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aloha! bet you didn’t even know that i was gone… but i was! it was my birthday last week, and my father shouted us a trip to hawaii. funny, my mum brought with her three fat novels and just a couple of hundred US dollars, because she thought there’d be nothing to do but sit on the beach and feel bored.

me, i did my research beforehand, and noted that there was a gap close to the hotel. what did end up being a surprise was that our hotel was a stroll away from the rodeo drive of waikiki, and a brisk walk in the other direction took us straight to macy’s.

but of course, it was all about how much american junk food i could eat in a week. my first move was to take up the two-for-a-dollar offer on pop tarts at the enormous drugstore at the local mall.

i also got myself a slice of the famous ted’s bakery chocolate haupia pie. this one i actually procured from the deli section of a supermarket in the mall (yes, yes, i spent a lot of time at the mall, eight hours in one day if you must know, and my mother and i returned to the hotel to discover that my father had already tried to notify the police); there were two kinds available — one which was merely labelled, haupia chocolate pie, and the one i ended up with, ted’s pie chocolate haupia. i asked a store employee what the difference was, and he replied that the former was made instore, and that they were trying to copy ted. so i asked him which one he liked better, and he paused, and his eyes darted, and he said, “well. the ted’s one is pretty good.” so thank you, shop boy, it was pretty good, with a rich, dark layer of chocolate pudding below, and a light, fragrant layer of coconut pudding above, and a cloud of whipped cream above that.

the kid and i split it, and a blueberry pop tart for breakfast the next morning.

we also ate a lot of japanese food, natch, the highlight of which was probably a tuna and shiso leaf inside-out maki on our last night. and then unexpectedly, i ate quite a bit of mexican food. more, anyway, than you’d think, for hawaii.

behold: the tamale platter from the foodcourt (in the mall) on our second day there. two tamales from a choice of cheese, pork and chicken, and three sides from a choice of… plenty. already wilting from the lack of fresh vegetable accompaniments to american meals, i picked pineapple salsa, macerated oranges, and spicy black beans. and three kinds of salsa. and a flowery drink called, “jamaica”. the corn chips were complimentary. i did not get through it all.

i had not had tamales before, and now i know that they are like chinese zhongzi, except made from cornmeal, and thus possibly stodgier. the cheese one was pretty good until it cooled down and congealed, and the pork one was pretty good fullstop, but i would not necessarily have them again.

on my birthday, we were away from civilisation, walking on ancient volcanos on the big island, and sustenance came from the cafeteria dining hall at the lone, appropriately named hotel on the edge of the national park — volcano house. it was not hot and burny up the volcano, as you might imagine, but cold and drizzly, and tinged with sulfurous gasses. the one hot food option was a tub of chili and rice, so i had that, and because it was my birthday, i also picked a blueberry pie from the glass cabinet. the pie was flown in from spokane, WA… it was nice and all, but i kinda wish it had been trucked up from ted’s.

as i write this, i’m realising that i didn’t actually get around to that much american junk food after all. i must have finally realised my limits, or all those lectures from my good mother about trans fats finally found a receptor in my brain, because all those encyclopedic lists of ingredients on the packaging made every second thing look a little unappealing. only every second thing though, and only a little unappealing. and anyway, you can get peanut butter cups at the newsagents at broadway shoping center here in sydney.

what you probably can’t get are these amakara mochi, fat, sticky rice cakes in a beguiling bath made primarily of soy sauce and sugar. they were definitely intriguing, and somewhat moreish, but somehow i could not give them away. not that i really wanted to; they were not the worst things i ate in hawaii.

this was. the “market fresh” sante fe salad from arby’s, in a surprisingly upmarket stripmall surrounded by lava rocks on the big island. i don’t know if it was the icy cold chicken nuggets, or the leathery kernels of corn. perhaps it was the raspberry vinaigrette the consistency of a blood bank donation (perhaps i should have gone with the default ranch dressing, the consistency of an arterial blockage). i’d already come to terms with the standard, shredded iceberg lettuce served everywhere, so it couldn’t have been that. overall it was inedible, so i didn’t. the one saving grace of this miserable lunch was the curly fries. it was my fault, i suppose: who asked me to eat at a fast food chain outlet? it’s just, i didn’t think it was possible to do such vile things to a salad.

and the best things i ate in hawaii? just outside the hotel grounds was what i’ve since discovered is a local institution, wailana coffee house and cocktail lounge. truly the diner of my dreams, with its roster of waitstaff straight out of “ghost world” and its all-day, all-you-can-eat pancake special.

i did not get to eat the triple-layer cubes of rainbow jell-o from the all-you-can-eat salad bar, nor the giant belgian waffles i’d had my eye on from our first visit. i might’ve had a sandwich or something on that early, bleary night, but then i returned the morning after for the old fashioned french toast — each massive eggy, bready slice concealed a secret pocket of guava jam.

i knew it would be futile trying to squeeze a final breakfast in before our 7am departure to the airport on the last day, so i put in a request for lunch the day before. and this is what i had: the chuck wagon. a smoked pork chop with apple sauce, two eggs (i chose googy sunny side up), two macadamia hotcakes with whipped butter (so large they came on their own plate) and all the syrup i could eat. yes, three pitchers of maple, coconut and boysenberry syrups, jest fer me.

does it not make you weep with joy? the meat — a ham steak, really — was lean and tender, singed just right. the pancakes were soft and fluffy, with crunchy edges round the sides, and chopped macadamias all the way through. i’d already tried the trio of syrups on the french toast earlier in the week, and was happy to go with just an endless stream of maple. happy!

but i still had unfinished business. from my research i knew there was a cupcake shop in the vicinity, and so after lunch, while the kid went for a last hurrah in the swimming pool with her grandpa, i steered my mum’s afternoon coffee expedition in the direction of satura cakes. look — they really do come in cups!

i didn’t actually eat anything then… well, i couldn’t — this is my mum’s konamisu cupcake, a pretty convincing alcohol-free tiramisu with creamy, chocolatey mascarpone and light sponge and locally grown coffee.

because i hoped i might be able to eat again later, i came away with the store’s signature strawberry shortcake for the kid (a light as air confection of sponge cake and whipped cream), and the red velvet cupcake for me. the rich, moist, red cake was topped with a dreamy dollop of white chocolate and mascarpone. i only wish i could’ve been more awake as i scarfed it the next morning before the cab came to whisk us away.

but look. a week in hawaii is more than enough time to eat, even if it seems like you’re eating nonstop. aside from the chuck wagon, the highlight of the trip was probably walking through the 500-year-old lava tube in the middle of the lush rainforest on the edge of the kilauea volcano crater.

because you think hawaii and you think hula, and soft, sandy beaches, and swaying palm trees (and out-of-towners with leathery skin and far less (and more colourful) clothing than they probably should be wearing), but there we were, down from the volcano, on a beach of black sand created by centuries of broken down lava rocks, surrounded by… nothing.

coolness.

i was still eating at the end, of course. i considered revisiting the pumpkin spice cream frappucino i’d had at another airport starbucks a couple days earlier, but decided that the one not unpleasantly pumpkin-flavoured beverage topped with whipped cream and a dusting of cinnamon was enough. instead, i cracked open my final container of pineapple slices. i’d probably already eaten three or four local pineapples cumulatively over the week, but i couldn’t get enough. they were so juicy you’d be sticky all down your chin, and sweet, like they’d come out of a tin. and so, there i was, in the lounge waiting for the boarding call, savouring my last three slices. they went all too quickly.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 November 2008 at 3:31 pm

permalink | filed under cake, dinner, lunch, snacks, trip

when my mum comes to sydney, she goes to the opera; this time round, she went to see “la bohème” (and as an afterthought, “my fair lady” *). a few days later, she found herself eating at la bohème too.

but it’s not a place where scruffy and starving students hang out. oh no, no chance of starving here: this is where you come for big serves of central european food. my pretty, scallop-edged platter was soon filled with a festive assortment of meats (smoked ribs, a schnitzel, a portion of roast duck and two kind of sausages), and two sorts of cabbage (sweet red and sauerkraut).

this was the feast platter for one — you should see the feast platter for two! — and in fact, the feast was too big to fit on one plate. close by on another dish sat a trio of dumplings (bread, potato and speck) and a gravy boat.

the highlights for me were the cabbages, natch, and the smoked ribs, infused with such great flavour that i gnawed at the bone long after the sweet meat was gone. the speck dumpling was also infused with porky charm. the schnitzel, if you must know, was merely pedestrian. perhaps on schnitzel night (tuesday and thursday) it makes more of an effort.

also at the table were half a roasted duck and a pork knuckle that had surely been cut from the leg of a monster pig; the carving knife was still embedded when it arrived at the table. there were complimentary apps in the form of warm bread rolls and what amounted to two little dishes of duck fat.

friday night, when we were there, there was also live music, which means a lone man and his amplified violin, playing such tunes as “all by myself” and “you light up my life” over a melodramatic backing tape. he gets there at 7, and we got there at 6, and were still only halfway through our meal when he wheeled his amp in the door.

next time, dinner’s at 5.30.

* for the record, my mother recommends “my fair lady” (“richard e grant has wonderful timing and expression”) over “la bohème” (“ordinary”), cab

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 November 2008 at 9:28 pm

permalink | filed under dinner

we lunched at haberfield last saturday, where we discovered that the most innocent-looking vegetarian offerings at pasticceria papa might be harbouring bits of meat. tiny chunks of chopped-up schnitzel amidst the chopped-up tomatoes on top of a particularly springtimey pizza, for example. or two enormous meatballs concealed within a “broccoli and potato” schiaciata. but because none of us are actually vegetarian, we ate every last crumb, even the ones that the kid generously graced with scraps of salami off her salami pizza.

she is all about salami these days. and ham. and bacon, she told me, she loves the best, although i think it’s really ham. how much salami should a kid eat? surely italian kids (or spanish, or hungarian… and wherever else salami come from) eat quite a lot of it?

before lunch, we stopped by zanetti 5 star deli, and bought olive mortadella, and pickled octopus, and a packet of little starry pasta. we sat on the the steps out front eating mortadella, which, after an initial uncertainty about the olives, went on the list of approved cured meats.

and then after the cold cuts, and the pizza, and the gelato, and the ricotta cannoli — oh wait, that was me! — the kid requested soup for dinner, with her new starry pasta. here’s what went into our minestrone pot:

onions
garlic
salami
celery
carrots
cabbage
a potato
two bay leaves
a couple squirts of tomato paste
chicken
chickpeas
frozen peas
cherry tomatoes
the stars baby, the stars

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 June 2008 at 10:41 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, kid, kitchen, lunch

a couple of months ago, i volunteered to put together the newsletter of the kid’s playschool’s parents’ committee. i didn’t really think it through at the time, just figured it would be a catalyst to get some non-work-related design done. however, what it actually meant was that we had to make a special trip into school the other evening to attend a meeting. and i had to take minutes! because i also had to write the darn thing!!

it also meant a couple of trays of flaccid sandwiches — plastic cheese and vegemite, and plastic cheese and ham — and tepid water drunk out of the children’s regulation red plastic tumblers, but let’s forget that ever happened.

after it was all over, we caught the bus back to balmain with our fingers crossed, and got off the bus right opposite the new sushi place that’s just opened on darling street. it threw a welcoming golden light out into the night, and we stepped through the door to find the last two empty stools at the counter.

it’s a small room, seats about twenty. one waitress in front, two or three chefs out back. and a sushi train! sugoi! which, incidentally, is the name of the restaurant.

you probably already know this, but i l o v e sushi train: all those possibilities going ’round and ’round on colourful little plates. sure, there is that stressful element — similar to when you go for dimsum — where you can’t really relax and enjoy the eats because you are always keeping watch for something (better) that might come along, but sometimes you find a place where everything looks good, and none of it has the dehydrated edges of something that’s been riding the conveyer belt carousel for two hours…

and sugoi could be one of those places. we fished a plate of sashimi off the train; the temperature and texture of the fish was perfect. there was a pretty roll of tempura vegetables wrapped up in a delicate pea-green crepe, and topped with a dab of salad cream and a sprig of loveliness. there was spider roll! which i really do quite like. and at the end, there was no red bean mochi topped in whipped cream and strawberries and syrup like they do at tomodachi, but there was a fruit salad of melons, grapes, tinned pineapple and a slice of strawberry, in a glass goblet, on a red plate.

the newsletter has so far been well-received by the committee.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 May 2008 at 10:16 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, werk

saturday, i accomplished the unprecedented: three rice-based meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. mmm… i like rice.

breakfast was a trio of sticky rice puddings from lucky thai sweets and video. i had not come this way in ages, but friday afternoon after a spectacular lunch at spice i am (they must have turned up the heat for us; me and singapore girl scraped clean our platters of green papaya salad and sweet and sour clear fish curry, with lips tingling and gullets raw), we floated down campbell street on a chili high and picked the last two boxes of the shelves.

black rice with egg custard; white rice with fried onions, prawns and sugar; yellow rice with salty-sweet shredded coconut — i think i figure out which one is my favourite, and then with the next mouthful i change my mind.

there were longans too, $7.50 for a moderate bunch at paddy’s markets. the price seemed shocking at the time [and yet, still no match for the half-pound of lychees in new york, eh, nellicent?] but no longer begrudged — all the fruit is unblemished, firm and juicy on the inside.

lunch was the biggest plate of rice in the world. the special broken rice, to be exact, from the vietnamese stall at the sussex street food centre, but you cannot see the rice for the meat. there is a large grilled pork chop, all perfumed and lemongrassy. there is a skewer of thinly-sliced pork, rolled up. there is a slice of meatloaf, although the dominant ingredient seems to be mung bean noodles. there are pickled carrots, and a modest salad of sliced tomato and cucumber. there is a small bowl of nuoc mam cham, and an only slightly larger bowl of msg soup.

dinner was unnecessary you understand, but i cooked up a pot of chicken and pumpkin congee for the kid. later, after she had gone to bed, i scraped the bottom of the pot for the brown crusty bits.

i guess this is what happens when you eat pasta all week.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 May 2008 at 9:09 pm

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

fucken tired and shit.

this time last week… well, see now, i started off saying “last week”, and then it hit me that it was actually two weeks ago. crap. so this time two weeks ago, i was calling ’round likely candidates, trying to give away a spare ticket i had to the v festival.

which is harder than you’d think, even if it was two days out from the darned thing. in the end though, maybe i was just not meant to get rid of it. saturday, as i walked up to the gates, dressed in my best muji shirt, with an on-the-way bourke street bakery lamb-and-harissa sausage roll under my belt, and the scalper with the slimy, solicitous air muttered, “tickets? anyone got tickets to sell?”, i hesitated just a beat too long, and the moment was gone. me and my spare ticket and VIP wristband were sailing through the bagchecks, going it alone.

which, as it turns out, is not a bad way to go. i squeezed down the front of hot hot heat, i trudged to this, that and the other stage on a whim, and when whimsy got too much, i found a shady spot in the grass for myself, my “new yorker” and a quite delicious veggie sandwich which i’d thought to get at bourke street bakery some hours before to save me from having to eat the hodge-podge of stodge that is festival food.

(funny the way you have to go to a big rock show sometimes, to get a quiet moment to yourself.)

i was killing time until the main event, really. to me, that was queens of the stone age. as evening fell, along with a light drizzle, and the beast of a drummer kicked in… OH it was great! you know… when the crowd seizes up, and you feel it in the back of your neck. it was that kind of great, monstrous rock.

and maybe it’s a sign that i’m too old for outdoor rock festivals, but there were not too many moments of greatness that day, inbetween the trudging from stage to stage. duran duran were not great, but then again i was never a duranite back in the day. rosin murphy was pretty great, with her costume changes at each song and her funny, dramatic dance moves, and her funny, wonderful backing singers. smashing pumpkins started off great, with a lilting guitar anda wistful “today is the greatest day i’ve ever known…”, but then three songs in i remembered why i don’t listen at length to the pumpkins. the whining, the whining does not end.

and so (she whines), i left. i beat the mass exodus, and i caught a cab to my palatial bedroom at the vibe hotel in rushcutters bay, where i ordered copious amounts of room service and fell asleep in crisp white linens.

you are thinking, this is strange. why is she off to rock shows, and spending nights in hotels,and where is her kid? but i assure you, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. the kid had been deposited that morning with her doting aunties and smitten boy cousin for a day (and a night) of belated easter eggs, and vegemite sandwiches, and portuguese cakes, and as little as she could eat of a home-cooked corned beef and white sauce. and i, i had won a prize — the subscription prize, and who ever wins those? — from time out sydney magazine, of festival tickets, and VIP passes (read: clean toilets), and a night in a hotel, and a spankin’ new mobile phone, and spankin’ new phone credit.

(now there’s a moment of greatness right there. although the collective two hours that i spent on the phone with three or four of virgin mobile’s finest offshore call centre personnel, trying to convince them that i really had won a phone off virgin-sponsored competition, and that i hadn’t stolen someone else’s phone whose details were on file as the registered owner of the SIM card, and that they should please, please let me have goddamn access to my account, please… that was really not very great at all.)

but so, i was famished from seven hours of v fest on nothing more than a sausage roll and a veggie sandwich. and so, i ordered up big — so big, i thought, that i was surprised and a little bit embarrassed when the food showed up and they’d only included one set of cutlery.

i had chips, of course, because you must have room service chips, and these were pretty good chips, all crunchy and golden and fat. i ate many of these before i even tasted the duck salad, which i’d ordered out of curiosity, because the description on the menu read: seared duck with lychee, capsicum and watercress salad, with raspberry vinaigrette. the duck was not seasoned, except for the crisp skin, which was, aggressively. the salad was two bitey and mismatched flavours of watercress and capsicum — diced, and in three colours. the lychees strewn over the top seemed mismatched to that, and the raspberry vinaigrette was…um… sour?

fortunately, i got dessert too, because i was hungry at the time. but the vanilla bean ice cream was mostly melted by the time i got to it — it had been delivered sitting atop the warm duck — so i drank that with a spoon, and then i was much too full to have more than a taste of the belgian chocolate mousse.

so i had it for breakfast. rock!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 April 2008 at 9:52 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, grumble, lunch, soundtrack

good friday, i served up — somewhat sacrilegiously — a shepherd’s pie for dinner: lamb (of god) mince, cooked with a couple tins of tomatoes, most of a tin of chickpeas, diced carrot and sweet potato, and rather a lot of broccoli. the potato topping was mashed with the remaining chickpeas, and dotted — as prescribed by stephanie alexander — with butter. i do not know why i have not made a shepherd’s pie before this, but it’s a fine way to eat two large potatoes in one sitting.

i figured i’d walked it off earlier that afternoon. we walked from the heart of the city into chinatown for vietnamese — pho bo tai and some porky nem. good old chinatown, who else would be open to feed you when everyone else shuts down to commemorate the lord’s passing? after, we walked the length of the city to get to the botanic gardens. around the time jesus gave up the ghost, the skies above us grew dark and ominous, and the bats ever more shrieky. we caught a bus home then, before the heavens opened.

easter saturday, after a companionable lunch of pastrami bagels and ginger beer, i headed into kinko’s on broadway to rustle up some grunge on the photocopier. kinko’s — that bastion of 24-hour print self-servicery — was shut. the bastards! i hightailed it to the big kinko’s in the city, and it was a hive of activity. blowing up line drawings to 400% — now that was like coming home. but, ok, for actual homecoming, i stopped by BBQ king for a box of their finest, stickiest char siu.

easter sunday, the easter bunny — visiting from chiltern, victoria — presented me with a giant lindt easter egg casket, and the kid with a startling assortment of lesser chocolates. a good start to the day, which went on to include the circus festival at darling harbour, a BBQ pork bun picnic, the parisian toy boats exhibition at the maritime museum, and then a meandering walk through pyrmont, over the anzac bridge, up the back streets of balmain, and home to leftover shepherd’s pie.

we ate a lot of meat this weekend, and i was glad for the cleansing veggie wrap of easter monday. we walked a lot through the city this weekend — it’s both infuriating and a joy. in between i finished a drawing of what may become a CD cover, hopefully. it feels good to be working again.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 March 2008 at 12:55 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, kitchen

this is how to make a makeshift sausage risotto:

buy some nice sausages. (today at about life, we picked a pack of toulouse sausages from eumundi smokehouse: pork, with pepper and white wine.) split the sausage skins and fry the meat in a small amount of oil, just to break it up and brown it a little. remove the meat from the wok. there should be a puddle of sausagey oil in which you can now fry a finely-diced onion. and some risotto rice.

you would have had you stock on another burner, of course. this may be that stuff out of the freezer that you made three or four months earlier by boiling the remains of a roast chicken dinner. add the stock one painstaking ladle at a time, while it is slowly absorbed by the rice.

i think you generally have to stir for like, thirty to forty minutes? halfway through, return the sausage meat to the rice, then keep going. you might want to sample a couple of grains of rice from time to time, just to see if it’s cooked through enough. you will be excited by the rich, meaty flavour of the broth — the extreme savouriness — and encouraged by the cries from across the counter in the loungeroom, “oh my god, that smells so tasty!”

when the rice has just about lost its al dente-ness, it’s time for mantecatura! i don’t beat in quite as much butter as locatelli prescribes (75 grams), but i like the symbolism. also, i don’t generally add parmesan because i don’t crave the cheesiness.

this is how to fuck up a makeshift — though promising — sausage risotto:

the last couple of times i made this, i added a handful of rocket after turning off the heat. it wilts and adds colour, and a foil to the meatiness.

this afternoon at about life, we’d procured a bag of organic rocket — wild rocket, actually, from ladybird organics. and now i think the “wild” makes all the difference in the world, because where the rocket i’d been buying previously from the local fruitshop was mild and pleasant, this organic stuff was really something else. a vile weed from hell!

the thing is, after plating up, i also dolloped a spoonful of rocket pesto onto the mound of risotto, for dramatic effect, so you can stir through for a uniform green tinge, or a burst of something extra. again, when i’ve bought this at the fruitshop up the road, it’s been like the icing on a cake, a little salty green accent to the grand starchy statement. the about life house pesto is a startling emerald green, just gorgeous, but it was like eating poison. the bitterness, just from the tiniest first contact with our tongues, was like one of life’s harshest lessons. i guess in this case, that lesson would be: taste the damn pesto before you use it. or at least, read the label to discover that it contains just a healthy blend of rockets (sic), pistachios, lemon juice and olive oil, and then choose another pesto with salt, and maybe even cheese.

i put an empty bowl on the table, to contain the pesto i was not ashamed to scrape off the top of the risotto. we thought that would take care of things; we trusted that the bitterness had been contained. but we were wrong: it lingered. and that was when we realised what set wild rocket apart from the regular tame stuff.

we scraped the risotto off our spoons with our teeth so that it would not touch our lips, and at least one of us contorted herself so that she could swallow each mouthful without it touching her tongue. did you succeed, nellicent?

we made it through the meal, giggling from the awfulness, and we did not go back for seconds even though there was plenty left in the wok. in fact, after dinner, i spent a good few minutes picking out each strand of wilted rocket from the rice. and then when i had amassed a sizeable tangle, i took a photo of it. sigh.

but see, i’m not discouraging you from making your own sausage-and-rocket risotto — no way, it can be wonderful — but you might just want to check that you’re not using any hardcore, top-of-the-line, clean-living type ingredients.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 March 2008 at 9:44 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen, nellie

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

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

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