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the third time the swede caught sight of us, according to deborah, he had to look again, just to make sure. i didn’t notice; my attention was on the daim cake.

he had first seen us four hours earlier. we had worked our way through the magical maze that is the ikea showroom, and had arrived at the cafeteria, only an hour and a bit into the adventure; we had a modest haul of wooden cutlery caddy (to double up as pencil organiser), teddy bear bedlinen and two notebooks. it was still early, as lunchtimes go, but i figured if we ate early then there’d be an opportunity for afternoon tea later. we joined the queue and filled our trays. organic apple-guava juice, salmon with chips and vegetables for me, organic apple-guava juice, meatballs and chips, herby bread roll for deb. potato salad and beets to share.

“can we have chips and vegetables with the meatballs?” asked deb as the efficient lunch ladies plated up.

“no.” said the efficient lunch ladies.

i suppose we had already taken up too much of their time deciding if we should get ten meatballs, or fifteen. we were going to split everything, but lurking in the back of my head is the awareness that there can be too many meatballs. even if meatballs have been the main drawcard for a long-overdue ikea excursion.

it only seems like i have too much spare space in my brain, for lurking.

the swede, you remember, from the start of this story, checked us out., by which i mean, at the checkout. “ah!” he exclaimed, on spotting the pink juices, “this is organic apple and guava juice! it is new.” he seemed pleased that we had chosen so wisely.

and then a long and leisurely lunch, where i discovered a couple of the carrots had a strange frosty appearance, even though they were perfectly… room temperature. despite being hard and crunchy, they had an un-carrotlike texture. i was flummoxed, and then in spite of that, i decided that ikea should launch a string of ikea cafés around town — no furniture or curtains on show, just a refurbished mcdonald’s with cheap meatballs and salmon meals behind the counter, and a room full of coloured plastic balls for the kids. you would go, wouldn’t you?

it only seems like i have too much spare space in my brain, for lurking.

and then a long and winding wander through the downstairs maze of the market hall, where our restraint from upstairs was gradually undone. damn you, kitchen department! but we got through it. we even sat down on a saggy, discounted sofa in the bargain basement and reviewed our loot. one of us, not me, even put stuff back on the shelf. we joined a short queue and paid. and then we came face to face with the ikeafood(c) store.

sigh.

at least i had known ahead of time, had not pretended that the rows of swedish jams and cordials and ginger thins would not move me. too soon a shopping bag — “the taste of sweden” — was filled with cloudberry jam and blueberry jam and lingonberry jam, a single daim bar, a bag of salty licorice fish (for the boy; i shall not touch the stuff again), a bag of dillchips — and this is where the swede bumped into us again. “ah, these chips are really good! but i like these ones better,” he said, pointing to the american style sour cream and onion. but, ch, you can get sour cream and onion potato chips anywhere. dill-flavoured chips are hard to come by.

remember, in greece, all those oregano-flavoured potato chips you ate, not because they were so delicious, but because, where else will you come across these exotic crispies?

things that didn’t make the bag this time: creamed crab in a tube (30% crab meat!), gingerbread house kit, instant meatball sauce powder. as it was, the magical display of pulling rabbits out of this hat was quite a sight to behold, this show i put on at the checkout counter.

we were pleased, but wilty. the girl on welcome duty at the foot of the escalator looked confused as we rode back up; we were already weighed down with sweden’s best. back in the cafetaria, we sat beneath jaunty polka-dotted lamps and ate cake and drank tea. that’s when the swede did the double take. we’d been there about five hours. by the time the last crumb had been eaten, we’d have nudged it closer to six.

the feeling we had on realising it, i do not think that you could call it pride.

but it wasn’t bad.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 November 2006 at 2:42 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch, shoping, snacks

such is the lot of a vegetarian, that if you were attending the soya awards at the after hours art gallery tuesday night, you would have been waiting, waiting for one of the few circulating platters to come by with maybe a stuffed mushroom or a scrap of artichoke atop a cracker. alas, time and again you would have been confronted with a disc of duck sausage on a melba toast, or a grilled scallop nestled in a cauliflower puree, or a minced prawn satay conconction, or an artfully crafted block of layered sliced potato with a knot of mystery meat, possible airdried, perched on top.

fortunately i am not vegetarian, so i ate them all. apparently there was a platter of salt and pepper squid, but it never made it this far. understandably.

but because amber is vegetarian, and krissie semi-vegetarian, and i, someone who needs more than five bite-sized bits of dinner, we thought it best that we sneak out in search of real food.

i suspect that amber was a little doubtful as i led the way to BBQ king, with the meats still hanging in the window after 9pm, and the lurid photo montages of a thousand roast ducks. but listen, you vegetable lovers, it is possible to share a three-course vegetarian meal at this most meaty bastion. a mountain of salt and pepper tofu, with its dense covering of coriander and sliced chillis, will be completely demolished, the most delicious thing in the world tonight. virtuous mixed vegetables topped with cashews, mostly conquered. buddha’s vegetables chow mein, all crispy-edged and drenched in brown gravy… only the smallest tangle of noodles remain.

my friends, they have gone back up the mountain, but we will always have the tofu.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 November 2006 at 3:32 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, snacks

things i have learnt today:

1. there is a very nice waiter at the lindt cafe, who looks like orlando bloom. i’ve never had a thing for orlando bloom, but it worked really well for the waiter. the babycino at the lindt cafe is quite special: an espresso glass with a puddle of dark chocolate below, and then pure white milk and a pillowy crema, topped with a generous shaving of dark chocolate. a thing of beauty, and free. after the kid wiped half of the chocolate on her face onto my shirt, orlando bloom came by and said to her: “i don’t mean to embarrass you, but you have a little something on your face.” he gestured a circle around his mouth. then she threw her sippy cup on the floor so that he would have to retrieve it for her. this is how a two-year-old flirts, apparently. from next week, the lindt cafe is open sundays.

2. when we go out for a walk, the three of us, and i am holding maeve’s hand and walking at her pace, the boy’s long legs prevent him from keeping to this pace, and he has no choice but to walk about three metres in front of us. every now and again he will stop to wait for us to catch up, but then his legs get in the way again, and not a minute later we will have fallen behind. when called on this, he will claim that it is not his fault. after all, he is not expecting me to match his pace; i am free to walk as slowly as i like behind him. i just like to get angry at things, expecting that he walk alongside us. i have a very bad temper to throw a tantrum over nothing.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 November 2006 at 9:15 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, chocolate, grumble, kid

the time, she goes quickly.

i was early for the early train, but just before it pulled up an announcement came through overhead that the next train to arrive would be held at the platform indefinitely because someone had been injured on its platform at the next station. rush hour, everyone got on anyway.

onboard, the driver’s announcement was more informative: we would not be moving because a person had been hit by a train, and we had to wait until the person had been removed. how long does it take to move a person who’s been hit by a train? a bruised person? a person with limbs torn off? (you would have to find and remove the limbs too.) a person puree? i figured i had up to an hour. and i was armed with a book, two nori rolls and a tube of fruit fizzers. but not ten minutes later, we were on our way.

so a bus and two trains later, i had a twilight picnic on a stone bench outside the olympic stadium. murakami open in my lap, beef yakiniku maki followed by one filled with a bright yellow pickle. i still don’t know quite how i feel about murakami. “norwegian wood” reads better than “the wind-up bird chronicles”, but sometimes i think i’m losing something in the translation.

and then it was time. well, almost time. a walk up to the acer arena in the drizzle, to queues and bag searches (unexpectedly, the one thing they ask about is chewing gum), through the turnstyles, into the dark belly where kings of leon is rocking like the seventies.

i started this blog in 2003, after a pearl jam show. given the recent inactivity on this page, it crossed my mind that maybe i’d be ending it after a pearl jam show too. i don’t know. perhaps i’ll feel differently after i get my computer fixed, or maybe a whole new machine — macbook vs mac mini: discuss.

last night. pearl jam. eddie. so good.

tonight, another go.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 November 2006 at 5:09 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, soundtrack

“would it be inappropriate,” i asked deborah, “to have a choc top during the film?” i bit into a whole tempura’d shiitake, and slurped some cold soba.

thursday night, rather than go late night shoping, rather than stay at home and watch “jamie’s kitchen australia”, we were off to see the al gore global warming movie. because we are thinking girls! thinking about issues such as: what would be not too frivolous a snack to have during a serious and important documentary?

turns out, a chocolate choc top, and a blended icy-biscuity-chocolatey drink, topped with chocolate cream and chocolate syrup from gloria jeans downstairs. go us!

who woulda thought people would pay money to go see a film about how the world is doomed? i mean, one without bruce willis in it. and if bruce didn’t end up saving the world, would the audience take that responsibility home with them? and the people who choose to see this film, they’d be sort of that way inclined anyway, wouldn’t they? what of the rest?

we are already living in one of those made-for-tv movies, about when the weather went crazy.

a couple days ago, a nice man from the electric company came ‘round our place and changed all our regular light bulbs to low-energy ones, gratis. everything’s a much lower wattage, but burns twice as brightly. monday, i’m switching to green energy.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 October 2006 at 4:36 pm

permalink | filed under around town, at the movies, chocolate, dinner, drink, snacks

sometimes you know the solution to a problem. that is, you know of its existence, independent to the relevant problem, but you haven’t quite put the two together.

for example, i’d known about the orange grove organic market since shortly after i moved into the area. i’d also known that the 445 bus sort of headed in that direction. but to me, the market was always just a little bit too much of a walk. i’d say it would have taken over half an hour to hoof it. it was only recently that it clicked that i could take a bus there, and that the bus actually stopped right outside the market. brains — what would we do without them?

saturday morning, we walked to the bus stop with a spring in our step, and not too long later, we were on the bus with three other families with young ‘uns. off the bus, there were kids, and dogs, and sunshine, and bouncy castles. it was spring!

we did a couple of laps around the market, with no particular plan, just to see what was available (which was lots). i take a little while to warm up at markets, but then once the first purchase is out of the way, it always spirals out of control.

as it happened, that first crucial purchase involved standing in front of the artisanal lemonade stall for longer than you might expect. there wasn’t actually a queue, mind, it was just me trying to decide if i wanted the pineapple lemonade — a great beehive of glass filled with sunny yellow, with small chunks of fresh pineapple floating inside — or the raspberry lemonade — deep red, and copiously seeded. there was also a rather complex looking ginger ale with bits of chopped up chillis and other vegetation, but i thought that i’d save it for when i didn’t have to share with the kid. the lemonade guy recommended the pineapple… and it was nice and all, but i was too busy trying to drink my share of it, before maeve guzzled it all. the last i saw, her grimy little paw was sloshing about in the dregs, fishing for the fruit.

but so. now the purse strings had been freed! there was interesting bread, but we already had two loaves at home. there were two stalls with pink lady apple pies, but it was too soon after breakfast. there was some lovely rose geranium soap, but it was $5.50 a bar. we worked our way through the maze, accepting samples of nougat and oranges and raspberry ricotta cake. the south american food was inviting, and the calabrian too. the g–zleme ladies were there too, with variations i hadn’t yet encountered: organic chocolate and banana (must have been $15 g–zleme).

i bought: a brown bag of pink ladies; a packet of eumundi smokehouse double smoked bacon and a red wine and garlic salami; a small tub of gympie farm butter; a tomato and olive pastry, for sustenance; and some mushrooms.

ah the mushrooms. they were spread out in boxes across the counter: button, swiss brown, oyster, king brown, shitake, enoki, chesnut. i wanted them all. “can i buy a mixed selection?” i asked the mushroom man, and “how much are they?”

“they all cost the same,” he replied, “$4.50 for a hundred grams.” he even measured out 100g of oyster mushrooms, so i could see what 100g of mushrooms looked like. and then i asked for a 400g mix of the five more exotic funghi.

there were so many, he packed them into two of his sturdy brown bags. “$18,” he said.

see, i know that four times $4.50 is $18, but somehow i didn’t do that calculation in my head when i put my order in. and so when we caught the bus home, i had just under a dollar left in my wallet. but a bounty! of tasties! in my shoping bag.

dinner was fettucine with a myriad of mushrooms, fried with bacon and garlic in gympie butter. all together now: mmmMMMmmm.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 September 2006 at 9:05 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, drink, kid, lunch, shoping, snacks

earlier in the week, we were on our way to starbucks to try the new signature hot chocolate, when we stopped by the menu posted outside circle cafe. top of the hand-chalked specials list was turnip and chesnut soup!

it was so unexpected, interesting and enticing, that i immediately pulled the plug on the starbucks idea. maeve didn’t seem to mind; “this one?” she said, “climb stairs?” and up she went.

the soup was a lovely shade of camel, sweet and smooth — a potage, if you will. even maeve liked it, although she had her own plate of sourdough toast with grilled mushrooms and roma tomatoes to contend with. but the trouble with soup is that it leaves no room for belgian hot chocolate, to say nothing of the chocolate brownies doing laps in the revolving dessert case up front.

so when carla gypsygirl came to visit us friday lunchtime, bearing gifts of ice-cream hairclips and rainbow beaded bracelets, we went back to circle. you must know by now that my favourite lunch is breakfast, and that is what i had. the all-day big veggie breakfast is similar to the all-day big breakfast: eggs, mushrooms, hashbrown, tomatoes, and sourdough toast, with a mountain of sauteed spinach replacing the tangle of bacon and sausages (which is what carla had to counter the effects of a dodgy chicken dinner. props!).

half the big veggie breakfast though, is not quite enough to fill a belly; after maeve polished off all the tomatoes and half the mushies and an unexpected amount of toast, i was back at the front counter ordering my belgian hot chocolate and the lucky last brownie on the tray. the brownie is studded through with big chunks of chocolate, and is served warm so that all those chunks go moist and runny.

i had ordered it to share, three ways, but i think that the kid won that battle. of course.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 September 2006 at 9:50 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, chocolate, kid, lunch

it was a cakey sort of weekend.

saturday morning, me and the kid walked up the hill to the church fete. i’d been working up her enthusiasm since the day before, saying things like, “do you wanna go to the fete?” and “we’ll meet our fate at the fete!” and “there’ll be cake!”

back in may, we went to the fete at birchgrove public school. there were singing children, judo displays, a giant slippery dip, a petting zoo, lote tuqiri, and a cake stall with interesting, upmarket offerings such as austrian apple cake and an $18 loaf of banana bread.

there were no famous people at the church fete — well, i suppose god was probably there — but the cake stall was brimming with affordable treats. when we passed by the second time and maeve made a lunge for the pink cupcakes, the old lady behind the table reached into a large jar and handed her a biscuit. it really doesn’t get more affordable than that. but still, a ziplock bag of apple slice and a pink cupcake set us back just $3.50.

we bought a pair of wooden salt and pepper shakers ($2) and a handful of children’s books (four for $1), by which time maeve had finished her cupcake, so we headed out to the “cafe” area and had a plate of scones with cream and jam ($2.50). all before 11.30am.

8 o’clock sunday morning, i said to maeve, “hey, do you wanna go on a train today?”. she seemed agreeable: “oooookay.” this was good, because saturday night i’d discovered that the olympic park market had a sweet pudding theme and was all things cake!

as it turns out, it wasn’t all things cake — just a ho-hum row of tents selling stuff and another row of tents selling regular festival/market food and, at the end of it all, a large tent with a bunch of empty tables and a demonstration kitchen up front; after the bus and two trains out there, we’d still arrived too early for things to have been set up. so we found a playground, and watched little sk8er bois at the skate park, and chased magpies, and examined the magnificent pole display outside the main stadium, and wandered back to the big tent to find that the first demonstration started in 15 minutes!

it was just enough time to join a short queue for dutch poffertjes, and to secure a table not too far back from the stage. our healthy serve ($6.50) of bite-sized pancakes, fried in purpose-built moulded pans, in what looked like quite a bit of melted butter, until golden-crunchy-brown on the outside and fluffy on the inside, came topped with a warm blueberry compote and icing sugar. it’s true what they say, a dusting of icing sugar makes anything look good, even when it’s served in a plastic takeaway tub.

but now, here’s joanna savill introducing the husband and wife patissiere team from beb fine patisserie on broadway. today they would show us how to whip up a frangipane tart with cinammon chocolate ganache and caramelised pears, in just over half an hour. olivier offered such tips as “it’s a fruit tart, so don’t be afraid to put big chunks of fruit in it. when i go out and buy an apple pie, and you see the apple filling, it’s only 1mm thick… it makes me… it makes me crazy!!” and “when you make a ganache, if you use chocolate with 50% cocoa, the you would use the same amount of cream. if you use a higher cocoa content, then you must increase the cream in proportion, accordingly. for example, if you use 120g of 72% cocoa chocolate, then you should use about 150g of cream. because the higher the cocoa content, the harder the chocolate.” beatrice (beb) weighed in with, “you can use any fruit you want, according to your tastes. but if you use just almond meal in your frangipane, then you can use raspberries or blueberries; if you use some hazelnut meal in the pastry, the taste is stronger than just almonds, so maybe for the fruit, you should use apples or pears.”

there you go: pastry-making, a sort of exact science.

maeve was surprisingly obliging, even after the poffertjes ran out, sitting through the display of mixing and melting and joanna’s inane patter. it was only in the last minutes that she went a bit limp and began to emit a whining noise. even pointing out the trays of sample tarts that would soon come around didn’t help. but when the server came by and handed the lady at our table a slice and then whisked the tray away without looking our way, the child (and i) were stunned into silence. from the two spoons on a tiny plate, it appeared that we — strangers! — were meant to share the tiny slice. clearly, they assumed that we would be brought together in the spirit of cake, but they had no idea of the child’s appetite… and besides, our table companion had already licked the plate clean.

some desperate arm waving soon set things right; there is no such thing as pride when it comes to chocolate dessert.

the next demonstration was a stawberry marscarpone cake from yellow bistro in potts point, but we were crashing towards naptime. a steaming hot japanese-style pork bun ($3), all tart and gingery on the inside, was enough sustenance to keep us going on the two trains and one bus back home.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 August 2006 at 1:26 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kid

it’s all about time management innit? if you get it into your head that you might make something for a sunday picnic? the monday plan to meet up for a hot chocolate on sunday morning quickly snowballed, and suddenly, a sandwich and dessert picnic was only a handful of days away. not even a freak hailstorm could put us off. by friday, the sun was shining again.

friday morning
playground excursion, followed by supermarket excursion, to buy such exciting things as almond meal, cocoa and icing sugar. i’ve spent days convincing myself that i can make macarons, though i haven’t quite decided from which recipe.

friday afternoon
naptime for some, half an hour spent pushing almond meal through a sieve for others. have i made a horrible mistake? it’s not too late to just buy a packet of bisuits from the deli up the street. still, small circles are dutifully drawn on sheets of baking paper. when maeve awakens, the electric mixer goes on; the batter does not “flow like magma”. in fact, it’s a real bitch trying to pipe it through the unwieldy cookie press into 80 or so small discs.

when the boy gets home from work, i am still brandishing the cookie extruder like a pistol. a cup of tea later, boy takes kid to the park, i do some “real” work, the biscuit dough sits for a couple of hours to develop a skin.

friday evening
while the biscuits bake, i make a quick salmon congee for the kid. after the biscuits bake, i realise i can’t be bothered making a “real” dinner, so it’s salmon congee all ‘round, supplemented with a plate of frozen dimsims, steamed, for the boy. the biscuits look nothing like what they’re supposed to.

saturday morning
awake too early. playground excursion involves two parks — at the second one, a charming boy steps on maeve’s head as he asserts himself on a climbing thing. supermarket excursion for…

saturday afternoon
back home, i make lemon curd with the egg yolks left over from friday’s biscuit recipe. the boy goes out to watch a football game. make maeve a sandwich and sterilise a jar while she eats. activate some yeast in warm milk. sift flour and cocoa. let maeve pretend to mix the dough… pretend to let maeve mix the dough? knead the dough. the dough feels nothing like it’s supposed to. dough rests, maeve naps, i make chocolate ganache.

maeve wakes. dough is punched down. biscuits are sandwiched with ganache. they really do not look anything like what they’re supposed to. an apple does not appease maeve, so it’s off to park #3.

saturday evening
boy not home from football. just the two of us for dinner: panfried salmon with capers, mashed potatoes, steamed beans and corn. bread goes in the oven, bread comes out of the oven. it looks… only somewhat like how it’s supposed to, but it smells deep and chocolatey. whisk ricotta with a dusting of icing sugar, vanilla and lemon juice. for dessert we each lick one whisk bit clean.

boy not home from football. wash the kid. read to the kid. kid goes to bed. boy txts to say that he’s out drinking and will be home tomorrow. put some frozen raspberries in the fridge, to defrost.

sunday morning
while maeve breaks fast, i fold raspberries into ricotta. slice chocolate bread — why is it so dense? why is it so wet-doughy in the middle?? it’s not too late to dash up the street to buy a loaf of white bread for emergency plan B lemon curd sandwiches, is it? passable bits of chocolate bread are sandwiched with ricotta mixture. a jasmin tea bag is chucked into a bottle of iced water. we scrub up, we are out the door! the bus is coming! keep walking, maeve!

halfway to the bus, meet the boy driving home. he does the right thing and offers to drive us to the park.

a glorious time is had by all: after a civilised start across the road at toby’s estate, we traipse back to the park: helen, deborah, the kid and i, to find a shady sunny spot close to the playground. we unpack a picnic of sandwiches to find that everyone’s had cheese on their minds, and chocolate. helen’s sister arrives with husband, babies, and more cheese in the form of a whole greek ricotta cake.

this sort of fun, it could go on forever, except it’s way past naptime, and there’s a bus due, and a funky brown something wafting out of maeve’s nappy. we bid our farewells amongst hurried gifting of chocolate and cheesecake, and then it all collapses into a three-hour nap for the kid, and me? i eat my rare and precious mountain pepper truffle, from deb, (and i cunningly leave the single origin lindt, from helen, for later) and then collapse too, on the couch, to watch “the incredibles” supplementary behind-the-scenes dvd.

this behind-the-scenes stuff; always fascinating. like the way you get to see how half the recipes went a little bit awry, and somehow at the end — through the magic of springtime and cheese sandwiches — it all tasted just fine.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 August 2006 at 5:18 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, chocolate, kid, lunch, snacks

ah, blogging, that thing i used to do.

such is life in balmain…

we went to the toyshop the other day, and while i paid for the kid’s latest booty: two paintbrushes and a fetching nylon smock, the counter lady asked if i was a member of their loyalty scheme. she went on to explain that the scheme was: for every dollar i spend “on toys”, i get a point, and when i have collected 400 points, i get a $40 voucher.

thing is, i actually do like to collect points and get vouchers (and the like), but i also like to be realistic, and so i asked if the points had an expiry date. she hesitated, looked momentarily bashful, and then said that i would have six months.

“wow. um, i don’t think i could spend $400 on toys in six months,” i said.

“people say that,” the counter lady said encouragingly, “but then they do!”

“it’s true!” said a lithe woman who had just entered the shop. “you’d be surprised! it all adds up!”

i paid the counter lady $20.45, and she printed out my receipt and showed me where i could see my points balance. “only 380 points to go!” i exclaimed gamely… except it wasn’t — the computer had only given me 19 points. i’ve barely begun and already it’s a losing battle.

then we walked a block up the street to a café for some orange-ginger juice and a babycino, and the counter guy was steve bisley.

but the reason why there’s been no time for anything else is that for the last couple of weeks, i’ve been immersed in the eye-straining, RSI-inducing, yet educational world of laying out (and proofreading, and copyediting) a manual on wound care. oh the three different numbering/labelling systems in the same chapter! oh the glamourous photographs of sliced-open toes! oh the email of amendments that arrived yesterday, which says: “page 225 should be relocated to page 180. urgosterile is a dressing! you may have to renumber the pages! sorry lah!”

quite.

so.

now for something completely different. my head is in sandwich mode, and springtime, and picnics! these last couple days i have washed many mixing bowls, and many things have been mixed in-between. i’m waiting for a pot of chocolate ganache to cool down. and already there is a sweet and tart by-product of yesterday’s eggwhites: today’s lemon curd.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 August 2006 at 2:49 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, kitchen, shoping, werk

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