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Posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 February 2008 – 1:57 am

it had started out so promisingly, the launch of the sydney chinese new year festival. when we got to the marktetplace, it had not rained for several hours, and a great sumo panda was wandering amongst the trees soliciting photographs. the first stall we saw was the korean ice cream vendor, hawking watermelon-shaped icy-poles (as previously documented here) for a dollar, and this amazing corn ice-cream sandwich for a dollarfiddy.

a true-to-life corn-shaped wafer shell, with a heart of chocolate-coated corn ice-cream. straight out of the bag, the smell of corn was intense and pure — the taste less so, though the light and creamy was punctuated by little bitlets of corn.

corn!

but it all went downhill from there. as we progressed down the rows of stalls, it became apparent that this was a sham of a market: a few stands of standard supermarket asian brands — oyster sauce, curry paste, exotic drinks, feh; a few too many toss-and-“win” sideshow amusements run by scary carnies; an array of asian streetfood, all deepfried, most on sticks…

there was a stage, too, and a large pink rat-shaped lantern, but at some point, as we considered a dinner of takoyaki and papaya salad — the healthy choice — the DJ interrupted his mandarin rap record to say, “due to inclement weather, the official proceedings have been cancelled.”

which was all we needed, really, to hightail it out of there. dinner was had in a brown booth across the road, at cafe de macau. and what a strange, strange dinner it was. macau food eh?

Posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 January 2008 – 10:44 pm

Filed under around town, dinner, kid, snacks, soundtrack

the blue skies and sunny sun on australia day brought them out in droves: buff young blonde things, draped in australian flags, wearing flag stickers on their bumcheek pockets, plastering fake tattoo flags on their faces, sharing the warmth with their flag-emblazoned singlets with “if you don’t love it, leave” printed beneath the southern cross. i don’t know if it was the immigrant in me, but it all made me feel a little uneasy. what do these children think about when they swathe themselves in flags? it goes a little beyond simple, good ol’ USA-style rahrah patriotism, surely. well, maybe not. anyway, we had more important things to think about… like how many minutes it would take us to walk from the ferry to the angie hart show!

yay, angie hart! the whimsy of frente! that i’ve carried around since university brought me and the kid to the steps flanking a little stage in the heart of the rocks. we unpacked our ham sandwich and waited. angie stood alone by the side of the stage as the previous act dismantled and her gear arrived. she looked all adult contemporary rock chick… older. her hair was long and tangled, and her arms were soft, and beneath her billowy blouse, a little pot belly — she has aged as i have! and then her equipment arrived, and her guitarist, and she began to sing and it was just gorgeous. but it was a tough lunchtime crowd, in this little square surrounded by fastfood takeaway: people chatting over cartons of noodles, that man at the table right in front of the stage who kept his face turned away for the entire set.

the kid too was mostly unimpressed. “i don’t like this song,” she said, once the ham had run out. i was not beneath telling her that if she didn’t stick around for the whole performance, then we would not be going to the dorothy the dinosaur show later that afternoon.

but it all went according to plan. the ice creams on sticks, the dinosaur lurching about on stage before going backstage to collapse of heatstroke, the carousel ride, the grande raspberry iced tea frappucino, the ferry back home, the paddle in the pool, the lamb and rosemary sausage in white bread eaten on a picnic rug on the balcony —

hers with tomato sauce; mine with the fancy green peppercorn mustard that i procured at the maille boutique in paris. see, one of us does play at being australian better than the other.

i asked her later what part of the day she liked best, and she replied, “the swimming pool.” tchk.

Posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 January 2008 – 9:08 pm

Filed under cake, trip

i had sworn that i would not be eating a single cake once i arrived back in sydney, but today, a whole week since i landed, i walked into zumbo and counterboy handed me a big, fat, welcome-back macaron.

“have you tried this?” he asked casually, before continuing ominously, “you’re not allergic to anything, are ya?”

it was a potent mix of savoury and sweet — truly, savoury and then sweet — with a definite grittiness in the heart of the filling.

“um. is it some sort of thai salad macaron?” i asked.

turns out it was white truffle and praline. of course! that comforting, earthy aroma, heady and musky. i’m sure it would have worked fine on its own. the hidden slab of praline was nice and all… but brain-jarringly sweet. today was the first time ever that i was glad the kid was around to share the macaron; i do not think i would have been able to get through it otherwise.

and not just because i’d had my fill of the damn things while i was eating my way through paris. and not just because i had sworn not to eat cake.

in paris, i ate macarons from laduree, gerard mulot and pierre herme. (in london i ate macarons from yauatcha. well, technically, in london i also ate the pierre herme macarons that i’d bought on my last morning in paris.) the macarons were: salted butter caramel, chocolate, pistachio, passionfruit-basil, ginger, raspberry-chocolate, nougat, rose, pistachio, chestnut-maccha, chocolate-caramel, olive oil-vanilla, white truffle-hazelnut, black truffle, balsamic vinegar, fig-foie gras, pandan, chocolate-jasmin, vanilla-black sesame, raspberry-lychee, saffron-something… and a few others…

i would like to tell you about these, i really would, but i arrived home to a growing stack of emails, telling me about all the work i could be doing, to earn the money to replenish the dwindled reserves, which is sort of what happens when you remember — wrongly — that 1 euro is worth 1.2 australian dollars (instead of 1.6 australia dollars).

no regrets though, as i sit here with my 22 bars of european chocolate and my shiny red foldup shopping trolley bag and my vintage “ivory”-handled bread knife. my jars of green mustards. my sneakers and my comic books.

my three weeks of cake fat.

Posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 December 2007 – 1:30 pm

Filed under cake, candy, chocolate, kid, kitchen

really, we can’t get enough of the sprinkles.

so, ho ho, we made gingerbread, at the start of the month, and again on tuesday. any excuse to break out the all-natural-coloured sprinkles, the startlingly fake-coloured flowers, and the silver dragees. that long-ago gift of a tin of pink dean and deluca sugar came in handy too. we even went out in search of tiny candies, and returned with a package of pez (with a very blond disney princess dispenser) and a tube of mini m’n’ms.

small was crucial, because the gingerbread-house cutters i had found were for gingerbread houses about two inches tall. and the gingerbread-man cutter i’d been given for my birthday (thanks, sonya!) were for similarly-statured gingerbread men.

the kid takes a somewhat freeform approach to decorating the little men: as many little m’n’ms as she can fit. which makes for quite a lovely, chocolatey biscuit.

and so i leave you with this: the waitrose gingerbread recipe. i used backstrap molasses instead of golden syrup —

[ now. given the choice between a locally-produced molasses, which is a by-product of the sugar-refining process, or the organic molasses produced solely for its end result of molasses… way the hell over in peru, which would be the ethical choice? do you buy local, or organic free trade air miles? does it make a difference if the organic one has a pretty label, while the local one is kind of plain and has a black trickle down the side of the jar where it has leaked out like a by-product of say, a petroleum-refining process? these are the thoughts that went through my head as i stood in the aisle of the health food shop. imagine the thoughts i had while debating whether or not to use a raw egg white icing recipe! ]

— and a couple more teaspoons of a couple more spices (cinnamon and nutmeg), and ended up with a dark brown biscuit, crisp and crunchy. it was very sweet, and still not really spicy.

my plane leaves in about three hours. my fingers are numb.

happy xmas to you.

Posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 December 2007 – 7:59 pm

Filed under around town, ice cream, kid

stuff i might miss over the summer.

we came running down the hill under the harbour bridge, knee-deep (for some of us) in grass, stopping twice for dandelions. we came down over the hill, and we saw the pink and white van.

we may have gone overboard on the sprinkles.

Posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 December 2007 – 10:31 pm

Filed under cake, lunch, trip

my arms are covered in bruises. perhaps this is how inner turmoil manifests itself, on the outside. the most gruesome one at the moment – since the original matching set on the inner edge of each elbow, from scaling a wall a week ago, faded — is the one with the sharp, slightly blistered burn surrounded by a purple blossom of bruised tissue. that one was from lowering my forearm onto the rim of a pot while boiling pasta, and mysteriously, it does not hurt at all. there are two others, on the inside, and outside, of my upper arm, which i assume came from walking into ill-placed doorhandles, and i do that once or twice a day, so they’re nothing special.

but let’s talk about bruises that matter.

sigh.

just past sunday noontime, we met deborah in the narrow corridor of adriano zumbo patissier, to procure supplies for our luncheon picnic. you may recall, we attempted such a picnic months ago, to herald the spring, and were rained out (or, in, as the case proved to be). despite the steady light drizzle, our summer picnic barreled on; we were defiant!

i’d been thinking about the scuro all week. from the original zumbo lineup, it’s been revived for the december best-of collection. i have no recollection of it in the early days; back then it was all about the macaron. but to see it, this manly slab of flourless chocolate biscuit, and mousse, and layers of assorted caramel concoctions… in my head, it was a dense and sticky thing.

so it was a surprise when we popped open the cakebox in the park to discover that scuro had swooned like a lady. fallen with such force, actually, that it had embedded itself into the passionfruit tart beside it. it was not too warm out, and we had not swung the carry bag, so who knows what happened. perhaps it went insane with desire? the tart is rather ravishing after all.

and ravish it we did. the crisp pastry shell, the rich filling that filled our mouths with a warm passionfruity glow. the vibrant technicolor sunset across the top of it was contained within a barely-there layer of gelatin, but even that was enough to give a welcome, wobbly edge to the passionfruit creme below. this one, deborah had been thinking about for months, and i would say it was not at all a disappointment. deborah?

the scuro was much more delicate than i had imagined, quite light for something so dark. i especially liked the cakey bits, drenched in chocolatey juices, and the very pleasant burnt caramel flavour in the mysterious foamy middle layer. and it did my head in, in the end; i can no longer sit down and eat and endless quantity of quality dark chocolate, without suffering dizziness or a turn in my gut, but with the scuro, i was compelled to keep eating until it was gone.

i will not tell you how we ate it, this collapsed ruin of a cake, but just know that deborah, the kid, and i have eaten together enough times over the last two years that we had no qualms about seeing each other like that. spoonless (zumbo had run out that day). with crude (though genius!) shovels fashioned from the cardboard bases of our pastries.

it was not all depravity, of course. we had real food to start. mine was quiche! and i never order the quiche. but this one had been giving me the eye every time i walked in the shop, and finally i bit. sue, she is called, filled with spinach, goat’s cheese and blueberries.

the pastry was still crisp, and the one real fear i have about quiche filling — that it will be a mouthful of eggy-cheesy-eggy — never materialised. they were serious about the spinach. look at it! a great knot of greenery. the goat cheese was mild, and the blueberries not at all discordant, and i would love to try this again, warm out of the oven, and with a knife handy to make sense of the clump of spinach.

and that, folks, is the last zumbo post for a little while. in a sudden turn of events, i suddenly lucked into a plane ticket to london (and a train ticket to paris). lucky for the 12 hour overnight transit at changi airport, and the freezing cold that awaits me. and lucky, really, for the sister at the other end of the planes and trains and automobiles.

i leave in two days, and i have not begun packing. i have yet to buy me some of that expensive european money, and a piece of beautiful hand luggage, and travel insurance. at least i managed to buy two polypro skivvies at the adventure shop sale yesterday. i still have print deadlines to attend to – just, and the house is a mess. i am so clenchy, and the tightness in my throat, and the knot in my stomach…

but you know what else awaits me? cake. by god, will there be cake. and falafel.

if it turned out to be the kind that’s green on the inside, that would be just tops.

Posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 December 2007 – 10:34 pm

Filed under boy, cake, kitchen

anytime is good for cake, of course, but this time of year, there’s a tiny bit more than usual in this household: october is the kid’s birthday, and then mine in november, and two weeks ago, right at the start of december, the boy’s.

i’d been wondering out loud a few days prior such things as “would you like a chocolate passionfruit tart?” and “what about an old skool cream sponge from the vietnamese bakery? what about a lamington cream sponge??”, but on the day, he requested a pavlova, with passionfruit, and that was that.

except it sort of wasn’t. monday morning, i set the refrigerated eggs on the kitchen counter so they’d be perfect room temperature when the time came for the beating. i took the kid to music class; we went out for birthday dimsum. and then mid-afternoon, we returned home, and i discovered that the eggs had been returned to the fridge. such callous and violent efficiency makes me want to weep. (and maybe i did weep? i can’t remember.)

a couple hours later, back on the bench, the eggshells were still cool to the touch, and i made the fool decision to proceed anyway. the beating of the eggwhites was not a success. well, it was a partial success, but the peaks to which we aspired did not eventuate. and then the hour and a half of baking, and the instructions to cool completely in the oven… as time went by, it became painfully and sorrowfully clear that there would be no birthday pavlova.

but there was day-after-birthday pavlova. and that turned out ok. better than, even. the meringue was a bit spongier than i’d like, but covered in a big, fluffy doona of whipped cream, a couple of sliced-up mangoes and a drizzle of passionfruit, it had no reason to feel a lesser cake. truly, a golden moment.

here’s what you might do with your cream, if you make a mango pavlova. whip your cream as normal, perhaps adding some vanilla extract along the way. when it reaches optimum consistency, gently fold in a small tub of peach and mango yoghurt. hell, beat some more, if you like. the yoghurt gives a fresh tang to the cream, and a little voluptuous body, and the bits of fruit — bells and whistles, sure, but who doesn’t like a little jingle-jangle from time to time.

this was the first pavlova i’d made since acquiring an electric mixer — how could it have been so long since the last one? — and it made me feel like i should be whipping them up every couple of weeks from now on.

but not for the boy. no longer. over the last few weeks, he’s packed his stuff, moved it all into a corner in the loungeroom. it’s a large corner, which shrank substantially this morning when his dad loaded a portion of it into a trailer, and drove off into the country with it. the rest goes after xmas, with the boy. there is sadness hanging over us, and regret. and relief, and warmth. ten years is a long time, but god, it went by quick. so clear, the memory of exchanging numbers on the train back to the city on mardi gras night, and sitting at the base of the rusted metal pubic art on the hill at sydney park, looking at my sneakers… a headphone bud, bursting with accordians from “amelie”, being slipped into my ear on an overnight bus from hue.

Posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 December 2007 – 9:32 am

Filed under around town, ice cream, kid, lunch

one thing i remember about two days after my birthday is that it was dirty, stinkin’ hot. it was about 11.40 when we left the park, and just before noon when we arrived at about life; i was slick with sweat, and the lenses in my sunglasses had steamed up from the heat coming off my cheeks. the kid was fresh as a daisy, perhaps only slightly wilted, because she’d been in the pram while i’d been pushing it up that god-damned hill. at least one of us looked presentable; it was like we were about to meet the queen.

all morning, maeve had been going through a list of what she might do when she met maggie. “i might dance for maggie,” she said, “and then i might sing a song for maggie, and then i might say hello…” we have “the cook and the chef” on every week, so maggie beer is like, i dunno, a familiar grand aunt? and she was at about life signing cookbooks that day, as well as launching her new range of fancy ice cream.

and amazingly, as i stood there in the doorway trying not to puddle on the floor, someone handed me a tiny cone of ice cream, and one to the kid as well. now that’s a welcome. a smooth and creamy welcome, with a rich vanilla flavour and… an intriguing tang. that something else, when i managed to read the label on a tub a little while later, is elderflower. i wish that i had had a moment longer to savour it slowly, for bang on twelve maggie appeared and began signing books for the handful of people who’d shown up punctually. i popped the rest of the cone into my mouth and grappled for the cookbook in my bag.

a couple weeks before, i had told the boy that if he bought a copy of “maggie’s harvest” for his mum’s birthday, that i’d take it to get signed. so there we were, inching forward towards the grand lady. “where’s maggie?” said maeve, and there. she. was.

“hello!” said maggie, brightly. but maeve was not singing, and not dancing, and not even saying hello. there was something very interesting on the floor just right of maggie’s feet. so i told maggie how excited we were about her ice cream, and she said that she was too, and we got through it in the end, and then it was time for lunch.

the salad display at about life is a wall of great big bowls bursting with colour and delight. it was extra delightful that day, because of a small platter of grilled lamb cutlets sitting unobtrusively to one side. it became very important to me that we should acquire a portion of these… but what constituted a portion? the counterstaff did not know, because it was a one-off special for the day, but they helpfully suggested that i tell them how many i wanted and they’d put it on a plate for me.

so i asked for two — one each for me and the kid — and some of the tomato and hand-torn mozzarella salad on the side. and some bread and butter, please. oh, and also that amazing strawberry tart in the cake cabinet.

and what showed up was a heaped platter of colour and delight: the lamb was well-marinated and tender, with just enough charred fatty bits on the edges; the tomatoes were big and juicy; the cheese tasted pure, of cream. the bread, after it had been put to good use soaking up lamb juice and olive oil… sigh…

but by that stage the kid had already moved on. swiftly and methodically she picked off the perfect glistening strawberries atop the tart, and started on the stewed rhubarb at the same cracking pace, until the intense sourness stopped her. mm! it was sour! but i ate it all, relishing the tartness. what didn’t get eaten (shock!) was most of the pastry. “pastry”. it looked lovely on the shelf, all dramatically misshapen and caramelised, but it was chewy and ultimately unyielding, a handful of seeds and grains pressed into a pie dish, and tasted like what i imagine those moulded birdseed things taste like. sigh. (this is a different sort of sigh from the one in the last paragraph: it is a healthy cake sigh.)

following the banoffee pie debacle of a couple months back — there were a couple thin slices of banana atop the cloud of cream, and i thought that there might be more banana hidden beneath, mingling with the caramel… but no, those were the only two whispers of banana in the whole thing, dried out from being baked. and the cream wasn’t cream; it was some sort of soft meringue, i think. and the biscuit base was too big a slab. and… and… well, it just wasn’t a very good banoffee experience (my first time!) and i would hope that it gets better from now on —

i guess i’m trying to say… well, i’m hesitant to put the kibosh on cake at about life, based on two out of two not quite stellar instances… but maybe go all out on the savoury stuff — the salads, the tapas plates, the wraps filled to bursting point and served with a handful of undressed rocket — and if there’s lamb lurking about the glass case, order it! and then buy a tub of maggie’s ice cream from the grocery department.

which, in case you are interested, also comes in quince and bitter almond, and burnt fig jam, honeycomb and caramel. on the way out, i bought a tub of the latter for the boy, and briefly considered having it autographed by maggie, but she was outside in the sunshine, eating a big plate of something delicious. we sidled past into the heat. “where’s maggie?” said maeve.

Posted by ragingyoghurt on 9 December 2007 – 10:43 pm

Filed under snacks

what is this shiny little beastie?

for a start, it really is small, waiting out its sentence on a saucer from an espresso cup.

i came across a tray of them this morning in the deli counter of norton street grocer, past the great wall of boxed-up panettone, the $4 punnets of fat raspberries, the cheeses…

[ ok, so i didn’t make it past the cheeses; there is right now a fior de latte mozzarella as big as a baby’s head, in a tub in my fridge. oh, and i didn’t actually make it past the raspberries either. ]

what it is: creamy, salty cheese, rolled up in a slice of grilled eggplant, rolled up in a slice of prosciutto, immersed in red-and-green-flecked olive oil. it was about all i could manage for lunch on this crazyhot day (aside from a wedge of chorizo baguette topped with sliced tomatoes, ha!).

about all the kid managed was a mini ice cream cone of sara lee’s finest french vanilla, rolled in coloured sprinkles and studded with raspberries.

Posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 December 2007 – 2:26 pm

Filed under cake

so. the night before my birthday, i tackled the cha cha cha. but the day before my birthday, ana came ’round with little lucia and littler astrid — apparently it made a big difference to be stuck between four different walls with her two under two? — and i figured the least i could do was ply them with cake.

ana has some strange rules about food. stuff like, you can’t mix fruit with chocolate, or fruit with anything actually: fruitcake is totally out. so it took a little longer than usual at the zumbo counter, trying to figure out what might be acceptable. in the end, i picked a sort-of chocolatey one, and a sort-of fruity one, and hoped that it would all work out.

the cheech and chong (descended from the quasimodo from earlier in the year) is a crisp pastry shell with a frangipane-and-rhubarb filling — all at once sweet and tart — topped with a great wobbly disc of blowtorched chiboust. this delicate union of creme patissiere and creme chantilly was thoroughly infused with the fresh taste of pear, and i wanted more. MORE. and as it turns out, there were no issues with the fruit and pink chocolate garnishes, because maeve swiped them all before anyone else could.

the malt ‘n’ teaser had been recommended to me on several occasions, and finally i bit. but there is not so much to bite with this one: it’s layer upon soft layer of lush malty, chocolatey, vanillary… stuff. [well, ok, because you need to know, i have just this morning made a special trip up the road to read the little placard: malt bavarois, vanilla cremeaux, chocolate sabayon.] even the vaguely cakey bits — malt dacquoise and praline feullitine — are moist and sticky with syrupy goodness. truly, you could eat the whole thing just by pressing it between your tongue and the roof of your mouth… and i believe i did. it was lovely and comforting, quite the opposite of cha cha cha (though one is not better than the other; you will just have to decide what you deem appropriate behaviour from your dessert).

and the cupcakes? from the old skool bakery across the road. the kid chose them, one for herself, and one for lucia, even though her one memory of lucia is that lucia likes to poke her in the eye. and this is how it worked out: she ate her cupcake, bided her time, and then ate all the frosting and three chocolate buttons off the other one, because, as it turns out, lucia is still too young for pink icing.

ana loved both the fruity one and the chocolatey one, and unexpectedly, maybe even liked the fruity one just that little bit more. me? i grew a little older, and a little bit fatter, with an unprecedented three zumbo cakes under my belt.

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