Pakeha: How you cook?

The Kale Whisperer was born.