it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago, except now that i write this, i see that it was actually five weeks ago, gah.

my olds were in town, as were the boy’s, and an aunt of his, and a cousin, and we thought we might wander into carlton for a catch up and celebratory luncheon. pizza and gelato were on the horizon (essentially, a replay of the kid’s birthday do some weeks back, but without the paint), but i knew that we would never get into D.O.C. at peak lunch hour. so we tried the aunt-recommended place, and when that proved to be a heaving mass of lunch crowd, we crossed the road to the place previously vetted by the boy’s parents: cafe trevi.

what it had going for it was that it was empty. where it fell short — way, waaayyy short — was the food. the boy and i shared a couple of pizzas, and they were so awful we couldn’t bring ourselves to finish them (and you know, just for perspective, on the occasions that i’ve had say, domino’s, i eat until it’s gone). the bases were sturdy, bland dough trays on which some nasty plastic cheese was melted, and toppings — some strips of leather masquerading as prosciutto for instance — artfully arranged. the others seemed to be enjoying their food, so perhaps we just ordered the wrong things.

however, everybody agreed that the mixed salads were dismal: some roughly chopped pallid iceberg, a couple slices of cucumber and a wedge or two of anaemic tomato, carrot sticks, and — here’s the kicker — dressing perched precariously atop the lot in disposable plastic tubs, one of balsamic vinegar and another of commercial salad cream. low fat mayonnaise, even.

i must say i took a perverse pleasure in dipping carrot sticks in the salad cream. maybe i even enjoyed it, far more than i did the pizza anyway.

dessert down the street at casa del gelato almost made up for it. but not really, i was so grumpy.

last sunday, the boy proposed a carlton excursion, which began with an expedition through the melbourne cemetery. i love a good cemetery: that old one in the middle of athens, where the boy and i wandered 11 years ago; paris’s pere la chaise, in which my sister and i became lost, and cold, and hungry one wintery afternoon in 2007; waverly cemetery in sydney, the site of a fine twilight picnic overlooking a chinatown cream cake and the crashing waves of the tasman sea… good times!

melbourne general cemetery is a world class cemetery. the internet tells me it was established in the 1850s, and that it houses around half a million. what i can tell you is that it is a wonderful collection of gilded script in slabs of marble…

it’s a place where all the branches of christiandom exist peacefully…

there is a chinese section,

and a jewish section.

many angels, some beheaded.

it was shortly after we discovered the amazing shrine to elvis presley — a grotto covered in succulents and engraved marble plaques that looked like velvet elvis paintings — that we realised we were hungry. we meandered through the historic gravestones…

…to the exit, and found ourselves on lygon street just before three. and then after some discussion, we found ourselves at D.O.C. negotiating pizza.

sadly, the special from the other time — porchetta with mustard fruit — wasn’t on the menu, however there was a most agreeable offering of parma ham with buffalo mozzarella, fresh figs and a pungent undercurrent of gorgonzola. we were similarly smitten by the porcini pizza, which included a melange of mushrooms, all cooked to perfect succulence on a white base. the kid had her own margherita, because some things are just too delicious for her. case in point: unsatisfied even with this plainest pizza on the menu, she removed every basil leaf before it was deemed acceptable. by the end, we were so satiated we couldn’t even manage gelato. still, it was the birthday pizza luncheon that was meant to be.

four months ago, i got an email of just two sentences: “…just been diagnosed to have possibly lung cancer with metastases to the spine. i feel so bad we did not take her back pain seriously, attributing it to the hard physical housework she’s been doing.”

during the week just past, an update: “…sadly not responding to her treatment. yesterday’s scans show that the cancer has spread to her brain, liver and more bones, and fluid has collected around her heart and in her lung. she remains brave and is taking whatever comes.”

at what point does living with cancer tip over into dying from it? i am not convinced it is all just a state of mind.

so yes, i’m afraid i wasn’t so good at being confined. (and that’s only 4 weeks according to chinese tradition. we were chided by some lebanese ladies at the kid’s school for bringing harlan out to the twilight picnic a couple of weeks ago — “we don’t let the babies out until after 40 days!” they said, and, “put a hat on him — he is cold!”). the monday after the saturday birth, i was trawling the aisles of bas foods with my mother, in search of treats (peach nectar, pistachios, and ülker chocolate biscuits). in the couple of weeks that followed, i turned down my mother’s numerous offers of sesame-oil-ginger-chicken — instead, we did the rounds: mr close, lux foundry, arcadia…

surely this is as nourishing (and heaty!) as anything soused in ginger wine? behold the baked eggs at arcadia, on gertrude, which come with a 25-minute-wait warning. i picked the option with the lentils, and there must’ve been almost two cups in there, buried under the eggs, all salty and herby and crusty-topped. (the surface was all salty and stinky, from a layer of melty taleggio.) it tasted so deliciously of hearty good health that the sheer volume of lentils never got boring (the intermittent pieces of juicy celery helped).

this dish proved easy to eat with one hand, as the other hand occupied itself with the intricacies of breastfeeding. i ate every last pulse, and every last herby leaf from the sprig, and then rolled up the street to bask in the friday sunshine.

“this is the last thing i will cook for you,” said my mother, before bustling into the kitchen. it was lunchtime, her final day in melbourne after five weeks of maternal duty. she had come to cook confinement food, but the first half of her time here, there was no kitchen, and the second half saw her in delicate negotiation with the boy to see who would flex whose culinary muscle on any given night. in the end, i think she only managed sesame oil chicken with ginger, stewed pork, bak kut teh, and a couple rounds of turmeric salmon. the bottle of ginger wine she’d brought with her was only half gone, the additional two bottles i received as a gift, completely untouched. her mission to brew up vast quantities of tong sam and longan tea was aborted — the vile memories of this peculiar beverage from seven years ago still lingered in the back of my throat. while still in singapore she had discussed this tea, enthusiastically. “no,” i said. so she arrived with a kilo of the herb (and four bags of dried longans). “no,” i said. so she asked again and again over the next fortnight. “no,” i said, “but are you asking until i say yes?”

“no,” she said, “but i couldn’t remember what we had decided, and i wanted to make sure.” i wonder if the wonderherb tong sam is as beneficial to short term memory as it is to milk production.

this past saturday she had planned to celebrate harlan’s month on earth with a party (when i’d told her i didn’t really have anyone to invite, she volunteered a few of her family friends and distant cousins). there would be ang ku kueh, and red eggs, and curry chicken with nasi kunyit and roti jala.

in the end, there were just red eggs, and no guests. pinkish eggs, really, when the dye didn’t quite take. the recipe called for them to be boiled for 35 to 40 minutes and then immersed in a dye bath. somehow they ended up being cooked for a good hour or so — impressively rubbery things, with thick grey circles surrounding the yolk, and blotchy patches of pink in the whites where the dye had come through the cracks, and a mildly sulfurous aroma. i’d be eating rose-tinted egg salad wraps and cold, sliced boiled eggs with matching beetroot on toast all week.

saturday evening, party plans scuttled, i took my mother to cumulus inc. for dinner, where she paid. the next morning, after she arrived back in singapore, i received a txt informing me that she’d left the roti jala mould in my kitchen. perhaps i will have curry and roti jala in my future after all.

plus i may have to make this soup again — tasty and calming enough to eat beyond the period of confinement.

marinate minced pork with cornflour, sesame oil and salt. fry julienned ginger in sesame oil, then add chopped garlic and salt. add the pork and fry until not quite browned. add water and bring to the boil. simmer. add meesua. serve with baby cos leaves (or baby spinach, in this case), and… a spoonful of ginger wine.

happy full moon, sweet baby!

now here’s a bunch of vegetables that puts the aforementioned hospital veggies to shame.

the other tuesday saw me strapping on the baby and heading into the city for a wander. after stopping in at outré for a squizz at the tattoo art exhibition — which of the angelique houtkamp prints do i want the most? — it was still early enough that lunch at earl canteen seemed like a good idea.

turns out it was a great idea. in an effort to teach my eyes that they aren’t in fact bigger than my stomach, i turned a blind eye to the seductive salads in the counter display and only ordered the trout nicoise sandwich for luncheon, all fishy, oily goodness. it came as a sturdy plank of red-onion-flecked focaccia, filled with fat fillets of freshly seared fish, nestled warm in a ruffle of butter lettuce and mayonnaise. there were green beans and slices of tomato, though not nearly enough of them. perhaps it was just as well — any more and i would’ve had trouble eating it with one hand, as one must do, with a baby in the other. thanks, earl of sandwich!

when we left just before the lunch crowd, i must’ve still had a hankering for beans because the big green salad came with. later in the afternoon, sitting on the couch at home feeding the baby, i could not have been more pleased with the great pile of perfectly blanched green beans and asparagus spears, and strips of grilled zucchini, atop a bed of mixed leaves and herbs. the little tub of light, lemony dressing provided just enough of a glisten. i can’t say who enjoyed afternoon tea more that day, but i suspect it was probably me.

a few hours after harlan was born, while we slumped dazed and confused in our palatial birthing suite, an attendant brought a tray to the bedside — breakfast!

i lifted the lid on the plastic bowl and was rather pleased to discover a heap of rice bubbles. there was also a tub of peaches, and a tub of milk, a grainy roll, a pat of butter and a foil pack of strawberry jam. all in all a low-fibre, high-sugar meal befitting a world class healthcare provider, yes. i pretty much inhaled breakfast — it was all gone in a little over five minutes.

when lunchtime came round, i was excited to read “HONEY CHICKEN” on the sheet tucked beneath my tray. i had visions of golden, glistening, batter-coated chicken lumps. i lifted the lid to find this:

this sinewy looking mass of muscle, deathly pale against its bed of rice. despite its woefully unappetising appearance, the meat was actually moist and tender, and had the faintest taste of honey on its surface. alas, i cannot say the same for the vegetables. they just tasted of good health, in the blandest possible way.

it was around this time that i txted the boy — who had by this stage extricated himself from the miniature couch where he’d been reclining and gotten himself back home to install the recently procured baby capsule in the back of his truck — and begged him to bring me fruit and the packet of ülker chocolate biscuits lurking in the pantry.

that evening, the meal slip read “SWISS STEAK”, which promised a slab of tender meat covered in a rich mushroomy gravy, and fat slices of mushrooms. instead, it turned out to be a slab of meat, yes, held together with a fat vein of gristle, and doused in a bewildering sweet and sour sauce. i ate around the gristle and sauce, and then, having learnt my lesson from lunch, i turned the pat of butter for the dinner roll out onto the rice and vegetables, peppered and salted the whole thing, and rendered it palatable.

dessert was a tub of cold set custard — the highlight of the meal, really — and a red delicious apple, which is my very least favourite kind of apple on account of its complete, ironic undeliciousness.

i was pondering the random selection of meals that i’d been subjected to as i gazed out at my city sunset view, when an attendant came by and placed a sheet of paper on my bedside table. a menu! for the next day’s meals! it all became clear: up until now, someone else (a computer?) had been making the choices for me — here was my chance to see if these hospital meals could be more enjoyable if i got to pick what actually showed up.

so for lunch the next day, i chose irish stew, and for dinner, the hungarian goulash with mashed potatoes, followed up by that compelling custard on both counts. breakfast had already been decided for me, and i was greatly saddened to discover a pair of weetbix in my bowl the next morning, which is my very least favourite kind of cereal on account of its complete undeliciousness.

alas, i was cleared for discharge the day after that, so i will never know if the falafels in tomato sauce were any good. the irish stew was, and the goulash too, which was delivered while kid #1 was visiting, and met with her approval.

my last breakfast, on monday morning, i was back on the rice bubbles. they really do snap, crackle and pop!

and then we were off, me and harlan, back into the big wide world.

mm. i don’t much like it, the speedy passing of months. five months ago, a kindly reader told me i might like hardware societe — it really seems like it was just weeks ago (which i suppose it was, technically, just a lot of ‘em), but it wasn’t until last week that i made it there.

singapore girl was in town for a short spell, and running behind about five, ten minutes in the rain when i showed up. a friendly waitress with fetching sailor tattoos granted me the last marble-topped table, and then brought water and took an order for a hot chocolate. the amazing and forgiving thing about gestational diabetes is the unexpected mercies that it grants — hot chocolates have proven to have no ill effect on blood sugar levels. even this one:

it came, a generous jug of hot, frothed, chocolate-flecked milk and a cup, empty but for the knob of softened chocolate dribbled with cream. perched on a spoon was a tiny chewy doughnut. all up, i poured two cups of hot chocolate from the jug, and it wasn’t until late in the game that i discovered there was a sizeable mass of chocolate hidden in the bottom of that as well. it made for a particularly rich chocolatey beverage by the end (i’m not complaining).

midway through the first and second helping of hot chocolate, singapore girl arrived, twenty minutes late after all, and ten minutes away from the point when the lunch menu clocks in. i’d had ample time to study the breakfast menu, and had already decided… but it wouldn’t have been so terrible to start all over. as it was, the waitress urged us to put our breakfast orders through, and before too long, two fat omelettes arrived at the table.

i am wary of cafe omelettes: too often they arrive overcooked and spongy. this one was pretty much perfect — brown in spots, but soft and moist on the inside, with an edge of butter, stuffed with well-cooked asparagus spears, slabs of soft cheese — brie, or brie-like, i can’t recall — and leafy herbs. it was gone much sooner than i would’ve preferred, much like the last five months since the cafe recommendation.

i zoomed past slowpoke back in the depth of wintertime, but i was on my way to lunch further up brunswick street and couldn’t do much more than peep into the window and take note of the long room lined in rough hewn timber. it was brightly lit and airy, and there was a glass case of baked goods midway down. fitzroy-cute, rather than mountain-manly. i made a mental note to return. newly into spring — the first day of school holidays — after a jaunt through the carlton gardens playground, the kid was hungry for eggs. so we strolled up gertrude — coming distracted and somewhat unstuck only by the papier mache skulls at amor y locura — and rounded the corner. “i think we can get eggs here,” i told maeve as we stood on the threshold. “let’s go here,” she said.

we perched ourselves at the counter fronting the window, overlooking an open bowl of sugar, an open cup of pink salt, and a host of bicycles chained up outside. we ordered a pot of chai and watched the trendy kids wander down the road with too-big hair and too-small jeans.

from the tidy chalkboard menu, the kid picked the boiled eggs with toast soldiers, just about as eggy as you can get. they arrived, twins in matching cups, with a platoon of very liberally buttered sourdough fingers. after her tentative attempts, i cracked the top of the first egg sharply, and elicited a horrified gasp from the kid: a massacre! but once she’d picked away enough of the shell with her itchy little fingers, the translucent white came into view, and the googy yolk poured forth, and all was forgiven.

i had a hard time choosing — from the short and sweet menu of simple sandwiches and smashed avocado, everything appealed — but eventually settled on the lentil soup. oh my. the veritable swamp of light and colour puddled at the bottom of a large bowl was not what i was expecting, but gee, it was good. far from a gluggy mass of pureed lentils, this was a rich brothy thing with clearly identifiable pulses. the fresh tomatoes and baby spinach leaves brightened up a long slow chilli burn. the scattering of chilli flakes, of course, added to it. i ate it all, mopped up the dredges with bread. the smear of softened butter was most welcome.

the amazing expanding powers of lentil soup meant it was impossible right then to consider the tiny slivers of caramel slice and other homemade fancies from the cake counter, but that was ok. our feet were itching to get back to the street. it’s a world of fun and toys and vintage kokeshi dolls and shoo-fly buns out there in fitzroy, and it was ours for the taking.

but guess what! i totally made it to sopra too.

i’d been offered a ride to the airport, and i thought, hmm… sopra’s on the way, and suggested that maybe a farewell luncheon would be in order. for research purposes, of course: would it be the same now that the original chef had gone? before i knew it, there were eight of us — cousins, aunt, visiting mother and random blow-in neighbour — waiting for a table to make itself available.

we waited upwards of 40 minutes, ample time to peruse the famed chalkboard menu over and over and weigh up whether to have the salad of wagyu bresaola, or of smoked trout, or of white anchovies, or…

in the end, i picked the soft poached duck egg, with asparagus, spinach, oyster mushrooms and pangrattato. oh, it was luscious. i had not had a duck egg before — are they all like this? velvety rich and creamy? stabbing the egg open resulted in a luxurious spill that coated the winsome vegetables. the fried breadcrumbs were impossibly crunchy, and very moreish.

the whole thing, really: i wanted more. it was all over before i was ready for it to end. but i suppose it meant i had some room for a taste of the rather splendid tiramisu from across the table, and a single spoonful of the kid’s eton mess — i’m sure it used to come with more than three strawberries mixed in, and this with strawberries right now in season! pah. this one was mainly a mound of whipped cream, though admittedly quite a delicious mound of whipped cream nonetheless, punctuated with shards of meringue, and generously drizzled in strawberry sauce.

so there you have it: sopra, still excellent. needs a little more fruit.

so we snuck back to sydney for a few days last week, the kid and i. we made the spur-of-the-moment trip ostensibly to visit family, though in actual fact, there was a large flashing billboard in my head, and writ large upon it was the word “messina”. still, for much of the week we played happily north of the bridge, walking through the hills and vales of cherrybrook, and the malls of the greater northern suburbs.

and then on friday, after a bus ride into the city and a ferry ride across the twinkly harbour and a walk down the memory lane that is oxford street, we met up with one d rodrigo for lunch at honeycomb. i’d only read about this new cafe a few days before, and while you’re in another city, it may register as merely a blip, but when you find yourself suddenly within — well, who knows how many hours, given public transport from the hills district — when you find yourself contemplating luncheon at sopra because it was probably your favourite place in sydney, then it seems the only logical conclusion that you end up at honeycomb, new home of old sopra chef andy bunn.

the waitstaff were all smiles and welcomes when we showed up just past 2.30, and gave us our pick of the empty dining room; the kitchen closes at 3! from the all-day breakfast menu the kid picked waffles with mascarpone, honey, and that rarest of fruits — the banana. d and i went an altogether more grown-up route.

off the main menu, we shared a generous dish of orecchiette with prawns, salty little nubblets tasting of the sea. the pasta was perfectly cooked, the riotous confetti of chilli and herbs as festive on the tongue as it was on the plate.

after a brief discussion about whether a lamb ragu would be too much for 3pm on a sunny day, we also picked the kingfish served with boiled fennel and salsa verde. under its golden crust the simply seasoned fish was meaty, a suitable canvas for a smear of the salty, tangy green sauce (though i expect i would’ve been perfectly happy to eat the salsa straight from the spoon). the cucumber ribbons and sprigs of watercress made the whole package a gift of springtime.

ambitiously, we split a salad off the specials list: oyster mushrooms with ricotta and potatoes in a tumble of leaves. it didn’t offer too much of a photo opportunity, but the salty slippery mushrooms, fried a little bit crisp around the edges, and the little daubs of creamy cheese, and the tantalising shards of witlof, more than made up for it in the mouth.

and then we were done! happy and satiated.

and we wondered, could we still do dessert? we waddled up the hill for a bit, and found our way to the cool, dim oasis that is gelato messina, where the gelato is always piled high, and there are always more flavours than you can safely consume in one sitting, even on the end of a tasting stick.

i did sample the cucumber sorbet, an impossibly smooth and slightly tangy whisper of cool speckled green, but gave in to a single scoop of almond croissant gelato. the subtly fragrant almond milk base was most agreeable, as were the pockets of almond frangipane from the housemade almond croissants. the bits of croissant pastry, however, had become chewy from the moisture, and were not a joy to eat. alas.

still, it was with a golden glow in my heart (and belly) as we wandered off into the sunset. somehow it has come to be that messina is the thing i pine for most when i think of sydney. i’d like to think it’s the really good thing that represents an amalgamation of harbour ferry rides, and good friends, and favourite aunts… not just the really good thing that might send your blood sugar just beyond desirable limits for the afternoon.

so i made it back to mr close for the halloumi sandwich last week. the original plan of course, had been to brown bag it and pair it with a chai frappucino from the starbucks across the way. but it was not quite lunchtime and the cafe area only held a handful of suits in business meetings, so i showed myself to a table in the corner, and breathed the springtime scent of the jonquils before me. in no time at all, a smartly aproned waitress brought water and a menu. lovely.

now. see the charming little clutter of flowers, peppermill and stripy postcards — it no doubt makes for a welcoming tableau at the table, but once the food got to the table, i found the flowers just too much on the nose. why would you not want to smell your freshly toasted sandwich instead?

this one, which came as a piadina served on a board, had a nice crunch which gave way to a great salty mouthful of cheese, capsicum, eggplant and rocket. the generousity with the halloumi may be applauded, yes, but it also reinforced my reservations about halloumi sandwiches in general: the saltiness just overpowers everything else in its vicinity, and in this case the supporting cast was well worthy of their place in the spotlight. fortunately my tastebuds were saved from complete erosion by…

it’s time for your close-up, amazing side salad. it costs $2 more to have your sandwich on the premises, and it does say on the menu that eat-in sandos come with a small side salad. i was expecting nothing more than a little pile of dressed leaves, so this perfect, elegantly disheveled portion of rocket with slices of in-season corella pear, walnuts — toasted, even — and musty little lumps of gorgonzola ended up being the highlight of my lunch. and i don’t even really like blue cheese.

my artfully poured hot chocolate was pleasing too. it had arrived first up, a promising shade of rich brown, and proved itself to be intensely chocolatey without any glugginess or cloy. a much nicer beverage overall, than my bottle of gluco-scan earlier that morning.

yes, the old glucose tolerance test. it would appear that one of the side effects of pregnancy, at least this time round, is gestational diabetes. i suppose i had a lot running against me: sitting way the heck over this side of 30, being chinese and tubby, having a family history (on both sides!) of type 2 diabetes… and well, fine, i expect the preceding years of pancreas-punishing cake consumption can’t have helped.

i’d like to think the salty cheese sandwich might have done some good towards lowering my blood glucose that day.