hāngī cooking

This made me drool:

Andy's friend, hāngī master Rewi Spraggon, says hāngī is a Polynesian style of cooking. It immediately made me think of the Hawaiian luau—specifically, the roast pig, which is cooked while buried in the ground. When you watch the above video, though, you see that the New Zealand version involves roasting vegetables in the same pit along with the proteins. Another difference is that the roasting takes an astoundingly short time: about two hours (the luau pig roasts all day, I think). The vegetables came out looking fantastic, too. I'd love to try this, but I'd probably anger the village by eating everything myself.

Spraggon explains that the word hāngī comes from hā, meaning "essence or breath of life," and the ngī means "the spark of the land," so it's a way of expressing that you're partaking of the earth's energy, that Mother Earth is feeding you from her bounty.

It all sounds wonderful, and I'm going to be thinking about this for some time.