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what’s this? three posts in two days? surely this means that that harpie of a book project i was working on is safely ensconced at the printers, being teased and bound into its silky-sheened covers… but, no.

after postponing the launch date for a fortnight to give us more time to work on it, it became clear that “us” meant “them”. “they” who, after i gave them a stack of PDFs for proofing a week and a bit ago, promised daily that the amendments would be sent back tomorrow, then tomorrow, then monday, then tomorrow, then tomorrow, then tomorrow, then this afternoon, no, tomorrow, no no, this afternoon. so finally on thursday it landed with a thud, as only an 11-page word doc can, detailing changes, additions, suggestions to move a single page to somewhere else in the book where there is already something else, and an even better suggestion that because they had to remove a pictorial page i could perhaps add some pages at the end where more pictures could go. hmf.

so i did the sensible thing of course: i ignored it. and gave myself the day off. this was possible because friday morning, a little before five, the boy took the kid — slumped still asleep on his shoulder — away for easter holidays, in the country, with his olds, for an unspecified period of time, but most probably at least until wednesday.

W H O O P.

so i blogged for some hours. and i went up the street in the drizzle for a paper and some magazines, and i sat on my balcony drinking hot chocolate and eating hot buttered cross loaf. then i blogged for some more hours. and watched four episodes of season two of “carnivale”, rented the day before for the bargain price of $3.50 for the entire six-disc set.

then i made wontons, which is something i’d wanted to do since i read of helen’s wonton frenzy. truly, it was as easy as she said, and why have i not done this sooner? the only hiccup came halfway through the wrapping: i had dealt with exactly half of my filling of organic pork mince, water chesnuts, straw mushrooms, garlic, soy sauce, white pepper and minced garlic… when my wrappers ran out! i guess helen’s packet of wrappers must have been twice the size of mine, and when i read the empty packaging again, there it was: 34 pieces. who the hell gets all geared up squishing minced pork through their bare fingers, and then makes only 34 wontons?? ridiculous.

i wasn’t up to re-refrigerating the bacteria-infested remainder until i got more skins, so i tossed it into my wok with a tub of leftover rice, and voila! instant pork fried rice dinner! which wasn’t very good friday of me i suppose. i made up for it by staying up much too late and watching that jesus movie on tv.

this morning, i found myself awake just after six, so i cleaned the house. i have a clean house. so maybe it’s not the same as if my mum had cleaned it, but spray and wipe was involved, and a vacuum cleaner, and several large garbage bags. by ten, i was freshly scrubbed, waiting for deborah to show up: we were going on a bagel hunt.

she’d mentioned these really good bagels that a colleague kept bringing her, and then there was a story in the paper, and a one-off easter weekend saturday opening, and it all came down to us on a train to bondi junction, finding the great bagel and coffee company right there in the pedestrian mall, and splitting an everything bagel with a generous spread of smoked salmon and dill cream cheese: cream cheese, into which had been blended smoked salmon and dill. we ate it, so happily, sitting just in from the rain, with paper cups of steaming english breakfast tea. then we went back in and between us bought 18 bagels to go.

except we didn’t. well, the bagels didn’t. the counterboys were kind enough to hold them for us, while we explored the westfield behemoth across the road. after a few hours of great consumer restraint, we went back to pick up our bagels, and pretended for a little while that it might maybe be a little bit too crazy if we sat down to bagel sandwiches for lunch. our restraint is no match for bagels though, so there we were:

“i think i’ll get the pastrami one.”
“mmm, yeah, i think i might too.”
beat.
“unless…”
“we order two different ones and split them?”
“yeah!”

it helps to talk things through sometimes. the pastrami one, for which we chose a rye bagel, comes with sliced pickle, tomato, lettuce and mustard. they put the pastrami on steaming, but if you sit outside on a rainy autumn day, and decide that you want to save the pastrami one for last, it will be stone cold. but tasty. so tasty. tastier, though not necessarily better, than the turkey one, on an onion bagel, with cranberry sauce, avocado, brie and sprouts.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 April 2007 at 9:38 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kitchen, lunch, werk

the new and unexpected thing i discovered about my sister the other day, while i was telling her on the phone about how i had panfried ocean trout fillets with crispy salted skin, and made an enormous amount of buttery mash to go with, out of three mole-sized golden delight potatoes, and put together a large bowl of buttered and lightly salted steamed greens (broccoli, zucchini, peas and cabbage) to round it off… is that she does not care for buttered vegetables.

huh.

“but, green vegetables,” i explained, “with butter.”

“yeeeaaah… eh,” she confirmed.

tchk.

but the other thing i know she doesn’t so much care for, because she told me so maybe last year, is leftover pasta. like, not sauced or anything. just that extra tangle of noodles you find in the strainer at the end of dinner, because you can never judge how much dry pasta to put in the pot, because who knows how much a handful of dry pasta will expand in a body of rapidly boiling water.

well. probably jamie oliver knows.

do you like jamie oliver? i am still not sure. his food always looks delicious, but his tv persona is so tiresome. and even then, just that smartarse, jumping-about-the-kitchen, slightly spluttery cooking show persona, mind. the other jamie, the reality tv jamie, to whom bad things happen, is altogether much more likeable. i could not not watch “jamie’s kitchen”, or “school dinners” or, most recently, “jamie’s kichen australia”… which didn’t have so much jamie in it actually, and certainly not quite enough tobie.

i do not own any jamie oliver cookbooks, but when i recently came into possession of a 50% off voucher…

[ if you subscribe the the borders email newsletter, they send you discount vouchers every week. ]

…i was convinced i would have to finally buy “jamie’s dinners“, which i look at every now and again in a bookshop. apart from being a lively collection of fun typography and intensely colourful pictures, it is also full of the sort of food i make / would make. but standing in front of the wall of cookbooks, it occurred to me that since i already make this sort of food, i didn’t need to get a whole book on the subject. nevermind. perhaps i would get “jamie’s italy” instead. it was right there on the shelf, and i had not been able to not watch the tv show, and i really like italian food.

and then i remembered that i could not get any more cookbooks ever, least of all an italian one, because nellie had only the other week sent me, via amazon.de, “made in italy“, a weighty tome by giorgio locatelli. it is an engrossing read, this one, not just a stack of recipes, but a mix of history and culture and photographs of noble butchers and their meats.

so instead, the kid got that maisy book that folds out to become a 3D paper playhouse with a cut-out maisy doll and a closet full of paper clothes.

i tell you lots of stories! but there is a point, see. in the fridge, i had a box of leftover fettucine, which i had oiled to keep from clumping before i stored it. yesterday, lunchtime, the cold noodles separated agreeably to be tossed with a beaten egg, some finely-grated cheese, pepper and salt. i put oil in a frypan; i fried three rounds of noodle fritters. golden crunchy carbs, with salty cheesy bits and peppery bits, and brown crunchy bits where a stray noodle sat too long in a bit of oil. fried up cold pasta, who’d’ve thought. i saw this, in a jamie oliver cookbook.

and the locatelli? it has a whole chapter on gelato, but chapter risotto came in very handy last night, when i finally decided that i could probably omit the wine in the recipe to not so much detriment. (giorgio locatelli would probably disagree because every one of his risotto recipes called for a glass, but.) plus, i really needed to use up that expired arborio rice in the pantry, two huge tubs out of the many that my uncle swiped from his job at the rice company, more rice than he knew what to do with.

and i had sausages — chicken, rocket and tomato sausages. so sausage and pea risotto, from the book. it was a lot of stirring in a hot kitchen on a hot evening, longer than the recipe hinted at, but for the first risotto, after years of being intimidated, it was awright.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 December 2006 at 2:49 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, dinner, kitchen

i read somewhere that the ricotta you buy from the deli section of a supermarket has a higher water content than the ricotta you buy from an actual deli. this means that supermarket ricotta will give you a mushier result to your recipe. that aside, there is also the risk that the server will scoop your ricotta with the same ladle he previously used for someone else’s olive tapenade order. eaten straight, your ricotta will have an particular savoury edge.

you can fix this by beating the ricotta until it goes creamy, and then adding vanilla and icing sugar to taste, and beating some more. fold in some raspberries, frozen ones even, thawed overnight.

i’d been thinking about this raspberrry ricotta since the sandwich picnic the other sunday, and made a small batch midweek. it takes just minutes to whip up, and you don’t even need chocolate bread; it’s just as delicious on a toasted blueberry bagel. perfect for an early weekday breakfast while watching atomic betty with the kid.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 September 2006 at 9:47 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, kitchen

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

i made this!

a thing of beauty, adapted from nigella lawson’s kuchen recipe in delicious magazine. this one has grated lemon rind mixed into the bready dough, and is topped with cherries, almonds, raw sugar and mixed spice. it’s just out of the oven! i’m excited!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 July 2006 at 5:52 pm

permalink | filed under cake, kitchen

perhaps you’ve stumbled across “ready steady cook” in the pandora’s box that is afternoon tv, a sort of cooking gameshow which pairs everyday people and their bag of random groceries with actual chefs (think darren simpson rather than huey or aristos). maybe your favourite chef on the show is tobie puttock, because of the way he curls his lip with scorn at the showoff host, or because he seems irritated at the contestant he’s been dealt, if she is more inclined to chat vacuously to the host than to chop the spring onions. because he’s, like, sort of cute.

you may then already know that he will be heading the melbourne franchise of jamie oliver’s fifteen restaurant, and that he has a cookbook just out, “daily italian“. from this book came the recipe for friday’s potatoes.

sliced potatoes baked in milk with rosemary and garlic. it comes out with a curdly-crunchy crust. the perfect accompaniment for salmon panfried with capers, and a melange of green beans, broccoli and peas cooked up in a tin of tomatoes.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 July 2006 at 3:03 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen, tv

this year i got over my… well it’s not a phobia, not even distaste really, but you know that icky feeling you get from handling library books? your fingertips seem dusty or grimy or… that sensation i just can’t describe, when there’s stuff in that gap between your nail and the top of your finger, and in the webbing of your fingers. you know? the way my hands feel right now even as i’m merely typing about it.

argh!!

um. so i’ve been taking the kid to the library. sometimes to get picture books, and sometimes for organised storytime. some days i find the latest issue of a glossy magazine on the rack, with a bit less dust or grime to get in-between my fingers.

recently, i borrowed an only slightly dogeared copy of “delicious.“, from june of last year. in the first few pages, there was a half page on max brenner and his “chef’s own” recipe for hot chocolate, which pretty much amounted to: 1 tablespoon of max brenner hot chocolate mix, 1 cup of milk, marshmallows. dissolve chocolate powder into hot milk. if you want a richer drink, add more chocolate.

really.

but i got past it without too much derisive snorting, and came upon a recipe for sticky lemon pudding. in the photograph was a vintage enamel bowl on a waffle-weave tea towel. in the bowl was a spongey yellow cake with a golden brown top and a puddle of lemon curd at the bottom. for almost two weeks i thought about making this pudding. and then for almost one week after that, things kept happening to postpone the making of pudding. but reading of santos‘s lemony l.a. adventures only galvanised my intentions. yesterday afternoon, with the magazine’s due date fast approaching, i thought i should just do it.

it turned out to be one of those recipes where the end result looks exactly like the picture, except that because my pudding bowls are smaller than the prescribed size, i had two! it even tasted like its name: the cakey bit had a slightly chewy, slightly sticky mouth feel, and the tart lemon flavour (i cut down the sugar in the recipe) went all the way through the cake to the curdy bit below. YUM.

howzzat? an uppercase YUM in a lowercase blog. the recipe is from jill dupleix, and goes a little something like this.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 June 2006 at 11:58 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, cake, kitchen

eat more soup! this week, armed with most of a head of broccoli, half a carton of chicken stock, all of one large red rascal potato, some onion and quite a bit of garlic, i made a pot of broccoli soup so full of greeny goodness that the kid had two helpings. they were small helpings (that pink bowl is actually a 125ml measuring cup), but still. hurray for broccoli-eating babies.

that day, the boy came home from school, hungry of course, and fossicked about the fridge for a snack.

“i made broccoli soup today!”
“uh-huh.”
“broccoli soup!”
“i was looking for a snack.”
“broccoli soup!”
“hmm.” and so on…

more for me.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 June 2006 at 2:30 pm

permalink | filed under kitchen

who likes ice cream? bunnies do! no wait, i mean, i do! sometimes (rarely) i make my own, in the machine we were given a couple of xmases ago. this year there has been the coconut-lime-turkish delight extravaganza (coconut milk + cream + sugar + lime rind + lime juice + toasted coconut + bits of turkish delight = over the top confection with a curious hint of savoury flavour) and the lemon-buttermilk-blueberry affair (buttermilk + milk + brown sugar syrup + lemon juice + lemon rind + blueberries). i made that one on a very hot afternoon, so it didn’t freeze quite enough, but it had a lovely light texture, like uncle louie g‘s italian ices. oh cherry chip explosion, how i miss you!

so far i’ve avoided those recipes with the rich egg custard bases — a combination of fear of lots of egg yolks and fear of undercooking the egg yolks and contracting salmonella, and ice cream’s not about fear, dammit — but so far i haven’t noticed anything amiss. maybe for the next one i’ll try that handy hint i read about, where the homecooked custard base is replaced with a carton of supermarket custard. maybe i’ll just go out and buy a tub of sara lee.

what i did buy recently was a new drawing pen, made by the mitsubishi pencil company. i love it! how it glides across the paper, leaving a smooth, shiny black trail. i drew the bunny over the last couple of days, and it’s in the running — run rabbit run! — to be put on a threadless tshirt. if you could be so kind as to click on the thingy below and vote for it, i would be most appreciative (because, i’m sorry, you will need to sign up). oh no! it’s been taken out of the running due to a poor showing in the first 24 hours. harsh. ah well, click on the thingy below if you’d like to see the whole bunny.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 March 2006 at 10:26 am

permalink | filed under ice cream, kitchen

shall i finish telling you about the picnic, and the tart, from before?

it’s just that, if a group of people goes into a kebab shop to pick up some supplies for a picnic, you might imagine that there may be a platter of meats shaved off the great revolving thing behind the counter, if not from the special grill set up by the door, with those kebabs that are minced lamb moulded onto a mean skewer, or chunks of marinated meat and onions; several tubs of salads and dips; maybe a handful of falafel; and a fat bundle of bread — maybe even a couple of those tasty-looking ones drizzled with oil and za’atar — for everyone to share.

instead, there was an unspoken consensus that each mini-group within the entourage would cater for itself. hence, boy’s olds bought themselves a doner kebab plate, boy’s sister bought herself a doner kebab plate and a bag of chips for her son, boy’s other sister bought herself a vegetarian pide and a can of coke zero, and boy tried to buy us and the kid a chicken kebab plate and a falafel plate but the shopgirl misheard and made us roll-ups.

thusly laden, we bundled ourselves back into our cars and drove to the botanic gardens, but waiting in line with our picnic, we saw the sign on the gatehouse telling us to stay on the path at all times, which is just not condusive to picnicking, now is it?

no.

we ended up at the picnic tables a short hike away, close to where some kids were playing with a heavy metal chain hanging off a tree branch. i suppose it used to be some sort of swing, but now, without a seat, it was just a braining waiting to happen, flung about as it was with glee and stupidity.

but we got through the meats without incident, and then there was baklava on the table, and the custard eclairs, and well, the plum tart had been there from the start. “this baklava is so fresh,” someone said, lips glistening with sugar syrup. “the chocolate on this eclair is really good quality,” someone said. (it was!) “it’s a pity we didn’t think to bring any tea,” someone said, “because it would be very nice to have with your tart.”

and then, with the tart still pristine, someone said, “i couldn’t eat another thing.” and reached for another piece of baklava.

so the tart went back into the car as we walked round the garden, and after the garden, no-one wanted tart still. well, i wanted tart, but no-one else did. i asked the boy if we should cut the tart up and give some to his family to take home. i mean, i had made it to share with them, but it seemed that these were people who did not want tart. could i force it upon them? was it more polite to leave them with tart or without? in the end, the boy cut a portion of tart that was uncomfortably just short of half, whacked it on a paper plate and saw it unceremoniously into his mother’s arms.

when i got home and finally had a piece of my plum tart with a cup of tea, i j’regretted that i had brought it along to that shamster picnic. i should have kept it all for myself. it was fantastic.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 24 March 2006 at 10:05 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, grumble, kitchen

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