ragingyoghurt » around town

Category Archives: around town

the fizz is nice against the prickle. distracting, anyhow. for i am falling sick once again, and in need of distraction, from the sharp (in the back of the throat) and the cloudy (all around my head). my rose-print drinking glass is filled with rose-red fizzy. i’d been searching for a while, in a cursory and on-and-off manner, for a bottle of rose syrup cordial. this involved falling into any indian spice-and-video shop i might happen to pass, and not finding a tall bottle of red. last thursday, though, i got lucky. so. rose syrup + soda water = the bestest red fizzy ever.

thursday was lucky for several other reasons. first up, we dropped the kid off at playschool. and then nellie said, “let’s have breakfast at bourke street bakery.”

at the bakery’s broadway outpost, we lucked into the corner booth. well, the only booth. my sourdough toast with house jam came with a just-right portion of salty butter, wrapped up in a twist of waxed paper to look like candy. my hot chocolate came in a wide, low bowl. it was perfect fuel for a day of trudging through the rainy streets of surry hills.

a litany of old favourites unfurled. at object gallery, we found ceramic thongs hand-painted with intricate blue-and-white scenes. at christopher’s cake shop, we bought a bag of shortbread, filled with jam, dipped in chocolate. we moseyed, ambled up bourke street and down crown, and finally came to climb the galvanised staircase at fratelli fresh…

…to sopra. here’s a tip. get there a little way past two. the masses will have lunched and departed, and the water jugs, though empty, will be refilled with a smile if you bring one up to the counter.

the handwritten blackboard, as high as the ceiling, confounded me with choice, so i fell back on another old favourite: the antipasto plate. there are always four parts, and three of them change according to the seasons; the one constant is egg mayonnaise, which sounds a bit low-rent, but in fact it is a perfectly boiled egg draped in… silk. in the silky mayonnaise there are great chunks of chopped-up cornichon. it is great. great, i tells ya.

today, the lineup included some asparagus, pickled beetroot with gorgonzola, and boiled fennel with salsa verde. everything was simultaneously light and intense, the kind of delicious that makes you slowly whittle away at each element, one at a time, as you weigh up in your mind which you want as the final taste in your mouth.

as it turns out, the final taste in my mouth that afternoon was of an ethereal (and ephemoral) buttermilk pudding, which collapsed halfway into its own puddle of berry sauce.

we caught a break in the rain, and a bus to the city, and then another bus back out to get the kid, and after spending some time looking at pyjama pants and petshops, it was dinnertime. we had lured maeve to playschool that morning by promising a sushi-train dinner afterwards, and we are not girls who fall back on their word.

especially when it involves tomodachi. upstairs at broadway shopping centre, they do a fast trade in exotic sushi filled with schnitzel and cream cheese, or topped with blowtorched scallops and kecap manis. we had a plate of maki, whose crowning glory was a sliced of grilled cheese.

for dessert we pulled this off the train: an azuki mochi, divided into bite-sized portions, decorated with aerosol whipped cream and fresh strawberries.

it’s like all the fun in the world happened on thursday.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 March 2008 at 11:15 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, dinner, lunch, nellie, snacks

this is how the holiday goes: you arrive, and the three weeks are spread out before you, full of promise and possibilities. your life slows down, a little. an early morning trip to the wet market with your mother, a meal at a little pink cafe… this could be your everyday life. and then suddenly you’re three days away from the plane trip out, and there won’t be a return visit to the little pink cafe, and — even worse! — you have not had a single dosai, nor a bowl of meepok, and the opportunities to slot these meals in are diminishing fast.

[ takes a deep breath. ]

so this morning — noon, really — even though we had scheduled leftover popiah at home for lunch, we called halftime from our mustafa excursion and froggered across the street to a shiny indian vegetarian cafeteria, gleaming with anticipation.

a dosai makes any day a good day; a rava dosai is even better, crunchy with semolina, and embedded with a festive mix of sliced green chilli, mustard seeds, minced onion, ginger and whatever else the house mix might be. a ghee rava dosai is a magnificent and superior being, surrounded in a golden halo that comes from being fried in clarified butter.

one ghee rava dosai and a cup of syrupy masala chai later, i laid my head on my mother’s shoulder. oh! such contentment. we would have come to little india sooner, but my mother had been gravely concerned about the chikugunya-riddled mosquitoes that had colonised the area recently. fresh out of the car, she brandished a tube of mosquito repellant at us. but we live on the edge, dammit! look at us, choosing bindis with not a care in the world, trying on amusing shoes in the basement.

so today, we snuck in two lunches. but here’s what i snuck in last week.

on our first morning in port dickson, a roti bom. breakfast of champions: an extra buttery paratha, sprinkled in sugar. it came with a puddle of dhal and a slurp of fish curry gravy. unwrinkle you nose; the tangy, peppery curry is a most suitable companion for the crunchy, sweet bread. the kid drank half my teh tarik and then ate enough of the roti that i felt i needed to order another. i didn’t right then, but i couldn’t wait until the next day so that i could have it again.

as it turned out, i did not, because a murtabak presented itself, stuffed with dry chicken curry, with extra chicken curry gravy for sloshing around in. it was big enough to feed five, i believe, but i ate it all. the kid did not eat any of it, naturally, or any of her sardine murtabak (which i’d persuaded upon her in the guise of something a cat might enjoy), but she did drain most of my beaker of teh ais.

T minus three days and counting, i’ve finally learnt my lesson. my masala chai today was all mine, because the kid had her own golden column: mango lassi, which she drank in a single slurp. and then we did get home — late — for popiah. i had the best intentions to wrap modest little rolls, but they took on a life of their own. you start spartan, with a lettuce leaf, but then the turnip-carrot-tofu-beans, and the sprouts, the shredded cucumber, fat baby sauce, minced garlic, crushed peanuts, sprigs of coriander, fried shallots, crabmeat, prawns, an extra drizzle of sauce… and you are sunk.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 February 2008 at 11:55 pm

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

port dickson (say it, now, in the malaysian way: poddick son). it’s a hell of a town. at the tail end of the development boom of a decade ago, my father bought a holiday flat here, which swiftly went to seed. a corner on the tenth floor of cell block c — that’s us.

but once you look past the mildewed exterior walls, and the eerie green tint of the swimming pool, it is possible to live it up. the two hours of traffic jammed down the highway from kuala lumpur — fully explained when we passed by a rainbow bus in the ditch — became mere hiccups of the past the moment we set foot in billion pasar raya, a behemoth in the middle of PD town, crammed full of cheap everything: children’s clothing fashioned from lurid nylon; brown-paper-covered notebooks; small aluminium curry pots; big, ugly shirts for big, ugly men; that primary school paste of my childhood, in little tubs of primary hues, with matching applicator paddles (i had to buy a pack, just for the smell. if they’d had those lotus-scented erasers, i would’ve bought those too.) and let’s not even get started on the grocery section on the ground floor. i lingered too long at the self-service bins, a wall of familiar savoury crackers and sweet biscuits, and left, eventually, with nothing.

but there was no shortage of food of course — two nights brought us two slap-up seafood dinners for not very much money at all. the first night, in the fabulously faded restaurant of the terribly nostalgic hotel merlin, the classic cantonese dishes competed against a backdrop of pink and green.

the next night, at a much newer establishment — built to an exact match of the adjacent chinese temple — we were serenaded by the karaoke caterwaul from upstairs, and the operatic new year salute to the gods next door. we had a dish of mean little crabs in chilli sauce, but we got them back by chomping right through their brittle belly shells. there was a steamed pomfret, in the teochew style, all strips of salted vegetable and chunks of tomato — and a piece of lard, we were assured by our mother — but the kid ate her share, and mine, and quite a bit more. there was squid in crunchy batter, and the lightheartedness and glee you get from fried food, until we discovered a tiny, inquisitive snail making its way across the lettuce garnish.

i’d like to tell you that all our prior reservations about port dickson were vanquished during our short time there, and for the most part, in a purely superficial way, they were. late on the second day, we overcame our misgivings about the glowing green water in the swimming pool — a man languidly walked the perimeter that afternoon, flinging ladles of what i took, trustingly, to be chlorine from a bucket hanging off the crook of his elbow — and splashed about to no ill effect. we made sure to keep our heads above the water at all times, and this is how we did not miss a tabby cat by the pool’s edge, thrown back by violent convulsions before vomiting up a disagreeable something or other.

we walked uphill through the rainforest of cape rachado to a historic lighthouse, talking all the way of monkeys, and coming across none. we got caught up in banking hijinx. we bought cake boxes at billion! we stayed clear of the beach, fearful of the blinding sun and the warnings from concerned relatives about the high levels of e coli in the surrounding waters. so we took long naps in the afternoons, and that always makes things better.

we had driven past the fixtures of a military history on the way into town, but on the way out, it was villages and dusty brown all the way to the highway. the schoolkids walked along the road to get home, the chinese and indian girls in bright blue pinafores, the malay girls in baju kurung and headscarves, the harsh afternoon all around. we were heading home too.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 February 2008 at 10:11 am

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

“it is 34 degrees today,” txted singapore girl, “so aircon is good.” just before noontime, thursday, we met in the air-conditioned wonder of miracle supermarket in chinatown, to stock up on hello kitty rice crackers and green-tea salted-plum candy (and to consider the possibilities of durian mochi), and then we walked a couple of blocks westward to the air-conditioned wonder of mamak.

we were shown to a table in the back, directly beneath the air-conditioner. “it will be cooler here,” said the waiter, but still, it wasn’t quite cool enough to order any of the familiar and comforting numbers on the menu. not today, the sambal kangkong, or the sambal sotong, or a murtabak even, which was available with a chicken or lamb filling. it might have been different if they’d offered a sardine murtabak; back home, the roti uncles fill it with mashed-up fish, straight from a tin, sticky-rich with tomato sauce.

but it was too hot for anything meatier, so i picked something light: the roti bawang, stuffed with slices of red onion. and a teh ais.

the tea showed up first, a beer stein of sweet condensed-milky tea. sweeeet. the roti, when it arrived, came with two curry sauces — a homely chicken curry gravy, and a welcome and excellent surprise of an assam curry hiding little bits of fish.

oh, it was good! the crunchy and succulent just-cooked onions in flaky pastry, the alternate mouthfuls of contrasting curries. by the time it was over, i was sorry to discover that there was no room inside of me for dessert — none of the sweet rotis on offer, or the ais kacang which promised rose syrup instead of a generic sugary flavour. sigh.

so i will be back. it’s great to have found this shiny red restaurant, and its litany of old favourites. it’s only a little bit less great when we think about how much this food costs in singapore.

but here’s the thing — i am in singapore. surprise! me and the kid flew in on saturday, gliding in on a wave of vomit. there are so many things to eat we don’t know where to begin. this afternoon i had a sardine sandwich in the cutest pink cafe ever, followed by a cup of tea and a share of a limonata cupcake, and a chocolate one. i wanted nothing more than to move in.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 February 2008 at 10:26 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch, trip

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 2 February 2008 at 1:57 am

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream

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 28 January 2008 at 10:44 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, kid, snacks, soundtrack

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 20 December 2007 at 7:59 pm

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, kid

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 10 December 2007 at 9:32 am

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, kid, lunch

rehab is going swimmingly….

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 November 2007 at 9:38 am

permalink | filed under around town, drawn, kid

so this is what 35 feels like: like any other day, except with all the love and virtual cake that facebook has to offer. due to unforeseen circumstances, i actually ate three zumbo cakes yesterday (which, never fear, you will hear about one of these days), so i had to consciously steer today away from the real-life cakefest it otherwise might have been. it was going quite well too, until my aunt and grandmother showed up at around 10.30 in the morning with a whole ricotta cheesecake.

my good parents had left me birthday cards when they were here in october, and i opened them to find one — from my mother — covered in an enticing cluster of gem biscuits (one of my favourite biscuits ever, and ones that i don’t actually eat enough of, because i don’t actually eat a lot of biscuits), and the other — from my father — adorned with a velvet cocktail dress and its sparkly accoutrements, as well as the phrase “paint the town red on your birthday!”. which is interesting, because now i know that my mum thinks i am five (or perhaps she cleverly surmised that i need a warm, comforting childhood memory to cling to), and my pap thinks i am a vamp. huh.

inside this somewhat unsettling card, he had concealed a crazy and unexpected amount of cashmoney, so what i did was take everybody out to lunch.

i pointed my aunt in the direction of zilver, where i’d tried — unsuccessfully — to get in once before, at lunchtime, on a weekend, when the queue was out the door and almost down the escalators. just past 11 on a tuesday morning? no problem. the usual suspects were lined up: ha cheong, wu kok, char siu sou, char siu bao, a plate of bright green vegetables with its accompanying dish of oyster sauce, a cluster of steamed scallop dumplings, and egg tarts to finish. i love that, where most dimsum places give you three piece of whatever to a serve, zilver give you four. i love the light, flaky pastry in the baked treats — clearly they are packed with shortening. sadly though, the egg tarts — quivering circles of gold in their meltaway pastry shells — numbered only three, but my aunt and grandma were happy to share.

we made it home in time for cups of tea and slices of cake, and then all too soon it was time to eat again.

last night the boy had asked where i wanted to be taken to dinner. the act of which raised all sorts of issues in my head, and not just limited to: red lantern? flying fish? tetsuya? — well, we live in hope — (glebe point diner? bodega? ottoman cuisine?…) ultimately, i knew it had to be in the neighbourhood and affordable, and so i ventured that we could try again for rosso pomodoro, which, being a half-hour walk away, really pushed the boundaries of being “in the neighbourhood”. the first time we attempted to eat here, maybe a year ago, we fronted up to the door, and the doors, though open, had clouds of construction dust billowing out of them; they were renovating that week. last month we tried to get a table for the kid’s birthday family get-together, but it was booked out. tonight, with a 6 o’clock phone call, we managed to secure a table for 7.

i was excited!

and justly so. the tomato sauce is fresh and pure, the bresaola and rocket perfect foils. the pizza bases are crunchy, then chewy. they are thin where they need to be, and puffed-up slightly where it counts. the best part is, there is just enough cheese, and no more.

[ recently, we called up another local pizza place for delivery, and made a point of asking for half as much cheese as they’d normally put on. the guy on the phone was confused. “oh, so you want 50% more cheese?” he asked. “no, no,” we said, “less cheese. less.” it took a while to make things clear. ]

but, so, rosso pomodoro. we had wonderful pizze, and we were well looked after. the charming and friendly waiter explained all the specials, flirted with the kid, brought her fancy italian strawberry juice at the start, and at the end, chose a pink plastic paddle to go with her strawberry gelato.

me? i had a fat slab of old skool tiramisu, so boozy it sagged to one side, sitting in a thin brown puddle of itself. it was great.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 November 2007 at 11:23 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, dinner, lunch

Category Archives: around town

Click

Search

Categories

Archives