for a larf, contrary to my usual shy and retiring demeanor, i nominated myself in the best design category at the 2004 food blog awards run by accidental hedonist. the thing is, i managed to scrape through into the final roundup — go, hand-coded transitional html!
it’s a veritable smorgasbord of tasty blogs in sixteen categories, and i think you’d find something you’d like. plus you could vote for ragingyoghurt, although i’d probably give the vote to 101cookbooks.
is this normal behaviour? yesterday at marrickville metro, accompanying the boy to do his desperate and ultimately unsuccessful burst of christmas shoping for the year, i popped into the rather good metro grocer for a tub of yoghurt.
not ten minutes later, we stood at the cashier and i was signing a credit card receipt for $62 worth of yoghurt, halloumi, chocolate mousse, calabrian chili-marinated sardines, artichokes, plums, a vanilla pod, a marzipan stollen and a $20 panettone.
some days, once a week, say, it is good in clement weather, to strap the kid in the baby bjorn, get on the bus and head into the city. timing it just right, directly after a feed and a nappy change, will buy us a two-hour excursion, plenty of time for a stroll through the aisles of department stores looking at what i like to call “things”, and then a quick whirl through the david jones food hall for lunch and/or a treat. maevis would have fallen asleep sometime during the bus trip or the subsequent wandering, and on the bus home is when the first gruntings of awakening emerge. perfect.
a week ago, such an excursion resulted in a turkey and brie baquette, three nudie smoothies, a tub of chocolate mousse, and a $20 box of the special christmas assortment of lindt gingerbread truffles. today was a much more modest affair, yielding a small tub of roasted tomato couscous and turtle bean salad from the salad bar. en route to the bus though, i did stop by starbucks, the one which opened up in the space where half the commonwealth bank’s counters used to be. remember, nellie, when we walked across the brooklyn bridge in the windchill, and my face broke out in hives, and on reaching manhattan we had to take shelter in a starbucks for gingerbread lattes? today there was no such need, even though i really wanted to, for christmas. instead i went the maccha frappacino, in a lovely shade of green. in a very non-christmassy display of meanness, starbucks now charges 30c extra if you say “yes” when they ask, “and do you want whipped cream on that?”.
humph.
ah these heady days of carefree consumption of pregnancy danger foods. i was hardly strict about it over the gestation — a couple bits of sushi here, a runny egg yolk there, with no ill effect except mild worry if my stomach flip-flopped after the fact — but in the last couple of weeks i’ve gleefully eaten two brie sandwiches, two chocolate mousses (with a newly acquired third in the fridge), an enormous amount of sashimi at one sitting, and today’s whipped cream on my frappacino. all i have to tackle now is soft serve ice cream.
is this my week of bizarre food-related mishaps or what? following closely after the lip-nougat battle, comes this afternoon’s liver-on-scone debacle. yes, that’s liver. on. scone. sigh.
it all began with the buttering up of a supermarket scone. i put the knife down while i went to fetch the new raspberry jam from the pantry, and then picked up the knife and broke the flat new jam surface and continued on my merry way. mmm… jam. then i took a bite of jammy scone, and there was a surprising undercurrent of liver!
what!?
and so it transpired that, by mistake, i had picked up the boy’s knife with which he had just applied thick livery layers of pate to some rye toast! and i had stuck it into my new raspberry jam! and spread it all over my scone!
i was very unhappy, and each bite of strange raspberry-liver scone made me just a bit unhappier, and then i had to get a spoon and scoop out the liver-tinged bits of jam from the jar, and eat them.
ok, well, i probably didn’t have to eat the livery bits out of the jar.
ok. so i was skinned by a piece of nougat.
yesterday afternoon, i cut a little finger off the stick of italian dark chocolate nougat that my good mother bought me at fratelli a few weeks back. it is a moist, fudgey thing full of whole roasted hazelnuts, with a protective layer of rice paper. mmm…
i put it to my mouth wherein the moisture from my lips adhered to the rice paper, so that when i removed the nougat after taking a bite, it removed the skin from my lips.
sure, it stung at the time, but i didn’t pay too much attention until a couple of hours later, at dinner, with the boy’s olds no less, when my lower lip was really, really stinging and i was having trouble speaking because it seemed like i couldn’t close my mouth properly. still, how much attention will you pay to your lip when the table is covered with a bounty of sashimi?
not too much.
and then i got home and looked in the mirror, and well…
