Xtremely hot Maori lunch cooked in lizard cauldron (1). Slideshow. Eat, play, love, New Zealand

   A lunch of Maori beer, mussels and prawns, with Te Puia's Patrick Tamati and Te Taru White.

 To get the visual skinny, be sure to check out the slideshow below and the video with Part 2 of this story.

“Bubble, bubble, toil and ... ” The scene from Macbeth with the witches dancing around the steaming cauldron (I’m sure they danced in at least one version) popped into my mind when I saw Chef Shane Beattie sweating over the geothermal waters of Ngararatuatara, “the lizard.”

Chef Beattie, pictured right, was cooking lunch for our party of seven at Te Puia, New Zealand’s Maori Arts and Crafts Institute on the outskirts of Rotorua, a North Island city that bubbles with hot springs and smells of sulphur until you get used to it, which happens remarkably quickly.

I went to Rotorua not expecting the city or the area to have charm. An ex-boyfriend’s brother moved there and I must have heard something that colored my view.

I left there a day and a night later wondering how I might return.

The city, known for bubbling mud pools and geothermal spas, is scenically located on a lake. The region has 15 others (it’s a virtual lake country) offering cruising, swimming, waterskiing, kayaking and fishing.

And Rotorua’s main street is lined with an eclectic mix of restaurants that made me want to stick around for a couple of months, there were so many that looked delicious.

Cooking Ngararatuatara-style is x-tremely hot, x-tremely unusual, x-tremely sustainable, x-tremely delicious.

Te Puia also came with a surprise. Our group went there expecting a Maori hangi lunch (a meal cooked over heated stones in a pit dug in the ground and covered, for several hours, with earth — similar to the Hawaiian lu'au). Turns out they do them at night. (Part 3 of this story has more on the hangi, so stay tuned.)

Instead, we found Chef Beattie working his culinary magic amidst clouds of steam, dipping woven grass bags filled with mussels, shrimp and corn, into the boiling spring of crystal-clear water of Ngararatuatara. To quote Te Taru White, Te Puia’s chief executive officer: “The pool you see behind me is one of the unique features of this valley. Our (Maori) people are one of the few people in the world who still cook using the geothermal waters from deep down within the earth. We’ve done this for 600 to 700 years."

Please continue to Part 2 of this story to read more and to see a video featuring Ngararatuatara, “the lizard." Please excuse the absence of the dash above the "a" in Maori and above the first "a" in Ngararatuatara. The examiner publishing system turned them all into question marks when I saved this story and I had to remove them.

©: Story Wanda Hennig, 2009; ©: Photos Wanda Hennig; Video: Wanda Hennig