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the coughing started towards the end of matt moran‘s masterchef theatre at the good food and wine show. as matt moran arranged raspberries atop a creme base, the one sharp point at the back of my throat grew into a great spluttering fit. i don’t think it caused too much disruption; the applause for the raspberry tart drowned me out.

but i have been coughing for just over two weeks now. at its worst it was the kind of cough that brings up brown and lumpy from my lungs. now, the germs seem to have all gone, but i wake up at four in the morning, still coughing, and the only way to get back to sleep is to watch cindy crawford’s informercial (“i never thought i’d be in an informercial…” she says, not batting an eyelid.) and read another chapter of “snow“.

having only vicariously experienced the good food show of previous years via grab your fork, i asked helen for some tips. “bring a backpack… get $25 worth of samples,” she offered helpfully.

so we hit the ground eating, deborah and i: lavosh bread topped with figs and white cheese, unusual jams — strawberry-balsamic vinegar-black pepper — on bite-sized scones, little cups of ready-peeled crabmeat, south australian pasta sauce made with south australian tomatoes, pomegranate green tea, chocolate…

for me, the show was all about chocolate. five minutes in we had found an organic chocolate stand with samples of buttermilk chocolate (“it is very sweet,” warned the samplegirl. and it was.) then we found the lindt stand, where a lady distributed raspberry lindor balls, and right behind her stood another lady handing out orange lindor balls. then the adora stand, where you present your hand, palm up, and the kind counter ladies filled it with callebaut chocolate buttons. the ikea stand missed a great opportunity to supermarket their range of swedish food (they were selling kitchens) but there was an enormous bowl of daim candies for the taking. not an hour into the show, we were walking down the aisles, woozy and lightheaded. but not one to let a feeling of unwellness stop me from eating chocolate, i plundered the sample trays of the three or four other organic chocolate stands, a generous hunk of a triple chocolate cookie and a teaspoon of wattle seed white chocolate mousse.

we sampled savoury for a bit — dried figs, fish tofu, curry on rice (twice!), corn chips — and then we bought the donna hay magazine show bag. curiously, it contained no donna hay products (besides the magazine, which irritates me), but was startlingly value for money. $7.95 bought us a couple of mini samples: a small packet of cardboard corn cakes and a tiny bottle of shower oil, but also a host of full-sized products like a pump pack of liquid hand soap, a tin of moroccan spice flavour rub, a 750g carton of raw sugar, a dozen dishwasher tablets, a pack of disposable plates edged with blue daisies, and a loaf of bread (!). [edit 22/06: and a three-pack of chocolate brownie-muffin bites, and a bottle of fiji water.]

across the aisle, the delicious magazine showbag upped the stakes with gourmet samples and a bottle of wine and a coffee voucher and a lindt chocolate cupcake, but you only got the showbag if you took out a subscription to the magazine. fair enough. but in a glorious twist of fate, deborah bought herself a subscription, and then handed me the cupcake. thanks, lady!

and so it was this moist, dark cupcake with the lush chocolate ganache that sat in my lap during the matt moran cooking show, though it didn’t really make it past the first few minutes. being in row g, we missed out on the plate of salt and pepper squid that got passed ’round the early birds up front, but he sure made it look easy, cleaning the squishy beast. “even simple enough for donna,” he quipped. then he picked up his cookbook several times, stroking the cover gently, like a proud papa.

the theatre disgorged right by the glitzy display of curtis stone’s new cookware range. silicone sheets with shallow star-shaped moulds for making wafers. double-walled glass ramekins. nice, and of course, we need more celebrity chef cookware. but the bright yellow C logo all lit up like broadway gave us the giggles.

we did a last lap around the exhibition hall, to buy the things which we’d been listing in our heads. there were other things we might have bought, at special show prices, if those prices hadn’t been tied to unmanageable quantities like five tins of powdered stock, or four bottles of soy sauce, for $10. (though at the kikkoman stand, we learnt that a teaspoon or a tablespoon of soy sauce in a dessert such as a lemon tart could really bring out the… tartness. when quizzed further, the counterman admitted that a tablespoon would actually be a lot, and the recipe developer actually recommended more like a teaspoon. perhaps the recommendation should actually be no soy sauce whatsoever in your dessert. anyone care to try this?)

so for me, what ended up in my shopping bag were three bars of single-region lindt dark chocolate (and a coupon for a free lindt macaron at the lindt cafe) for $5; the $25 adora chocolate showbag containing one each of their sixteen truffles, a dark chocolate bar, a bag of chocolate-enrobed turkish delight (from iran), and another mini belgian chocolate bar; and a carton of the organic triple chocolate cookies sampled earlier in the day.

way earlier. a week ago, i asked helen if two hours would be enough to see everything. wisely, she’d said to budget for three. as we left the exhibition hall, an announcement came through that the show would be closing in 15 minutes. i guess this means we’d been there close to six hours.

the show closed at six, but by five, the exhibitors had already begun scrubbing down their counters, and the samples were long gone. en route to the exit though, we were stopped in our tracks, because the good man at king island dairy was still handing out little tubs of chocolate creme dessert. what it is, is pure thick cream (53% milk fat, no vegetable gums or whatever) combined with belgian chocolate. genius.

i immediately wanted more, but it was dark outside, and there was a healthy walk to the buses ahead of us, and how were we to know that halfway through, it would begin raining sideways?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 June 2007 at 11:16 pm

permalink | filed under around town, bookshelf, chocolate, shoping, snacks

a week ago, my mum and i walked the gauntlet of cleveland street to stand in line at sopra, for a taste of the sydney italian festival prosciutto promotion. we stood for a long while, almost as long as it took to walk to waterloo from glebe, and then we gazed upon the handwritten board at the three-item-long special menu.

three.

it was written all in italian, but “melone” in the first one was pretty easy to decipher and came, tantalisingly with “gamberi”, and i vaguely remembered that “agnello” in the third one is lamb, so twenty minutes later, when a waiter came ’round to see if we were waiting for something (“um, actually, yes, we are waiting for our orders to be taken”), that is what we ordered.

the middle option involved some sort of pasta and melanzane, and when it arrived at the next table, it turned out to be a penne-moulded-around-chopped-vegetables-and-baked sort of thing.

the prosciutto and melon salad was all colour and light, and the surprise thing (if you don’t read so much italian) was that the third party was a tangle of fennel salad topped with two grilled prawns, tasting of sea and salt. the prosciutto was pink and springy, and tasted strongly of fresh pig. all delicious.

the lamb was a backstrap, wrapped in prosciutto, perched atop a small heap of baby vegetables — carrots, potatoes, tiny artichokes, green beans — and fat, flavoursome field mushrooms. it was very tasty, but the lamb was disappointingly tough. halfway through i figured that taking much smaller bites made it more manageable.

we shared it all, as well as a rocket and parmesan salad, because what our waiter said when i asked if the meals came with vegetables, was, “no”. it was not a bad thing though, because if you have had another rocket and parmesan salad elsewhere, you might be expecting some dressed leaves crowned with a few shards of cheese. but. at sopra, the dressing is the cheese! tiny ground up bits of salty parmesan mixed into the oil, coating each rocket leaf, so you get cheesy flavour in every bite. genius! and the flakes of sea salt! so very salty!

as we cleaned our plates, we noticed that all the other tables had attentive waitpeople who explained the italian menu in great detail, and that the guest chef, massimo spigaroli (president of the italian prosciutto consortium) stopped at most of the tables to ask how everything was. we were afforded no such pleasantries, and so were equally tough (like a lamb backstrap) when it came to leaving a tip.

(noodlebowl has some very luscious pictures of the other prosciutto event.)

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 June 2007 at 10:57 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch

quick! before i forget…

i went to new zealand, and all i got was this lousy photograph of a lousy airline meal. well, an exaggeration maybe: it wasn’t “lousy” so much as “lacking”. the pie gravy was gummy, but at least there were actual chunks of meat glued into it; there was cake, but it was cold, hard and dry; there was no fruit or veg, unless you count the tomato sauce. ok, lousy.

also, i did take more than this one photograph. just, surprisingly, nothing more of food.

we were in christchurch, because my father had a conference to attend, and invited everyone along for the ride. so while he met with colleagues and ate convention center fare all day, my mother, maeve and i…

walked the streets;
[ looking at the street map in the hotel room, we’d plan our expedition and set out for a long walk to something at the other end of the city. what we discovered is that christchurch is pretty small though, so we’d always reach our destination in about ten minutes. ]

went to the art gallery;
[ the christchurch art gallery is a just-right-sized museum for a couple of hours’ exploration, and has a large activity room set up for children with puzzles and magnetic walls. when we were there, there was a gargantuan inflated rabbit sprawled across the main foyer, and another smaller one hiding in one of the galleries. just what a kid needs to be engaged with art: bunnies! ]

and explored the arts centre.
[ which is a city block worth of working studios, galleries, cafes and shops –including a much-lauded fudge shop — and whose courtyard we stumbled into, to find ourselves amidst a cluster of medieval mosaic pillars. lovely. ]

except that as you got closer, you discovered that each pillar had been wrapped with printouts of intricate kaleidoscopes of people, an installation by korean artist, lee joong keun. lovely and amazing! ]

there was a lot of public art in that one city block.

but eventually, a kid gets tired of art, and starts asking to see penguins. we breezed through the international antarctic centre (in which there is a snow-filled room where you can put on a high-tech jacket and experience an antarctic storm with 40km/h winds — breezy indeed! it may seem like a fun idea to start with, with the layer of powder snow on the ground, the cave in which to take shelter from the storm, and the slippery dip made of ice, but by the end, it will be a somewhat traumatic experience from which the kid cannot wait to escape), pausing long enough for the kid to throw the shriekiest of tantrums in the penguin enclosure. the penguins didn’t care though; they were behind glass.

eventually, too, a father gets tired of conferencing, and we climbed aboard a rental car and headed out to the jade-green countryside. barely two hours out of the city, the kid painted the upholstery a fetching shade of vomit, so we stopped for a little rest at little river.

we spent the next three days in akaroa, a town where a volcano used to be. everywhere we turned, it was like looking at a picture postcard. a postcard on which a picture of a kid has been superimposed on it, eating a pink ice cream.

there was a lot of good eating, in particular a dinner by the cosy fireplace at ma maison, where every one of my three courses was perfect: akaroa salmon and caramelised scallops, resting on a salad of pickled diakon, mung bean and paw paw, finished with a lemon butter nage and a vanilla balsamic glace; followed by pressed terrine of confit duck and veal, with crispy bread and a seedless grape chutney; followed by double chocolate tart with maple syrup, vanilla bean ice-cream and a black forest sauce. what they did not say on the menu was that the tart also came with a great dollop of marscarpone, and that the black forest sauce was actually a little bowl of macerated cherries, which really pushed it that bit beyond just “perfect”.

there was a lot of wool purchased. possumerino in fact, a non-pilling, lightweight, extra warm mix of sheep wool and possum fur. my mother must have been up for a special-service-in-pest-control award for keeping the pesky possum population down, because by the end of the trip she’d bought possum merino hat, gloves, socks, cardigans (three!), and had scored a scarf from the conference folk. oh! oh! and a possum fur collar!

unstoppable, my mother.

there was a lot of broken crockery in the artist’s garden at linton. these days i am wary of too much whimsy, but the kid seemed to enjoy the crockery-covered cats and dogs, the ballerina table, the grand piano which housed a collection of succulents and played a selection of french cabaret standards sung by the local piaf… me? i found a small corridor, tiled with shards of mirror, just wide enough for a bench to sit and reflect upon this ex-volcano hanging off a little island in the south pacific ocean, and what a pretty good place it was to be.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 May 2007 at 10:01 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, kid, trip

this just in from our correspondent in the field:

baby had a great time. no nap.
on arrival, fed the guinea pigs, then off to michel for babycino.
then to playground where she spun and spun on an axis, and chased the cockatoos and ducks.
played stephen’s drums like a maestro, then the trumpet, then the guitar.
enjoyed the braised pork and the rice drenched with its gravy. even dipped all her veg in the gravy.
(have you marinated the pork? she lives for that)
the to cecilia’s for cupcake with icing and cream and charmed the pants off the folks there.
came back with 2 goodybags of cupcakes.
had her bath and was read many stories and sank contently into dreamland past 10 o’clock.

my mother’s been trying to bond with the kid, but maevis has been playing to get.

“on tuesday po-po will take you to ee-po’s house to see the rabbits and guinea pigs,” she offered last week.

“actually,” replied the kid, “you stay here and mummy will take me.”

but so, after music class this morning, and dimsum this afternoon, i strapped her into the carseat and waved her off with my aunt and my mother, who were bubbling with gentle trepidation up front.

and then i went off to watch zodiac. and then leisurely browsed the aisles of jusco, where i found some yummy lychee-and-grapefruit hard candy and a box of double-maccha-dipped chocolate pretzel sticks.

a good day for all, then.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 May 2007 at 11:01 pm

permalink | filed under around town, at the movies, kid

and so a month goes by. it kicked off with a txt from a concerned well-wisher, letting me know that all the pictures on this page had been replaced by a dramatic highway-by-night photograph. dramatic indeed! my domain had quietly expired, who knows when, and evidently my registrar is not the kind that sends out a renewal reminder. after an almost frenzied exchange with the helpdesk, who helpfully sent an email which confirmed, “your domain name expired. you were supposed to log in and renew the domain…”, i typed my credit card details into a box, hoped for the best, and then left a few hours later for new zealand.

my good mother is visiting this month. her first week here, we did the rounds: about life, circle cafe, bar contessa, david jones food hall… we had every intention of doing sopra, but barrelling up crown street, we passed by bills and our plan came undone. she’d been talking about trying the ricotta hotcakes for years, and i figured it was now or never. and now, perhaps, never again; is it neccessary to have that much pancake on a plate? tchk. we shall try again for sopra this friday: as part of the sydney italian festival, they are presenting “special prosciutto menus“!

we had cupcakes from cupcakes on pitt (the promising sticky date cupcake was a bit dry and quite heavy and strangely muffin-like — i am not recommending it; the strawberries and cream was much more delightful — pretty pink cake with fresh cream and a single sliced up strawberry), and cupcakes from the colonial bakery at the milsons point train station (the lemon cupcake had a generous dollop of whipped cream and a splodge of dayglo yellow lemon jellycandycurd), and then my mum briefly talked about a new cupcake cookbook and how she might buy it and bake cupcakes in her impending retirement. (she has since recanted, and will now be baking muffins, which really sums up the difference between us, i think.)

we did circle cafe again…

and for a week in-between, we went — my olds, my kid and me — to new zealand, where babycinos are called “fluffies”, and the marshmallows that come with them are invariably a little stale. the lamb is delicious though, in all its forms: lamb pie, lamb burgers, more lamb pie, lamb salad. somehow i photographed none of it.

this lamb salad is from about life, and is one of the best things i’ve eaten, ever. tender roasted meat, shaved fennel, pomegranate seeds, this gorgeous beast i captured.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 May 2007 at 9:11 pm

permalink | filed under around town, blog, cake, lunch, trip

so, the second kid-free friday went according to plan. dropped her off at playschool just in time for morning tea. in the midst of quiet munching children, there was a place set at the table for her, a bowl containing a slice of apple and a slice of orange. she was hesitant and shy and nervous, but the magnetic pull of the fruit was too strong.

i walked into the city, and on to surry hills, to the ray hughes gallery, where the most amazing show by lucy culliton, “domestic science“, is on for another week or so, so hurry! hurry over to see it.

it’s a hundred and sixty-five paintings and drawings of the best cakes, preserves, decorated arrowroot biscuits, knitted dolls, coat hanger covers, stuff at a regional show, all painted with love and gusto, candy colours, dabs of paint so high off the board you want to lick it. well, i did anyway. i mean, i did want to. lucy culliton is probably my favourite contemporary australian painter, and not just because she paints glorious buckets of hot chips and sauce, or trays of fairy cakes; her series of cactuses is as gorgeous as the rest. i had come to the gallery with a secret mission: i wanted to buy one of the paintings for myself.

because how much higher will her star rise? and how affordable will a painting be at the next show? and how much do her paintings fill me with joy?

plenty. i walked through the exhibition once, and again, and i saw how many red spots were on the main wall already: the lamingtons had been sold, and the festive iced cake covered in sprinkles. i tried to imagine that one of the remaining cakes could be mine: a second-prize orange cake; a doily covered in pink-iced cupcakes; a cream-and-jam-filled victoria sponge (truly the most lickable of the lot). i paced the wall for half an hour. i had to leave, and i walked down the street to the bourke street bakery, where i sat on an orange milk crate on the sidewalk, and meditated over a pork and fennel sausage roll and a belgian hot chocolate. it fortified me.

when i returned to the ray hughes gallery, ray hughes — who had earlier seen me with my nose mere centimetres away from a chocolate cake — smiled and gestured at the woman in bluejeans and cowboy shirt sitting opposite him, beneath the wall of plenty. “this is lucy,” he said.

and what i said was, “i think that one of these paintings is mine, but i don’t know which one yet.” and then, because she looked quite mystified, i said, “i think that i am going to buy one; i just haven’t worked out which one.”

because she does not know me, she asked, “cake or knitting?”, and she was friendly and kind and above all, unprecious, and told me about the names she had written on the winners’ certificates — emmylou harris had won for the pink-iced cupcakes, and how she had visited a dozen or so regional shows and distilled the best into this fictional, best-of-the-best lithgow agricultural society show, (and how lithgow wasn’t actually the hotbed of homecraft that she’d conjured up), and how she’d been a graphic designer a long time ago and gotten tired of the routine and gone to art school and would never go back to moving type about a page…

and i paced back and forth some more, and at times she would take this piece or the other off the wall and bring it into the sunlight, so that i could see just how luminous the cream filling in the victoria sponge really was, and how supple the red jam. and i wandered into the back room for respite, this little room filled with lively and understanding portraits of barnyard animals and exotic parrots; lucy’s friend rachel fairfax had accompanied her to all the country shows, and had documented the animals as lucy studied the food and craft.

and when i slunk back to the wall for maybe the fourth or fifth time, she laughed, not unkindly. i told her i’d narrowed it down to two: the pink cupcakes on the doily, and the resplendant packet butter cake, which showed me something more to love every time i came back to it. she put them side-by-side on a bench, and then it was clear.

we shook on it, and she placed a red dot next to #81. my first piece of art! i felt pretty great.

and then i got home, and minutes later my print rep called to let me know that the proofs of the book were online for approval. we signed off on them just after 4pm. and then i felt extremely great.

i think though, that i will have to go back to the show, to see it all again without that spectre of needing to buy something gnawing a hole in my belly. bring on kid-free day the third!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 April 2007 at 10:28 pm

permalink | filed under around town, art, cake, shoping

how has a week gone by already? it’s like time travel i tells ya. last sunday morning we were a flurry of activity, pretzel-dipping. this time i roped in eager little hands: grabby fingers to break up a lindt bar, agile fingers to fish pretzels out of the chocolate bath, grubby fingers from samples along the way.

we packed a picnic then: buffalo mozzarella and pesto sandwich for me, tasty cheese and avocado sandwich for the kid, and a little box of sliced tomatoes for on-site insertion. a couple of mandarins in the basket, and a few chocolate-dipped pretzels for good measure. we were off to the acoustica festival, just up the hill and then down the hill from home.

from the crest we looked down into birchgrove oval, and it was like a quaint village through the clearing. an arc of little white tents lined the perimeter, some festooned with balloons, proferring all manner of festival foods, sunglasses and quick massages. there was a giant inflatable slide, and a swing-carousel, and something with a row of clowns’ heads that swiveled to and fro.

in the middle of it all there was a boy and his guitar. he was the first act of the day, and the front row was his friends from high school. there was no second row — it was very early in the proceedings — so we sat a couple metres back, on my $10 “burberry” picnic rug, and minutes later, as he played an elliott smith song, all the food was gone.

“can we go and buy some ice cream?” asked the kid. it was a reasonable request, even though the new zealand natural ice cream stand was charging an unreasonable $4 per scoop.

we returned to our rug to catch as many minutes of act number two as it took for the pink ice cream to be eaten, and then, “can we go to the face painting?”

we returned to our rug — one of us hopping all the way — to see the third act of the day, but it was perhaps too much to ask of the kid. she was already being pulled in the direction of the playground up the hill. we left in the middle of some pretty good 12-bar blues.

considering the last live music i saw was baby proms at the opera house, and the second last live music was a playschool concert, i was pretty happy.

this makes me happy too: the six-month expired box of royce nama chocolate in my fridge is still completely edible! these little bricks of fine chocolate, each one dusted in cocoa powder, pack a punch of dark chocolate flavour and melt away to nothing on my tongue. actually, the google translated page tells it better:

it is the raw chocolate of the sweetness moderate adult. …the elegant fragrance starts overflowing, V.S.O.P was blended in the bitter chocolate. tastefulness it is the raw chocolate of the adult taste where the elegant fragrance and the bitter impression of overflowing do not accumulate.

all true. it is made with fresh cream, and apparently has a shelf life of one month. but i have put it to the test, and six months past 27 october 2006, they are still perfect. now that’s time travel.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 April 2007 at 9:15 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, kid, kitchen, snacks

there is an urgency to these posts, isn’t there? is it necessary to have four posts in a day? it’s just, they are back today.

after i considered bagels for breakfast, i briefly considered bagels for lunch. in the end, i took myself and my “new yorker” to circle cafe. because, when will i get another chance to sit in a nice cafe and drink iced tea with mint and lemon, and chew and swallow at a normal, leisurely pace, and not worry about little grabby (grubby) fingers reaching into my plate? despite my anticipation of lots (well, several at least) of quiet, quality meals out over the course of the week, this was the first such undertaking.

well. tuesday, having read about har mee in the city, i’d set out in search of these elusive noodles; apparently they are only made tuesday, friday and saturday. apparently. i joined the queue, inched forward slowly, placed my order at the counter, and then didn’t quite understand when the countergirl said, “there is no har mee today, because we did not work yesterday.”

she filled my silence with explanation, something about how the day before was the easter monday public holiday, so they were treating tuesday as regular monday, and the rest of the week would be a day out. (and the rest of the year, presumably. what the hell?) i asked her what the special for “monday” was, and she gestured towards a laminated poster on the wall that said “kueh teow soup”. ch. she was already looking over my shoulder, taking the order of the man behind me. i suppose my eyes had already told her that i wouldn’t be eating there that day, even before my mouth did.

so there was that attempt.

anyway.

they make a fine nicoise salad at circle. mesclun, lightly dressed, punctuated with strips of roasted red capsicum, pungent caperberries, chunks of good tinned tuna, and on top, a criss-cross of whole anchovy fillets. a hard-boiled egg and a roma tomato, quartered, radiate from the periphery. the last time i had this, there were whole olives hidden throughout, but this afternoon they seemed to have run out. nevermind. it is a large, flavoursome meal, even when you don’t count the little basket that comes with, holding a stump of house-baked baguette, and two pats of butter.

i stretched it out, my last solitary lunch hour: i had a hot belgian chocolate afterwards, drank it in sloooow sips. and then i waddled off and bought some dinner groceries, came home, put stuff away, cleaned out the puddle of sour, brown water at the bottom of the crisper drawer, and heard the key turn in the door. heard her squeaky little voice waft downstairs, “hello, mum!”

good thing i’d gotten that amazing, twinkly gingerbread heart at circle, to go.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 April 2007 at 10:04 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, lunch

i finally went to see the tezuka exhibition at the art gallery on wednesday night, after a good day of shifting bits of text around the page. balance, right?

all those tiny, perfect, original drawings — page after page, yellowed with age — of astroboy and kimba and the other creations of a forty year career. the brush marks of still-white paint, drawn over with corrections. it made me want to weep, or draw. either.

i was wilting and hungry halfway through, so i went down to the gallery cafe and ordered chai: no longer listed as “chai latte” on the menu, thank god, and no longer delivered in a picardie glass. it came in a fat little teapot; pretty good tea service for three bucks. the sun had gone by then, on late-opening wednesday, so i sat at the counter against the big window, feeling the evening chill come through the plate glass. and i had to draw it, this perfect teapot. the priapism, sadly, is all my fault.

at a home decor shop yesterday, as i flipped through my notebook for window measurements, the shopgirl pointed at my drawing. “that’s really good,” she said, “do you do art?”

“um, sort of,” i said. i told her about astroboy and how i was compelled to draw after.

“i used to do fine arts,” she said, “but then i realised that there’s no money in it, and i would prefer to do something for people who told me what to do, and then paid me. so now i’m studying design.”

“that is so weird,” i said, “because i studied design, and every now and again, i think that i should be doing art, like drawing or printmaking.”

we talked about art schools. she gave me a price on roller blinds. it’s always PMS368 on the other side.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 April 2007 at 10:53 am

permalink | filed under around town, drawn, drink, shoping, werk

in between our morning tea bagel and our lunch bagel, deborah and i popped into wheel and barrow, where everything was beautiful — especially those clear ice-cream glasses in the shape of ice-cream cones — and where we didn’t buy anything.

at one point i positioned myself directly behind a narrow shelf so i could surreptitiously photograph a beautiful test-tube filled with beautiful pink dragees. it didn’t work though, because a sales assistant pushed through with a large box of something that she had to stack onto that very shelf i was standing in front of, right at that moment. after she’d returned to the counter, we heard whispers wafting over to us: “…taking photos!”

three seconds later another sales assistant appeared at my side. “what are those pictures for?” she asked, not rudely, but not offhand curiously either.

i paused. and then i shut off my camera. and then i said, “actually, these are for my own amusement, because i found a cockroach in your dragees!”

i handed the tube over, and she might have recoiled. “well. i think i will dispose of these,” she said, reaching for them finally, “and normally, we don’t allow photographs.”

why did i stop listening to spiderbait? this is just great.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 April 2007 at 11:02 pm

permalink | filed under around town, shoping, soundtrack

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