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Category Archives: lunch

nice pear. today, an adventure: the sydney sandwich social whereby sandwiches are made and halved and swapped and eaten.

at ten-thirty, as, all casual-like, i sliced bread, cheese and pear, what the second processor in my head was thinking was, well, i suppose i could make a sandwich, and if all goes well, i’ll be ready to leave the house at eleven-thirty, with a sandwich and a baby. and then it happened! hence, my new plan will be to not make plans, and to let the second processor take care of things.

because then we were on the bus into the city, the magic bus that has a space for a pram, and takes you all the way to the botanical gardens (or the art gallery, if you are that way inclined). and we were walking around under the hot hot sun, looking for a small group of people with large sandwiches. and we were finding them at last, and sitting down in the shade of a tree, and chasing birds and eating twigs and leaves of the ground.

this is the sandwich i made:

pear, pesto and parmesan on walnut bread. last night, when i described the idea to my sister, she paused and thought about it, then said, “unexpected. and tasty.” and then, “does it have to be an alliterative sandwich?” why, no. but they came together all sweet, salty and faintly green.

in the end there were more sandwiches than people, and more cookies and muffins too, and quite a bit of fun for a baby who hadn’t slept in about five hours.

and now i am home, with a baby in bed, and a cup of tea and a delicious apple-streusel muffin, and the saturday review section of movies i will not get to see, not for a very long time, not until they come out on DVD, maybe.

thanks to saffron for the picture of my sandwich, and augustus gloop for the muffins, and to both for bringing all the sandwiches together.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 24 September 2005 at 4:54 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, lunch

note, if you will, that the level of purple beet brine in the jar is “half”. o treacherous beet brine! how you conceal the fact that the number of pieces of pickled beets within your murky depths is “two”. by the time this disagreeable fact was discovered, the turkish bread had been toasted, the avocado sliced and arranged, and the mind set on a crowning glory of pickled beets.

alas. the crowning glory ended up being mainly bits of onion dredged from the beet brine, and a slice of salami. of course, it was yummy nonetheless, so i’m not really complaining. alls i’m saying is sometimes you just really want beets…

tchk.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 May 2005 at 9:11 pm

permalink | filed under grumble, lunch

on a day when there happens to be a block of feta in the fridge, as well as eggs and milk, it may pop into your head that a feta omelette needs to be had. and if you were also reading a particular foodblog that morning, it might spur you on to ensure that such an omelette would be had for lunch.

and so such and such were placed in a pan, and topped with a couple handfuls of incidental rocket (sadly, supermarket rocket, which seemed to have no taste of rocket, or anything), and then folded over and plopped onto some soy-linseed sourdough. and a forgotten jar of pickled beetroot at the bottom-back of the fridge was happy to oblige.

but why so lucky as to have feta in the fridge? it’s just that when my mother was here the other month, one of the things she left me was two slimy mackerel in the freezer. bet that mackerel thought that calling itself “slimy” would be some sort of deterrent, a survival tactic. HAHA fishy, the joke’s on you! we will eat you nonetheless, for you are not only not slimy, but quite meaty and tasty, with that feeling between my molars, of oily fish.

“just brush them with olive oil and season with salt and pepper,” said my mother before she boarded that plane home, and so i did. while the boy cooked them up on the balcony barbeque, i roasted some thick slices of desiree potato and threw together a greekish-nicoiseish salad of cucumber, green beans, the afore-mentioned rocket, some oven-roasted grape tomatoes and smooth creamy feta. mmm…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 May 2005 at 8:10 am

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen, lunch

i have just been listening to “daisies of the galaxy” by eels, the first time in over a year. it is lovely and amazing, and i really should listen to my CDs more instead of having, like, dr phil on in the background during the day.

yesterday, i finally went back to yoga class. it has taken almost this long to get the kid to the stage where she might not have to eat for the duration of a yoga class and the walk to and fro.

there was a sense of trepidation: does nigh on seven months of no yoga render me all unpliable? could i muddle through a general class, or would i have to go back to beginners all over again?

as it turned out, joy, i could keep up with the generals, and all those months of pregnancy yoga meant that i could still squat like a chinaman during squatting pose. by the end of the class i was feeling rather good — muscles all warm and wobbly, like.

the best part about yoga is that it is just down the street from cafe banchetto, on devonshire, where some days you can get a takeaway sandwich with a large grilled mushroom in it.

there were other roasted vegetables thrown in as well, some salad greens and ricotta — see how the giant mushroom has left a fossilised imprint of itself in the creamy white. oh how it glistens!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 May 2005 at 1:57 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, lunch, soundtrack

what is better — and more efficient — than ice cream after lunch? i think you will agree that the answer is, “ice cream for lunch”.

when i met ana at passionflower at lunchtime, as planned, it transpired that she, feeling peckish a little earlier, had already eaten a crepe uptown. huh. it only briefly crossed my mind that i should maybe order something savoury and nutritious before having ice cream for dessert, but then i came to my senses: anything other than ice cream would take up too much ice cream space in my stomach.

the passionflower menu is the kind with pictures in it, which may or may not make things harder. when the waitress came ’round the third time to take our orders, i asked for the black and white seduction, but by the time anna had made her choice, i had already changed my mind. an eastern banana split, please!

see? it is a scoop of maccha ice cream, a scoop of taro ice cream, a scoop of sticky rice ice cream, a banana, lychee-orange compote and a waffle bowl. so that’s what a $12.50 dish of ice cream looks like.

passionflower went through a stage where it was like something had gone wrong in their freezer and made the ice cream less creamy and more icy, but now everything is well and good. they also have a flavour which wasn’t there the last time i visited — a while ago — lychee and rose petal. it is pink and creamy with bits of actual lychee mixed through. you can see a scoop of it there, across the table, in front of ana. it was yummy, and made me smile.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 May 2005 at 12:40 pm

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, lunch

ohmigod i am just famished today. it was only four? ish? hours ago that we returned from grocery shoping, and i was dizzy with hunger, and still managed to stumble about the kitchen cracking open eggs and cans of salmon and straw mushrooms. it was the bean sprouts that done it. in the car i had said out loud, “maybe i could make an omelette.”

“like a banh xeo?” asked the boy.

“um, no. i was thinking, like, a goat cheese omelette.”

“a banh xeo with pork and prawns?” he was relentless.

we had neither pork nor prawns, but in the pantry there was a tin of salmon, and in the back seat there was a bag of bean sprouts and a bag of vietnamese rice crackers covered in pork floss, sesame seeds and dried prawns.

and so there it was in the pan: two beaten eggs topped with salmon, straw mushrooms, bean sprouts, crushed rice crackers, a few squirts of sesame oil, fish sauce and chili sauce. em. i’m calling it banh xeo anyway.

but now i am dizzy with hunger again! any tales of roadside cakestops will just have to wait.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 April 2005 at 6:24 pm

permalink | filed under kitchen, lunch

yesterday it was a rather overwhelming 31 degrees, sunny and humid. so there were no steamy bowls of hot soupy noodles at the end of the walk to chinatown as the sun began its descent. instead it was a large plate of vietnamese roast pork and barbeque pork and porky-glass-noodley garnish on rice — three kinds of pork! and tangy pickled carrot and um, radish? and sweet-salty fish saucy dip! slices of cucumber and tomato! how did they fit it all on the plate? how did this overladen plate fit onto the tray with the obligatory bowl of msg and spring onion soup, and a large plastic cup of dried longan drink? how did i eat it all?

i don’t know.

also, i don’t know how today it is 19 degrees and cloudy and drizzly, but it is the perfect weather for getting out of the chiller all those prawn heads left over from yesterday’s farewell-mother lunch, putting them in a pot with some garlic, and simmering away until a rather concentrated prawn stock results. this i will save in the freezer for a(nother) rainy day.

what with the oil burner i lit to temper the prawniness in the air, the house is now filled with a heady aroma of prawns and lavender. it really is not a bad thing.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 April 2005 at 11:12 am

permalink | filed under around town, lunch

at lunchtime, armed with visiting olds, the kid and i trundled across the M5, the park and another horrible main road to the growers’ market at fox studios, only to find, having thought about hot bacon and sauerkraut all morning, that — oh tragedy! the pierogi man no longer holds a stall there. hmph.

luckily, the disappointment was quickly tempered by an assortment of free samples from the chevre man, a tasting plum from the plum man, some nibblets of nougat from the nougat lady, and a tiny sliver of ice cream sandwich from the ice cream sandwich guy.

there was no free anything at the pie shop, however having bought a duck pie for me and a lamb pie for my father, and then having asked the pie lady which was which, she replied, “the duck pie has a little duck on it.” and indeed it did:

it was very salty, and contained bits of peas, carrot and corn too uniform in size to be anything other than a frozen variety. or maybe they are just perfectionists back at the pie-ranch. indeed, the pastry crust was perfect. whatever. what i really want to tell you about is the ice cream sandwich guy, but i am really quite sleepy and too full of turkish banquet dinner to go any further, and will have to revisit this pressing issue sometime in the morning.

so to end my lunch post, i shall direct you to this dollop of investigative journalism on school lunches around the world (via da*xiang)

posted by ragingyoghurt on 9 March 2005 at 10:10 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch, snacks

you may have surmised from my last post that i really do like green food. the last couple of days, there has been rigatoni with broccolini and peas, with parsley and feta pesto. mmm… green… and see, it sounds fancy, but involved just one pot in which the pasta was boiled, and then the other greens blanched — the peas were even the frozen kind. the pesto was the store-bought kind, and is amazing just eaten in spoonful out of the container, which is what i may well do with the remainder. so. after the pot contents were drained, they went back on low heat and the pesto mixed through and viola! a very green meal in no time at all, with hardly any washing up after, hurrah!

there has also been a home-delivered thai green curry from a place that says it will be about half an hour, but ten minutes later it arrives at your door. there was so much gravy that the next night i poached two bits of salmon in it, with a handful of green beans thrown in.

and then there was this ugly thing:

rye toast, with avocado, fried halloumi and roasted zucchini.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 26 January 2005 at 8:32 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, lunch

happy new year breakfast.

xmas came early, on the twenty-second, with the arrival of nellie, who in a fit of human endurance, rode the terrible air canada route between new york and sydney via vancouver and honolulu. as if that weren’t enough, she arrived bearing gifts: the new satrapi (which in its original french is already the old satrapi), a just-read-on-the-plane sedaris, the bumper hardcover compendium of american elf (which is so bumper that its 500 pages have wrenched themselves from the binding), and an assortment of condiments including beets and cherry jam (according to the flowery italian label, 170% fruit content).

with the baby and the copious end-of-year meat consumption worked into the routine, everything fell into place. post-christmas we took it as far as the rock, on a road trip into those parts of the brown country where it’s normal for a day to be 36°. squatting in the boy’s grandmother’s retirement flat, we kickstarted each morning with a breakfast made up of any combination of bacon and sausage and egg and beans and white toast, or all at once. and then ended each day at the old family home with the kitchen table a smorgasbord of barnyard meats and an assortment of coleslaws.

along the way was young, cherry capital of australia, where the best meal was not the cherry pie — pastry all sodden and doughy — in the tearoom of a reknowned jam factory, but the $7.95 roast lamb special at the young services club, with help-yourself, all-you-can-eat hot vegetable and salad bar; the lamb was moist, tender and gravied, the hot vegetables included corn on the cob, and one of the salads was whole pickled beetroot. nor did the town yield the best cherries of the trip; these came from a fruitshop in a mall in wagga wagga, and for a whole cent cheaper per kilo.

incidentally, the cheesymite scrolls at the wagga baker’s delight are at least twice the size of the ones from the surry hills bakers delight, and the custard scrolls much more custardy. which makes one think that wagga is where it all happens. whoulda thunk?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 January 2005 at 6:22 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, dinner, lunch, nellie, snacks, trip

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