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Category Archives: drink

it’s beginning to look a lot like xmas! there’s a dark cherry mocha frappucino awaiting me a starbucks, but now that starbuckss are few and far-between, i made do yesterday with the festive cookies ‘n’ christmas beverage at gloria jeans.

[ it pained me to order it -- i had to stop speaking halfway through and check the signboard to see that it really was called "cookies. and. christmas". ]

but it didn’t hurt to drink it. it was mildly chocolatey, and not overly minty, and if that doesn’t seem too exciting (it wasn’t), well! the self-serve sprinkles at the condiment bar will surely do you in.

here are some other exciting things i’ve found lately:

sweet william not nuts chocolate bar
i remember being told about dairy-free sweet william chocolate a few years ago by this vegan girl i knew. because i’m not vegan, or lactose intolerant, i did not think to venture down that route.

but! a new variety i stumbled upon at banana joes last week compelled me to put one in my basket. “not nuts!” it proclaims on the wrapper, for those allergic to peanuts as well as dairy. or for those, like me, who do not care for peanuts in their chocolate. instead, it is packed full of whole roasted soy beans. hurrah! the crunchy, beany little nuggets are a treat indeed, and surprisingly, so is the chocolate: smooth and creamy (though a little too sweet), and devoid of any of that weird soy flavour you get in regular non-asian soy milk products.

how do they do it? amazing!

also…

coca cola lip balm
i really do like coca cola, but i really have to be in the mood to drink it. i have to crave it, actually, and i give in to that craving two, maybe three times a year. oh, to feel that caustic fizz work its way down my throat is a wonderful thing.

voila — coca cola lip smackers!

the bumper pack i bought had regular coke lip balm, vanilla coke lip balm, and a liquid lip gloss that rolls on via an enormous silver ball bearing. it tastes and smells just like the real thing! and i don’t have to actually drink any of that crap! i am extremely happy about this great development in lip balm – junk food cross promotion. do not think i have not considered applying it over my regular cherry lip balm for a walk down cherry coke lane.

i resisted — so far — the fanta pack, which included a stick each of orange, strawberry and grape. perhaps i could just buy a grape one; grape fanta is so hard to come by these days.

- – -

bet you didn’t know i felt so strongly about coke!

what better time to finally address that meme i got tagged with the other day. ok, fine, two weeks ago. i am very bad with memes. but two people tagged me for this one, so it must be important.

so. the rules of the game:
• link to the person who tagged you
• post the rules on the blog
• write six random things about yourself
• tag six people at the end of your post
• let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog
• let the tagger know when your entry is up

that is a lot of rules, so i’m only following half of them. the first half. told you i was bad with memes! also, i think you get quite a lot of random things about me in the day-to-day running of this blog — i really like broccoli, for example, and “america’s next top model” — so i’m really scraping the barrel here.

1. i really like coca cola

2. i eat floor food
sure, it depends on the food, and the floor; i won’t eat food off a wet or grimy floor, even if it’s picked up quickly. but the five-second rule is fairly elastic around here. once, at the national art gallery cafe, a fat artichoke shot out of my sandwich when i took a bite out of the other end. i waited until i had finished the whole sandwich, and then i retrieved the artichoke from under my chair where it had rolled, on carpet, and i ate it, after checking for hairs.

3. i eat expired food
i am right now eating a bag of japanese milk-tea-flavoured corn snacks, best before date: 07.02.23. they have a pleasant, sweet, milky-tea flavour, and are only slightly stale… a bit like those flushable corn-based packing peanuts (it’s true, i nibbled one the other day to see if they were the disintegratable flushable kind).

4. i remove the pegs from the clothes line while bringing in the washing
i caught the tail end of this debate in the herald’s column 8 section earlier in the week. apparently such people are deemed to have some sort of obsessive-compulsive affliction. but really, how can you put out new laundry when the lines are littered with randomly placed pegs? you’d have to hold the damp piece of clothing bunched up in one hand while you claw at the pegs to release them before clipping them back on. you’d be unable to flick out the twisted wet bundles to rid them of their wrinkles. you’d… ahem. wait ’til you find out i’ve also been known to match the colours of the pegs to the colour of the clothes. and hangers, let’s not forget hangers.

5. that guy known as “the boy” moved back in
it’s neither an overly good nor bad thing — maybe it’s both, and maybe they cancel each other out — but i thought it might be useful to note, in the interest of narrative.

6. i am horribly shy and retiring
but i’ve met some great people through this blog. come say hello if you see me in the street… unless, um, you’re a scary stalker type. then yes, just walk on by.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 November 2008 at 9:46 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate, drink, misc, shoping, something new

where does a day go? hell, where do they all go?? so we lost an hour this morning, but that does not explain how i’m suddenly at the tail end of october. it’s been a month of eye-twitching work and a week of xtreme tourism, and even though it’s really only 10pm, i am so very tired.

perhaps i’m missing that 470ml of blood i donated on friday. you should do it! it’s draining (ha!) but fun: you go in, they bleed you, and then in return they pour you one of their finest lukewarm, uncreamy milkshakes. this time i chose caramel.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 October 2007 at 10:44 pm

permalink | filed under drink

yummy green things for tuesday

1. starbucks blackberry green tea frappuccino
blackberry syrup blended into the regular green tea frappuccino; voluptuous whipped cream; an extra drizzle of syrup. it tastes much less of green than the normal maccha frappuccino, but was still fun. i won’t have it again, because it does not fit into my kilojoule-balance plan. but you, you should totally go ahead.

2. broccoli soup
bounteous broccoli, at a bargainous $1.98/kilo at the supermarket, necessitated four heads be purchased and cooked up in a large pot with onions, garlic, olive oil, butter, and chicken stock. oh, and two potatoes. truly, it is the gift that keeps giving; i think i will get at least another three meals out of this.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 September 2007 at 10:54 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, drink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

after spending the night mostly awake and upright in my airplane seat, i stood in the red lane for about an hour as the one xray machine available was put to work (slowly) keeping australia’s borders safe. as it turned out, my booty of dried mushrooms, dried scallops — oh how i have missed you! –, chocolate, tea, biscuits and antihistamines was waved cheerily through.

ah… tea. a good cup of tea is hard to find, in singapore. no, wait. a great cup of tea can be found if you want a local teh c: a puddle of condensed milk in a thick china cup, topped with hot tea and swirled into a sweet caramely beverage. or a marsala chai pungent with spices, at the dosai place. but if you want a nice cup of normal tea, say for breakfast, you will pay $5 for a twinings english breakfast teabag swimming in a pot of hot water. the amount of water will be too much for a single measly tea bag, and you will spend all of breakfast time wondering why the hell tasteless brown water costs so much, eh? rivercafe? “modern australian style” indeed.

when i got home, i brewed a cup of toby’s estate’s strong and delicious australian breakfast tea, tempered with a good slosh of full-fat milk. it was perfect with the valrhona chocolate biscotti that i found (and which was bought for me, thanks frenchie!) at da paolo gastronomia, the deli arm of my new favourite place to eat (western food) in singapore: da paolo pizza bar.

the biscotti give a solid crunch of unexpected buttery saltiness. the plain version is served with your chocolate gelato in the restaurant. the chocolate chip (i use the word “chip” loosely; they are really just large chunks carved off the block, i’m sure) version is all sweet-salty mind-boggly good.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 March 2007 at 8:27 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate, drink, snacks, trip

“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

back to the comforting clicky-click of one’s keyboard, one could spin fanciful tales of homely cakes that one encountered in the wintery sou’-eastern wodge of this great land.

instead i shall spleen about some ridiculous developments in the field of convenience foods that i’ve seen advertised in the last couple of days.

1 the “café menu” range recently introduced by a prominent instant coffee conglomerate includes four varieties of cappuccino (eg. sweet cappuccino — “authentic café quality coffee targeting younger drinkers, those new to coffee or those who prefer a sweeter, milkier cappuccino”), and perhaps too many flavours of latte, the stupidest being the chai coffee latte. it’s not even the (you might think) tautologicality of the name for a milky tea drink, it’s that it actually is a coffee beverage blended with a spice mix of ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon.

2 the newly-implemented flip-top lid on tubs of ice cream. apparently this makes it “easier”, though the ad didn’t specify what exactly we would find less challenging. certainly, i was more puzzled.

who thinks up these things? argh!

i’m sure these are at last partially responsible for the worrisome dream i had last night. my recurring stress dream, i might have mentioned, is my teeth shatter and i chew on them, grinding them down like broken seashells. a few years ago, i bit into a stale rice cracker, and part of my molar did break off, around an old filling; i sat there a while wondering, am i dreaming, or am i awake and my tooth just broke. argh! my other stress dream, which i’ve had maybe twice, though several years apart, is where i can see parasitic worms floating around inside my stomach, and also involves walking through a shiny white laboratory with stylish stainless steel table lamps.

in last night’s dream, i realised too late, as i was getting a sandwich for dinner, that the pearl jam show started in half an hour, and it would take me at least an hour to get there. and even more horribly, i had forgotten to go to the previous night’s concert, and had also forgotten to sell my spare ticket. i believe i may have sobbed. somehow, i made it there in time, and my only concern was how a short person gets a good view of the stage. phew.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 July 2006 at 11:30 am

permalink | filed under drink, grumble, packaging

you know how it is: step out to buy a butter dish, and suddenly you have a butter dish, and two little glass tubs for storage, and a pretty pink mixing bowl, and some ocean trout for dinner.

i recently found a recipe for lemon curd sponge pudding in a magazine, and it became clear to me that i would have to acquire a pudding bowl. (you see how it is? if you have already read the previous entry, you will shake you head sadly and agree: it’s an affliction!)

but it was half price!

monday lunchtime, the bowl was sitting clean and fresh on the drying rack as my bucatini came to a boil, and before i realised what was happening, i had grabbed it and filled it with a tangle of spicy coriander pesto noodles with peas and broccoli.

ah lovely and versatile pink mixing/pudding/pasta bowl.

maeve was ambling down the street the other day in a pair of pink trousers and her black and white stripy t-shirt. she looked like a giant licorice allsort. we went to starbucks, and the girl behind the counter said, “is that your, um, sister?”

“UM… no, my, um, daughter.”

“it’s just,” she said, “you look so young… and my sister and i, we have eight years between us, so…”

“ah,” i said, “there are 32 years between us.”

and then she offered maeve a chocolate muffin sample and a baby-cino. note: starbucks balmain does baby-cini for free. me, i had noticed the scrawl on the blackboard that said, “hot white chocolate”, and instantly i had to have some, with raspberry syrup.

i had some, and it was way too sweet, and thick, and white. i mean, of course, but i was surprised. like that time in sainsburys, nellie, when we gazed up in awe at the shelf of brown-bagged gourmet chocolate chip cookies, and picked the one labelled “white chocolate and raspberry” because you said they were amazing, and we took the bag home and broke it open and ate a cookie and thought, hmmm. because it was a regular chocolate chip cookie, and standing flummoxed in the kitchen we could even see through the cellophane window in the bag that they were clearly brown chocolate chips, and how had we not made the connection, standing at the end of that aisle in sainsburys, that the “white chocolate” label did not compute with the brown chocolate within? we did not compute.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 June 2006 at 4:02 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, drink, kid, nellie, shoping

here are two hot chocolates i had in london.

the first one — doesn’t it look enticing? — was from carluccio’s, the special florentine chocolate, which turned out to not be made to order. instead, it was dispensed from a constantly churning little tub perched atop a shelf high above the espresso machine. it has to be constantly churned, because, as i found out, if left to sit for any period of time, a skin quickly forms. the drink itself is like a runny pudding, and tastes a bit of cornstarch. whuh?

the second one was from the tate modern. you can get a plain hot chocolate, or one with cream and marsmallows. they skimp on neither.

well folks, i’m on to my third variant of cold in about five weeks, horrible squishy bouts of spongyhead and phlegm in hues spanning the spectrum from clear to bright green to murky brown. in between each cold are endless spasms of residual asthmatic coughing.

tonight i washed down an antihistamine, a couple of puffs from a purple inhaler, and a vitamin c pill with a glass of tea. i’m not sure if this renders the medication useless. at least, i mean, it can’t be bad; not like washing down valium with bourbon, for example. we shall see.

the tea is from a can that i’ve had in and out of the fridge for the last year or so (though i wouldn’t be surprised if it actually turned out to be two years old). what happens is, i put it in the fridge, planning to drink it, and then in the meantime an influx of new groceries makes me take it out again to make room. but so tonight, it is finally over, this in-and-out tea saga.

this is what the can says:
“It’s time to Pure. Pure life,
pure time, with pure mind.
Pure taste, with heart.
Little sugar, just black,
pure tea. In Famouse House.”

you see why i had to get it.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 May 2006 at 8:47 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate, drink, packaging, trip

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