ragingyoghurt » 2005

Monthly Archives: October 2005

the best excursion ever…

[ well, ok, the best excursion since that time nellie and i stole the car and drove north, to ikea, for swedish meatballs and daim cake ]

…was on saturday. it started with a banh xeo and a dried longan drink, continued through the messy middle bit with the baby wiping every piece of food on the table before eating it, and ended with the unearthing of a selection of tasty treats in a vietnamese grocery along illawarra road. among them:
a tray of “gourmet mushrooms”
a just ripe pineapple
a bottle of rose cordial
a tin of jackfruit in syrup

the mushrooms were shiitake, enoki, oyster and shimeji (so pleased to meet you all!). this evening they were folded through olive oil and cream, with parsley and garlic, pepper and salt — and somehow i managed to resist eating them straight out of the mixing bowl at this stage — before being baked en papillote to be tossed through angel hair pasta and topped with shaved parmesan. this was slurped down so quickly that i felt i had to make dessert.

“would you like some pineapple?” i asked the boy.
“ummmmm… … … no,” he replied.
“but what if i fried it in butter and brown sugar, and put vanilla ice cream on top?”

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 October 2005 at 9:50 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, ice cream, kitchen, shoping

of course, the good thing about making something that requires two egg yolks (refer: gnocchi, previous entry) is that it leaves you two egg whites with which to fashion a pavlova.

i once helped to make a four-egg white pav, a pav so big we ended up making it in two parts: a large meringue at the base, and then the whipped cream and fruit, and then another, smaller meringue covered in more cream and fruit, and shaved chocolate, which was a bit controversial with the purists at the table. finally assembled, it looked rather like the titanic, suitably festooned for its maiden voyage. the pav, though, never even made it through the first night.

two egg whites yield a much more modest and manageable pavlova. this is the third pav i’ve made, and all according to stephanie‘s recipe. sort of.

sort of, because this time ’round, i thought i’d try and get the meringue into the oven before putting the kid to sleep, and in my clock-watching, distracted state, i managed to forget all the ingredients after the sugar.

which is exactly half the list. oh no! while waiting for the meringue to be done (done for?), i googled such questions as “what does vinegar do in a pavlova?” but my research proved inconclusive.

so i asked the boy, “is there such a thing as a bad pavlova?”, and his reply, “hmm… i do not think there can be a bad pavlova,” spurred me on to whip the cream, fold in a dollop of yoghurt, and arrange a bloom of thinly sliced mango on top. it were pretty good.

i ate the last wedge tonight while watching “save the last dance“, which i think i like because it reminds me of being eleven and watching “fame” on tv.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 October 2005 at 11:15 pm

permalink | filed under boy, cake, kid, kitchen, tv

over the weekend, i chanced upon a recipe for spinach and ricotta gnocchi. usually i like the idea of gnocchi, but i can’t imagine eating more than maybe two or three before i get bored and start looking around for, um, tiramisu or something. (strangely, i have no problem sitting and eating mounds and mounds of mashed potato, even to and beyond the point of pain.)

this recipe though, was more than just mashed potato. in fact, there was no potato at all. and just look at the picture in the magazine: so green and enticing! and covered in butter and cheese.

so yesterday, after i stopped being distracted by cake, i went up the street and bought a kilo of spinach and a wedge of ricotta, and stood at the stove for a good part of an hour, following the recipe exactly.

after i dropped the first four balls into the lightly salted boiling water, they disintegrated and looked like a bubbling swamp in the pot. hmph. the next four held together a bit more, but when i drained them and put them in a dish, they sighed into each other and became one large, soft… i don’t even think you can call it gnocchi (gnocco?).

each subsequent batch ended up being floured a bit more, and left to cook a bit longer after they had risen to the surface of the water, so by the end it looked less swampy-mulchy and more italian cuisine. sadly, by this time it had been rejected by the baby (and in a cruel twist i ended up making her mashed potato instead, and baked beans), and forsaken by the boy (who thought it was tasty but soft and lacking meat, and then quickly moved on to cake and ice cream), which is why this afternoon, i ate a large plate of them for lunch.

they were still softer than the magazine ones look (oh, maybe the food stylist put some sort of firming agent in to stop them collapsing under the lights, yes yes, that is my excuse), but gawrsh, so yummy.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 26 October 2005 at 3:54 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kid, kitchen, lunch

when i made the banana frosting on saturday, i read the recipe then cleverly deduced, “feh, 1/4 cup butter and 1/2 cup mashed banana — that will surely yield me enough frosting for like, seven cupcakes. hence, i shall double the recipe.”

and so it came to be that on monday, i still had a sizeable tub of leftover banana frosting in my fridge. clearly, i had to make another cake.

that is all.

oh, and also that my mother, who only ever has two mouthfuls of cake at the most, ate the entire slice that graced her plate, and then picked off the crumbs one by one with her fork. i don’t expect this will ever happen again. i just wanted to record this moment for posterity.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 26 October 2005 at 3:28 pm

permalink | filed under cake

i think you know that i really, really like cake. however i am not so much of a baker. my electric mixer broke down a few years ago, and it always seems easier to walk past a shop window with a cake inside, and suddenly i am in there too, buying the cake! than to sit in the kitchen for an hour or so creaming butter and sugar with a hand whisk, and even then not getting the mixture soft and fluffy enough.

but in the tradition of libra babies, whose birthdays stretch across a week, and maybe into a month, saturday meant a birthday picnic in the park. and what better to bring to a picnic than cake?

i anticipated the gasps of glee and horror from the gathered grandparents as i wheeled out the enormous cake with a photo of maevis printed onto the thick white fondant icing… however in the end i opted for cupcakes. sensible yet fun! and the one bowl chocolate cake from “martha stewart kids”, which required half a cup of olive oil rather than a block of wrist-spraining butter, made the choice clear.

when it came to the frosting, i again felt a twinge in my wrist (i have small, delicate wrists). but i found a recipe for banana buttercream frosting which actually contains real mashed banana and not so much butter at all. the instructions said to beat until frosting is fluffy, but alas, my hand-whisking was no match for a pink kitchenaid. in the end, it wasn’t a big swirl atop the cupcake like those lickable american ones, but it did the job, and looked vaguely natural and healthy (because you couldn’t see the three cups of icing sugar that went into it)… and well, the kid seemed to like it.

no, really.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 October 2005 at 10:01 pm

permalink | filed under cake, kid

dinnertime thursday i was running about the house, grabbing whatever chocolate i could find and stuffing it into my going-out handbag. in the drizzle, we walked briskly up the hill, caught a bus, realised it was the wrong bus when it stopped way (way) short of where we wanted to be, walked even quicker (downhill, thankfully) for about twenty minutes, and arrived at the wharf just as the ferry did. on the top deck, in the drizzle, looking at the twinkly city, i tore open my emergency bag of muji roasted black soybeans covered in soy chocolate. do not be alarmed — there was only the thinnest shell of soy chocolate coating the crunchy, pulsy soybeans, and i ate many of them.

before too long, in the drizzle, a pointy thing covered in fairy lights appeared on the horizon: luna park! it got bigger and grinned at us, and soon we were there.

we were there to see eels!

somehow the boy had managed to get us on the guestlist. ’tis a very useful thing to have friends of friends.

in the big top (which possessed none of the magic and flair conjured up by its name) there was a russian animation about a crocodile and a small furry bear-like creature; a girly folk singer channeling phoebe buffet; and a bar of lindt pistachio chocolate.

“chocolate at a rock concert. that’s funny,” said the boy, as he helped himself to a square.
“funny, how?”
“funnier than beer and cigarettes.”
“i don’t think that eels are so beer-and-cigarettes a band.”

and in fact there was a string quartet, a double bass, a couple of keyboards, a saw, some other stringy things, and E in a bowler hat and a sharp suit, who drank what appeared to be whisky, and smoked a cigar. there you go.

eels = so very, very good.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 October 2005 at 9:51 am

permalink | filed under around town, boy, chocolate, soundtrack

happy birthday, munchie!
may you always be in cake.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 October 2005 at 10:10 pm

permalink | filed under cake, kid

i made dinner for my mum and myself last night. pan-fried ocean trout on mashed pea-potato, with beansprouts in a mirin-soy-sesame dressing.

confoundingly, the last few of times i bought trout or salmon, the pieces of fish came sans skin. where did the skin go? did the fishmongers think they were doing me a favour? did they sell the skin to those nori roll places that do the fried skin and mayonnaise maki?

[ momentary lapse in blogging as i salivate and think about a salmon skin maki ]

did they save it for themselves so they could prance around at home draped in nothing but fish skin?

it’s just, peppered and salted and fried… well you know. and i can’t even continue.

so. eating the crisp, raw beansprouts last night made me reminisce about the stir-fried beansprouts we used to have at home, while growing up. they were cooked until transparent and limp, and tasting faintly of, dare i say it, rancid water. the saving grace was the bits of salted fish tossed in. all those plates of dinnertime flaccid turned me off beansprouts for years and years. such a pity.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 October 2005 at 11:21 am

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen

further to the last post, i thought that i’d have to document the brave new pocky that i found at miracle supermarket. well ok, so they’re not strictly pocky, since one of them is made by morinaga, and none of them is a pretzel stick covered in icing, but the point is how much flavour can you put in a pretzel stick!?

from left to right: NY brownie; maple syrup and butter; and the surprising reverse, where the icing is on the inside.

i can’t wait to eat my pocky.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 October 2005 at 11:13 am

permalink | filed under packaging, shoping, snacks

it’s been a maccha kind of weekend.

first up, a saturday rendezvous in a pretentious frainch bakery with saffron, who immediately plied me with a brown paper bag tied up in pretty green ribbon.

perhaps you are unaware that when i moved house the other month, it took most of a large packing carton to hold my extensive brown (and white and pink and… you get the idea) paper bag collection. yes, i purged myself of stacks and stacks of magazines and somehow couldn’t put a single brown paper bag into the recycling bin.

um, anyway. so the brown paper bag was good, but inside was, as the girl herself said, “a lamington degustation. heh.” — better.

several hunks of sponge cake, a tub of red bean paste, a tub of maccha icing and a package of shaved coconut. intriguing, no? it’s just, there was a green tea lamington challenge sort of put out there, and a rising to the challenge, and a last minute maccha mishap… and thus, a serendipitous hamper. and saffron, i think it could still come together as soon as i go out and get a tub of cream.

cream will make it all better.

although i fear i will devour the yummy sponge before i get myself organised.

my mum arrived from warmer climes later in the day, and plied me with a lovely cardboard box, wrapped in beautiful japanese paper, wrapped in more beautiful japanese paper, in a gorgeous japanese print paper bag.

perhaps you are unaware that when i moved house the other month, it took quite a bit of a large packing carton to hold my extensive cardboard box collection… i’m not kidding. and of course you already know the story of the paper bags. sigh.

inside the box was a tray of minamoto kitchoan daifuku: six maccha-white chocolate and six dark chocolate. and two ceremonial toothpicks for impaling them like the sacrificial desserts they are. i had to immediately excuse myself and make a pot of genmaicha, and soon a fat, green thing was in my mouth. it tasted of green, then cool, and its core was soft white chocolatey.

at this point i want to share with you this message from the president of mitchoan kitchoan: “flavorful desserts can do much to bridge hearts when people get together. sometimes the dessert itself can serve to invent fresh topics of conversation. the joy of eating is only one of many roles a dessert or confectionery plays. it can enhance the moment when people cross paths, or it can convey a person’s true feeling toward someone very special.” yes.

sunday found us — sisters, mothers, daughters in a group of four, sitting in a bustling starbucks after the rest of the shoping centre had shut itself up. the baby had a hot chocolate all to herself, or at least the four centimeters of chocolate crema you get on half a cup of hot chocolate ordered off the kids’ menu. i’ve always found that i’m saddled with more hot chocolate than i want (yes, it is possible) when i buy one at a shop, so this is now my preferred hot chocolate. and only .85.

but my favourite starbucks treat is still the green tea frappacino, though sometimes i think it could taste a little more green. as my aunt observed this afternoon after sampling a spoonful from my cup, “it tastes like powdered non-dairy creamer”. but it’s green! specifically, that green.

and so, this third maccha confection brought the weekend to a close. there is a fourth for later: maccha biscuits studded with red beans, bought during a “supermarket sweep”-type frenzy earlier in the day, at a very cool asian grocery in chatswood. i’ve just looked at the receipt, and in fact the shop is called “miracle supermarket”, which it is.

if memory serves me correctly, my exchange, in mandarin, with the boss lady at checkout, went something like this:

“your stuff is really exciting!”
“exciting meh?”
“yes, there’s all this pocky i’ve never seen before!”
“oh, haha, thank you.”

i’ve never made anything with maccha, not even the tea itself. it’s mostly due to laziness, and partly due to not knowing which brand to get. as saffron apologetically explained, the one she bought tasted like rancid water. mmm. perhaps, santos, you could recommend a brand? you who seem to have had spectacular success with this, and this and especially this. i salute you.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 October 2005 at 9:38 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, drink, snacks

Monthly Archives: October 2005

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