Pine Harbour Fresh Market

On Saturday in the weekend just been, Simon and I went for a massive drive.  Over 300 plus kilometres.  Yep, petrol was at its highest price too.  Clever.

Anyways, one of the stops we made was at the Pine Harbour market which is held every Saturday between 8am and 12pm.  The food here all looked delicious and we tried our fair share of it too.  Simon also got himself a vintage French fry cutter from one of the stalls that sold old cookware.  I likes how all the stalls were matching carts with their names written on the front on a black board – very quaint.

 
Following our visit to the market we headed to Clevedon for a look around and then went for a walk around the Auckland Botanic Gardens.  At the gardens I picked up a brochure about the Manukau Heads Lighthouse, so we ended up driving all the way out to that.  One the way we had a squizz at the Glenbrook Steel Mill, drove on Kariotahi Beach and stopped in at the Waipipi Bird Park on the way.  This place is awesome – there was over 200 birds; exotic parrots to swans.  The owner brings out one of the Cockatoo’s named Charlie and I got to feed it pistachio nuts from my lips.  The place is up for sale though, so I don’t know how much longer it will be about for people to visit :(

Food Roadie North of Auckland

Simon and I headed up to the beach (Ruakaka – family has a Bach) on Saturday to chill out for the weekend since Simon had Monday off work.  The weather was horrible!  Severe wind and rain, but it was great to be somewhere quiet (well not really, Simon started playing Final Fantasy on his Xbox which meant I had to put up with its constant and repetitive music).  I got some baking done and we stopped in at a few food shops on our way to and from the beach.

Our first stop was in at Matakana to visit their farmers market and we stopped in Morris and James, a local pottery place:

So, lots of yummy food at the Matakana Farmers market – fresh produce, baking, beverages and lots of little things like hot filled rolls to eat there.  Matakana also has a Nosh store and their own local brand of ice cream, Blue, which is delish (tried some on my way back from snorkelling at Goat Island earlier in the month).  The village has some other gorgeous stores too, my fave is Red Letter Day – an awesome specialty stationery store.

We also stopped at Kaiwaka and went to the Dutch Deli, where we got some fancy chocolate sprinkles, hollandaise-mayonnaise and some specialty cheese:

On our way home we stopped in at Warkworth and went to Chocolate Brown, but I will post about that tomorrow as I took lots of pics and I have already put up heaps in this post.  It’s also an awesome place that deserves its own post :)

If you’re planning on taking a trip North from Auckland you could always stop in at Puhoi as well.  I went there not so long ago, so we didn’t have a look on this trip.  Puhoi also has a farmers market, cheese shop and even has a mustard maker.