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it’s come to this. yes folks, i am stock-piling pop tarts.

last month, i was alerted to the woeful news that frosted pop tarts are no longer allowed into australia. pop tarts haven’t been widely available for a while, but you could always count on specialist retailers or david jones food hall for small-scale imports. no more. the gelatin used in the frosting is believed by the guys in the quarantine department to be an agent for mad cow disease, so there.

i’d had usafoods.com.au bookmarked for a while now, though i hadn’t ever placed an order. now seemed like a good time to try them out. their supply of frosted pop tarts was already running low, so in a fit of mild panic, i got a box of eight frosted blueberry pop tarts, and a box of 12 frosted s’mores pop tarts. in their newsletter (where the news of impending frosted pop tart drought was broke), usafoods had helpfully suggested that a cheaper and fresher tasting substitute was toast ‘em pop ups, so i got a box of those as well.

research, you understand.

so this carton showed up in the mail room a few days ago, and the kid and i immediately leapt into action and hustled an after-school snack. here before us we have a blueberry pop tart and a strawberry pop-up. pretty much identical, in their stay-fresh foil wrappers, like hapless adventurers wrapped up in emergency blankets, no? little snacky cakes, this is where your adventure ends!

and were they the same? well, the kid kept referring to her strawberry toaster pastry as “pop tart”, so i’ll say: yes. even i couldn’t really tell the difference. side by side, the toast ‘em does look more “picture perfect”, with its smooth biscuit and non-bleedy sprinkles, but essentially both are crunchy pastry envelopes filled with sticky, almost-fruit jam, adorned with a shell of hard icing. mmm… i wouldn’t normally have picked strawberry flavour, but it came in the bumper toast ‘ems assortment box, alongside frosted apple and frosted brown sugar cinnamon.

it’s a damn shame one of the selection wasn’t “frosted cherry”, which is my favourite. it kills me — so unfair — that this development (regression?) occurs just as pop tarts world opens its doors in NYC. and what can you buy at pop tarts world? frosted cherry pop tart flavoured lip balm!

how’s that for a first world problem?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 September 2010 at 12:59 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, cake, shoping, snacks

i remember seeing coverage of skye gyngell’s pop-up cafe at the good food affare in sydney the other year. i remember being perplexed by the hay-strewn floor, and confounded by the collection of twee tchotkes on display. having now experienced petersham nurseries, it’s finally all become clear.

the running joke between my sister and her friend about the curation of old stuff piled just so around the nursery, is that someone goes around with a label gun, and randomly sticks price tags on everything. that tarnished mirror? £14,000. that rusty old hoe? £600.

but it was an intriguing wander through the various tents and sheds, admiring dusty antiques and the new things that just looked old. i especially liked the baskets (and baskets) of handy utilitarian brushes. a different one for every task imaginable.

the pastiche of skye’s cafe at the good food affare just pales in comparison. i believe all the stuff on display — the garden furniture with the perfect patina; the shabby chic chandeliers; the bottle green etched drinking glasses — could be purchased from the homewares giant who put on the show. it irritates me just thinking about it.

anyway. bear with me. it’s just some background colour to the preceding post. and besides, who doesn’t like tulips?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 May 2010 at 12:32 pm

permalink | filed under grumble, shoping, trip

another morning, breakfast for some of us was a remarkably life-like, custard-filled totoro bun. not for me: the day before, i had chanced upon the new digs of the japan centre on regent street. i stumbled into this warren of wonders, and came away with the bready gift for my sister.

it is more frenetic in the store than out on the street. past the sidewalk tables with the unsettling spongey seating, just after the entrance, there is hot steamy action with freshly made savoury snacks. then there are the refrigerated shelves piled with ready-made meals. there are a few rows of tables where people can (and do! madness!) sit and eat this food amidst the crush. there is, somewhat inconveniently placed, a bank of cash registers, before the grocery section kicks in — all the staples and then some, as well as a fridge of treats like cottage industry black sesame panna cotta and maccha swiss rolls. there is a wall of practical kitchen utensils, whimsical bento accoutrement and aluminium foil printed in cartoon characters. beyond all that, almost hidden, a sushi train. truly a fine example of a small but hyper(crazy)efficient inner city supermarket.

back home, totoro-pan was met with an appropriate amount of appreciative gasping, and delivered a comforting combination of airy, sweet bread (complete with “polo” topping for the belly) and nice light custard. me, i had the tiniest nibble, and then contented myself with eating quite a bit of the kid’s hello kitty bun. really, i’d bought it for effect, as the child does not like custard, not even chocolate custard. shame: kitty’s filling was a smooth, dark specimen, rich with cocoa. when i was done tearing limb from bready limb, i licked my fingers clean.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 May 2010 at 10:08 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, shoping, trip

sometimes the kid gets all excited about going to the supermarket. because she cannot yet write most cohesive words, she will draw our shopping list. today we are going to chinatown.

clockwise from top: soy milk, noodles, rose syrup cordial, nanami togarashi, dumplings, chili bean paste, sesame oil.

- – -
this was originally posted to the ragingyoghurt facebook page,
while the blog lay dormant.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 February 2009 at 12:12 pm

permalink | filed under drawn, kid, shoping

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

back when i was deathly ill — well, i’ve finally taken the last antibiotic tonight, so really, the bugs could be back, stronger, tomorrow — my good sister called up to check that i was still alive. we had been talking for a little while, when she casually announced that she had just online-ordered me a box of groceries from fratelli fresh, and that these groceries would be with me the next day, and that maybe i shouldn’t buy a bunch of asparagus if i went out shopping before then.

and truly, the next afternoon, an enormous cardboard carton showed up, gleaming white and emblazoned with swirly gold script. it was like christmas come early, though of course, the packer had somehow forgotten to include the bunch of asparagus.

but what a bounty!

1x punnet tomatoes – cherry
1x 400g cannellini beans
1x 300g jam – homemade – conservi del padre – raspberry
1x 250g pasta – guiseppe cocco no. 15 egg papperdelle
1x 500g pasta – guiseppe cocco no. 59 orecchiette
1x 250g cheese – ricotta – paesanella
1x 1kg mandarins – imperial
1x punnet berries – blueberries
1x 150g peas – snow peas
1x 190g antipasti – mushroom fantasy in olive oil
1x 100g deli – mortadella – sliced
1x 500g sausage – lamb, rosemary and garlic
1x each bread – fruit loaf

you really can’t tell from the descriptions on a packing slip, and so you will be amazed that a kilo of mandarins numbers 30, and 100g of mortadella is but four slices (but still a magnificent offering packed on a golden board with a fancy sticker), and the lamb sausages are from a.c. butchery.

i expect nellie had already prepared the meal in her head — a couple of nights later we had orecchiette with sausages and snow peas.

of course, you must remove the meat from the casing, and fry it up with chopped garlic and a tin of tomatoes, and then later in the game you can add some broccoli florets, and roughly sliced snowpea pods, and a handful of frozen peas for good measure.

and while you are eating it, you will smile large, and toast the good name of your good sister, and curse the day and a half — and the halfway ’round the world — that separates you.

happy birthday, nellicent!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 October 2008 at 10:50 pm

permalink | filed under kitchen, nellie, shoping

here i am, riding the bus, the day after i queued two hours — two — to get into the dinosaur designs sample sale. i didn’t even queue five minutes to get my book signed at the david sedaris reading last month. ok, i didn’t even queue period; deborah held a place while i walked to the front of the line to count how many fans there were ahead of us. roughly 80 made it a quick decision to abandon our posts for a splendid dinner of pasta and chocolate cake. priorities eh?

but thursday morning was a lovely day to spend in the sun, reading “the new yorker” style issue while shuffling forward at a snail’s pace outside the dinosaur designs warehouse.

i’ve wanted one of their bangles for years, but i was always too cheap to spend the big retail bucks on these chunks of plastic, no matter how lovely and handcrafted they are. the warehouse — really, the one room within the warehouse into which a select few were permitted entry every fifteen minutes or so, was the size of an average classroom, with trestle tables set up around the perimeter and an island in the center. atop these were plastic crates, and within these were a jumble of bangles and rings and necklaces and dishes and bowls and platters and vases and jugs, and the sound of fifty or eighty or however many women in total had been admitted, the sound of rifling through these hunks of resin, was like entering a mahjong den. and the jumble was somewhat less lovely (but only a teensy bit less lovely).

and i got my bangle! a pale green, not quite translucent thing, wonky round the edges. it looks like it might glow in the dark, though it doesn’t.

and what does one do the day after partaking of a sample sale, laughing in the face of that resolution to not buy anything for the rest of the year that is not food?

you could buy just over a kilo of jelly belly beans, now 20% off at the david jones confectionary department, in a fetching selection of such matching hues as very cherry, cotton candy, coconut, cream soda and chocolate pudding.

or you could wander up to the newish hawkesbury harvest markets at cook + phillip park, where the sun beats down mercilessly, and there is no shady spot for respite.

what there is, is a dairy stand selling a lightly salted butter churned from the cream of real, live, grass-eating jersey cows. if you stop to have a chat, you’ll be offered a cup of cold milk, sweet and clean. the gympie lady’s been out of butter recently, problems with milk supply and all, so i thought i’d give this one a go.

it was rather good on a slice of soft white sourdough, with a dribble of red gum honey.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 September 2008 at 12:01 pm

permalink | filed under (after a) fashion, around town, candy, shoping

weekend teacup blogging

i think this is starting to become an affliction. i was at the rozelle markets yesterday, and when i said, “i think i’m going to buy that pink teacup”, the kid responded immediately, “but you already have the green teacup”. that’s how bad it is.

but it was $15, less than half the price of the ones i saw in the dusty window of a dusty antique shop in glebe. this (and, ok, a couple of orphaned saucers) were from a woman who said she had moved on to other things, and was purging her personal collection. she had wild hair and a crazy rainbow wooly jumper. bloody hell. i could become that woman.

so no more teacups.

the biscuits, on the other hand… these beauties were from christopher’s cake shop at taylor square. delicate shortbread sandwiched with sugary icing and dipped in coloured chocolate. the pink one is strawberry flavoured, and the yellow one a most engaging lemon.

these i will be back for, oh yes.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 June 2008 at 11:13 pm

permalink | filed under shoping, snacks

over the weekend, saturday, we had second breakfast –

oh no, wait. third breakfast. at two in the afternoon.

this was after first breakfast of tea and toast, and yoghurt and berries, at home.

and after second breakfast at the orange grove markets; i had been on a long-overdue mission to procure some gympie butter, and all of a sudden, there we were, watching the ponies, with a cherry danish for the kid, and a bacon, egg and chimichurri roll for me (the chorizo guy is capitalising on the extremely long queue in front of the honey-cured bacon and egg roll guy), and a raspberry-orange juice in-between.

yes. so, third breakfast was had, because we were barreling down oxford street after partaking of the giddy merry-go-round that is the hope street markets, and the kid wanted scrambled eggs. but where o where does one find scrambled eggs in that section of oxford street, between the uppity paddington end, and the trashy darlinghurst end? is there somewhere not too trendy, or too gay, or too derelict? no, really, i want to know!

well. because i saw the sign for the $13 vegetarian breakfast outside BD’s foodhall, i can at least recommend this place to you. even though BD is short for “body development”, and one of the guys behind the counter had very large muscles squeezed into a very small black t-shirt. i’d been in here once, a few years ago, to buy a bottle of water. it’s the shopfront for a catering outfit, and the counters are packed with large bowls of bright salads, and a vast array of baked things and sandwiches.

but we wanted breakfast. we split it, the kid and i — she had the eggs, and i had the mushrooms and hashbrown, and there was more than enough toast, avocado and baked beans to go around. and you know what? when you least expect it, possibly the best mushrooms ever show up on your plate. an enormous tumble of whole mushrooms, larger than your regular button ones, cooked dark and slightly caramelised, with crunchy bits and a hint of balsamic vinegar. they must have been roasted, they had such a rich, smoky flavour.

but my cup of tea, poured from a large teapot in which a single teabag floated forlornly, was no match for the rather wonderful ring i found at the candy hand stand at the hope street markets. look at it! wonderful!

possibly the best little plastic thing ever to be stuck onto a ring and sold for 10 bucks, my precioussss.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 May 2008 at 8:20 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, shoping

so. burrata.

saturday, we barreled up to haberfield, which is always less than the expedition in my head. which is to say, it is a great adventure, but it takes only two buses to get there, and if you time the connections right, and if the buses run punctually, then you can be there in just over 30 minutes. deborah can walk across the highway to get there in 10 minutes, but let’s not hold that against her.

because i don’t actually get to haberfield that often (see: expedition in my head), i end up going a bit crazy with the procuring of comestibles. this time, i’d even brought my stripy esky.

it was exactly the right size. by the end of the afternoon, it was packed to the brim. from the italian deli, a modest package of freshly-sliced olive mortadella, and one of chilli salami, both wrapped neatly in luridly printed waxed paper. from peppe’s, two boxes of ravioli: veal, pancetta, sage and white wine; roasted duck, prosciutto and caramelised onion. and from paesanella, a small tub of ricotta and a large tub containing a voluptuous ball of cream-filled mozzarella. burrata.

according to my recent googling, burrata is “the current darling of cheese lovers” — around southern california in any case. i first had it a couple of years ago, and i think about it from time to time. it is a spongy white lump, formed by hand. essentially, it is a thick outer skin of freshly-pulled mozzarella, filled with shreds of leftover mozzarella and fresh cream, before being sealed up.

we brought it home and had it for lunch a couple days later. it’s true what they say: you slice it open and the cream runs out. it is mild and rich at the same time, and the innards have the texture of scraps of cheese sealed in a pouch.

it was wonderful with sliced tomatoes, pepper, salt and a drizzle of fruity olive oil.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 March 2008 at 11:06 pm

permalink | filed under around town, nellie, shoping, snacks

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