ragingyoghurt » lunch

Category Archives: lunch

my bank account is the lowest it’s ever been (she says, remembering back to a week ago when she threw caution to the wind and money at the dinosaur designs), but today, tossing up between bagels at bagel house and a nice cafe sitdown, we chose about life. actually, the kid did. it’s my fault, i suppose, but she has really developed a taste for “scrambled eggs at a cafe”.

“you know, i can make you scrambled eggs at home,” i’ll say.

“but i want scrambled eggs at a cafe.”

sometimes i play along.

so we hop-skip-jumped over the potholes of the backstreets, and sat ourselves down at a big wooden table. these days the kids’ scrambled eggs at about life come with a fat slice of lean bacon.

on the grownup menu there is cinnamon chocolate french toast, but i’d been burned by their regular french toast before — sure, it looks impressive, cut some two inches thick, but the egg only penetrates not quite enough to render palatable a great wodge of bready bread. this problem might have been fixed by a copious dousing of maple syrup, but there was only a small puddle of the stuff. which only confirms my suspicions that about life is not the place to get a delicious sweet thing.

instead, today, i got the about life vegan breakfast — scrambled tofu with red onion, spinach and roasted pumpkin relish, served on soy and linseed toast. it sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? in my head i saw a great mound of sauteed spinach, maybe another pile of pumpkin, and good wedges of grilled onions. instead, i got this:

it was all kind of scrambled together, and placed rather politely on a solitary slice of plain — and unbuttered, damn vegan breakfast — sourdough. which, you know, is fine. fine. because why should i be disappointed when the thing on my plate doesn’t match the thing in my head?

because it was $15.50, is why.

still, it was almost tasty, even. a good sprinkle of black pepper, and salt (and i never add salt) fixed that. as did a scraping of butter from the kid’s order, and a blistered and fatty bit off her bacon that she refused to eat.

i further sullied the vegan experience with a pot of chocolate chai, a wonderful, creamy mix of chocolate and spices brewed in frothy milk. it was particularly gingery — tingly on the tongue — and it looked like there was even real chocolate in there, and when i got to the bottom of the pot i encountered a veritable swamp of tangle leaves. so ok, the about life drinks, at least, are delicious sweet things.

but the virtue — vegan or otherwise — is overrated, and anyway, possibly too expensive to indulge in with any regularity.

– – –

last week, i spent $15.50 eight blocks down darling street, at circle cafe. there, it buys you the salad of the day. but what a salad! poached egg and bacon salad!

a perfectly cooked egg — glorious and runny inside — perched atop an enormous tumble of well-dressed leaves, and many slices of crunchysaltymoist bacon, and shards of parmesan. the accompanying bread basket held half a baguette and two pats of butter.

you see where i am going with this? if you have $15.50 earmarked for lunch, you should go there too.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 September 2008 at 10:26 pm

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

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

deborah’s been running hither and yon getting her wedding together, but when she returned from over the mountains the other week, she brought me back a handsome bottle of vinaigrette from a french patisserie in bathurst.

it came in handy on friday — a most elegant dressing for a tumble of mixed leaves and orange grape tomatoes, topped with three fat slices of salty fried haloumi. i don’t know why i don’t make more of an effort at lunchtime, but this was a pretty convincing argument in its favour. i didn’t really need it, but the accompanying slab of morpeth olive sourdough, buttered, was a good chaser.

the bread came into its own for breakfast the next morning. toasted, it develops a lovely crunch on the outside, and becomes far more receptive to a slathering of salty butter. and here’s the clincher: chestnut honey. that pungent, woodsy aroma of the sweet honey gives way to the intense salty bursts of the embedded kalamata olives.

the first slice was so good, i made another, and then i couldn’t wait for the day to be over and done with, so i could have it for breakfast again today.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 June 2008 at 4:13 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, kitchen, lunch

another saturday, another $10 teacup. this one at least i can drink tea out of.

friday, after a couple of weeks of half-hearted to-and-froing, deborah and i met upstairs at fratelli fresh. please understand, there was no reticence about meeting for eating. it’s just, we couldn’t decide if we’d rather eat at danks street depot or sopra… so you see, we did not really mind which way the day went.

the plan was to read the menu board at sopra, and if nothing took our fancy (as if!) we would head across the road. as it turned out, the 1 o’clock lunch crush was so impenetrable that our decision was made for us before we were even within reading range.

i used to go to danks street depot fairly regularly, usually when an invoice got paid. it was just up the street from where i used to live, and it was a great space in which to eat… well, anything really. back then it was just starting up, and you could see into the kitchen from the big central table. back then the kitchen wasn’t even in a different room; the only thing separating it from the diners was a bench on which produce sat and chopping happened. once i was there, and the chef himself came up and cleared our table. then at some point, the service started to get a little surlier, and sopra opened up across the road, and i moved away… and i reckon it’s been about four years since i was last in there.

and gosh — gawsh — is it fancy now: swirly room dividers, precision seating, shiny bar extension. no more that warm, fuzzy, sunlit feeling of sitting in uncle jared’s kitchen. it was a high-powered, well-dressed lunch crowd, and very, very noisy.

so. the decision had been made for us about where to eat, but we still faced the quandary of what to eat. the wild rabbit and pork terrine was a definite, but we spent many minutes trying to figure out its complementary companion. i was leaning quite severely towards the slow-cooked broccoli and eggs, and eventually i fell over at its feet.

because it was great! who would think of garnishing a serve of golden, buttery scrambled eggs on toast… with broccoli? it had been roasted, i think, with chili, garlic and white wine, an enormous stalk of it in a most appealing shade of olive green. and on top of that, chunks of salty and creamy fetta. i would eat this at least once a week.

it would be harder to eat the rabbit and pork terrine that often; such a solid, meaty slab. deceptively so, for it is mild pink striations with pale green pistachios and seedy figs peeping through the layers. still, the flavour was at once clean and rich, and just gamey enough. it came with a tidy stack of figgy toast triangles, a tangle of perfectly dressed rocket, and some paper-thin slices of sweet pear, none of which helped to overcome that porky feeling at the end of the meal.

you will not be shocked to know that at this point, we got up, paid our bill, and high-tailed it back across the street to sopra. almost 2.30, there were just enough empty tables that we did not feel bad about ordering just dessert. the waitresses, though surprised, were most supportive.

and truly, i had just been thinking banoffee pie, but suddenly, there we were, with that and the biggest fat bastard of a tiramisu to ever belly flop onto a plate. it really was the most obscene looking thing, and we fell upon it with gusto. gusto which soon turned into confusion, because — what were those raisins and bits of orange peel doing in there? does sopra really make their tiramisu with panettone? the cakey bits certainly had that bizarre stringy texture of panettone soaked in an alcohol bath.

(the creamy bits, on the other hand, were sheer perfection.)

the banoffee pie was pretty good, although there could have been a few extra bananas beneath the gorgeous blanket of freshly piped cream — you’d think bananas were still $13 a kilo. tchk. but aside from all that, and aside from the twinings tea bag that passes for an order of tea, sopra is still possibly my favourite place to eat.

(by which i mean, i get out here only two or three times a year, but i love it when i do.)

we sat for a while, fighting the good fight, woefully distracted by the men at the next table and their antipasto platter, and tray of cured meats, and, ahem, seafood basket. but eventually the cakes won. well, the tiramisu did anyway.

the kind and patient waitress commiserated, and pointed the way to the cash register.

it was just gone four o’clock.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 May 2008 at 9:28 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, lunch

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

speaking of pizza…

here’s one i picked off the zumbo countertop a couple of weeks ago: a double-carb masterpiece of thin, puffy flatbread with an artful arrangement of sliced waxy potato. see the dainty sprigs of rosemary, and the whimsical daubs of mild and musky goat cheese?

it was even better after i emptied the rest of a jar of pesto-marinated fetta over the top of it.

+ + +

are you like me? do you get grumpier and grumpier the hungrier you become? especially if it’s someone else preventing a meal from happening? grrr. i don’t have to be hungry, is the thing, and i rarely am… except for right now, i feel a little hollow beneath my belt, but my jeans and i, we’ve only recently reached a truce, and i don’t want to antagonise the situation.

the situation in the rest of the world is more dire. over at avaaz.org there’s a petition calling on G8, UN and EU leaders to take immediate action to address the world food crisis by mobilizing emergency funding to prevent starvation, removing perverse incentives to turn food into biofuels and managing financial speculation, and to tackle the underlying causes by ending harmful trade policies and investing massively in sustainable agricultural productivity in developing nations.

gaaarn. sign it. they are just over three quarters of the way to 100,000 names.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 April 2008 at 3:41 pm

permalink | filed under lunch

a couple of days before i went away, i popped into the blood bank to donate 470mls of my finest, stickiest, type B+.

[ B positive! hah! ironic really, when you think about it ]

but so, after the bleeding, and the complimentary made-to-order strawberry milkshake, and the healthy snack pack from which i wolfed down two biscuits that must surely have contained a good dose of transfatty margarine they were so yellow… i wandered northward about two blocks, and finally made it to central baking depot.

i kept forgetting it was there, this bigger, fancier outpost of those bourke street bakers, in a part of the city i just never get to. but there it was, all good, honest, industrial chic, with little tables hewn out of big trees, and even littler faux milk crates fashioned out of… i dunno, galvanised steel fencing? in any case, it’s about eight more places where you can sit — and quite a bit more breathing room — than at the other two bourke street bakeries.

with more room comes more cake! there were trays of cake behind glass — slabs of flourless chocolate cake, and something hummingbirdy, and what i remember to be a caramelised banana cake sandwiched with a fat layer of cream, for which i must return, oh yes. in the window there were danishes and twists. on the counter there were bowls of chocolate meringues.

so i went the pizza route. this one, a pleasing crunchy base topped with roasted capsicum, pancetta and ricotta, with pesto, was that delicious amalgam of slurpy and squishy and salty. up front they were thin slabs arranged just so on a tray, but they arrived at the table sliced up and sandwiched. thoughtful, no?

i imagine it must get busy at lunchtime, but around 11, it was just me and the couple at the next table, the girl making the most orgiastic noises over her sausage roll. so i left them to it…

…and stumbled into the babycakes boutique right across the road, where the cupcakes are bite-sized and the variety boggling.

but that’s a story for another time.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 April 2008 at 3:32 pm

permalink | filed under around town, 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

the days streak by like lightning.

our baubles arrived in the mail today: shiny smooth perspex clouds, with dangly lightning bolts. i couldn’t decide on gold lightning or pink, so i got one of each. you have until 10am tomorrow (wednesday) to get a bunch of plastic jewellery for a song. these ones are most appropriate for the weather right now.

right now, i’m working on a job that doesn’t want to end. last night i breathed a sigh of relief and prepared to write up a hefty invoice, but this afternoon, there it was again, mocking me from my inbox. truly, it makes me want to staple my head.

it didn’t stop us, though, from watching hours of kid’s programming on tv as we played a gambly game of “i wonder if the rain’s stopped now, so we can go out” (no.). it didn’t stop us building a slightly flawed train network (much like our great city’s) across the red carpet.

it didn’t stop us from making toasted cheese/green apple/green peppercorn mustard sandwiches — lightly toast some nice grainy bread, spread each piece with a little butter and top with thinly sliced granny smiths and tasty cheese. stick them under the grill until cheese bubbles. dab mustard over one of the slices, then plop the other on top. sweet-sour, wilted-crunchy all at once, with a double thick layer of oozy, mustardy cheese bang in the middle.

we split a mandarin for dessert, and then we bravely went forth into madeleine battle, round two. it was only 2pm, and the rain was relentless.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 April 2008 at 10:42 pm

permalink | filed under kid, kitchen, lunch, werk

of course, we could not visit haberfield and only get food to go.

we had pizza, and it was fine pizza, but as soon as the seafood-stuffed calamari arrived at the next table, we felt the regret deeply. we had pizza, but not so much pizza that we could not then head across the street straight after for a selection of dolci at pasticceria papa.

i think, even so, that we were being hopelessly optimistic. there were three numbered plaques on the table, and in good time, two of those were replaced by twin plates of mini cannoli. i had my eye on larger things. my order was for a cup of gelato (two, if you count the kid’s mango ice), and a fat chocolate eclair.

there are those in our circle — a solitary frenchman, actually — who believe steadfastly that a chocolate eclair must be filled with chocolate creme. a strip of choux pastry with a slick of chocolate icing on top, filled with fresh whipped cream? a travesty! i should be very amused to see his reaction to an eclair of mock cream. i, for one, would not turn it down.

but. so. papa’s chocolate eclair is filled with both! i cut through the beastie to find a layer of dark chocolate custard beneath a layer of cream. bliss.

the gelato was equally sublime. firmly packed into every last facet of the cup, it made a pretty picture in red, white and green. viva italia! the amarena was a vein of red sour cherry running through light, milky gelato. the pistachio was almost savoury.

there were still biscuits left on the table when we reached the outer limits of our stomachs, but i’m sure you’ve figured out that in the end, i did get a couple of mini cannoli to go.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 March 2008 at 11:41 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, lunch, nellie

Category Archives: lunch

Click

Search

Categories

Archives