i’m getting that feeling now, of having to cram the sydney experience into the short time left we have in this fair city. in the last four months, for example, we have been to the maltese cafe on crown street, thrice. that’s a lot of pastizzi.

i should perhaps have introduced the kid to this hallowed bastion of crunchy little pastries a little earlier. i used to come here back in the 90s, when i laid out pop magazines up the street, and the whole artroom would break out at lunchtime and split a plate of pastizzi. good times.

it’s nice sitting here, in this slightly shabby room, with an assortment of savoury (and sweet) pastries before you. it will please you to note that the china is heavy and, crucially, mismatched.

15 years ago, the pastizzi were 30 or 40c a piece, and you could feed three hungry flying monkeys for just over $5. now, one pastizz will set you back $1.50. no matter. the decor is still mostly 15-years-ago, and besides what can you get for a dollar-fiddy these days?

on her first visit, the kid was surprised to find that the mushrooms in the chicken and mushroom pastizzi were distinctly inoffensive. by her third visit, it was her standard order.

i do like the cheese and spinach pastizzi, with its light and slightly tangy filling, and i’ve also been reacquainting myself with the stodgy delight of the pea pastizzi, stuffed with the best murky-green tinned mushy peas. all the more delicious dipped into the intense tomato sauce (remember? you used to be able to order “a bit” of sauce, or “a bowl”.)

the apple pastizzi, filled with sweet stewed apples and sprinkled in sugar, is a treat in itself, but on our outings the kid understands it is to be eaten for dessert, only after she is finished with the meaty one.

we ordered a couple of ricotta and blueberry ones the first time round, but it was rather heavier on ricotta than it need to be (and consequently, somewhat lighter on the berries).

the pastries are always hot, and if you are lucky enough to have it straight out of the oven, the friendly man behind the counter will caution you that it is especially hot. oh, delicious crunchy flaky pastry.

the last time we were there, this saturday past, the kid said, “i LOVE this place. i think that we cannot move to melbourne anymore.” i know exactly what she means. round the corner, some well-stenciled graffiti reminds me why coming to surry hills feels a little bit like home.

and the sydney experience continues. the maltese cafe is just far enough away from gelato messina that the stroll down oxford street then victoria street will make it possible to have a delightful second dessert (or y’know just dessert if you were sensible enough not to have apple pastizzi at lunchtime).

last saturday there were so many new flavours that i had to have a three-scoop cup just to feel like i wasn’t missing out. in case this ended up being the last time i got to come to messina (probably not though), i finally indulged my fond memory of the coconut-lychee gelato. it was just as wonderful as i remembered.

i had a small taste of the sprightly and refreshing pink grapefruit and aperol sorbet — “hello sailor!”, it was called — but decided that i’d have to have the peach and amaretti. oh! it was peachy, and studded with crunchy chunks of crumbled biscuits.

a scoop of rosewater and almond praline gelato in the most agreeable shade of pink rounded out the selection. the delicate hue echoed the very faint flavour of rose, which seemed overshadowed by the aggressively crunchy candied almonds.

the kid had her own yoghurt and berry cone, and nursed it by the plate glass window in the back, utterly fascinated by the freshly churned gelato coming out of the machine in the kitchen. we watched as they dispensed cherry, and then coconut, and then once the coconut was all done, the gelato man came out front to the counter and proferred a cone of it to the kid.

we ambled out then, back into the sun, towards more sydney experience (pumpkin sourdough at infinity, a modest selection of chocolatey treats at kakawa, and then a stroll through hyde park for a gander at the archibald fountain). the coconut gelato was impossibly smooth and lush.

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?

at maruyu the other weekend, i could not resist this package of choco pies. mochi choco pies! a whole box of ‘em for $2.50! maruyu sits on clarence street, a block west of the queen victoria building — possibly the best city block in all of sydney, with this two-level japanese minimart (that’s, maruyu), an affordable and unfussy french cafe, and a very interesting exhibition space within doors of each other. i’ve gotten many a bargain at maruyu. sure, a lot of it was exotic junk food just past its expiry date, but this one is still good until at least january next year.

so i opened the box, and was somewhat surprised by the size of this little packet. i mean, i assumed each one would be individually wrapped — it’s the nature of this sort of asian snack food, but i really did think that seven to a box would yield a slightly larger pie. what with the plastic wrapper within the carton, and then another cardboard tray in which the little packets of choco pies were nestled, it was a much smaller handful than what i had expected when looking at the picture on the box.

and then when i got that sachet open, all i could do was laugh at the tiny disc inside. choco pie? it looked more like an after-dinner mint.

when i first saw this on the shelf, i was drawn to the mochi part of it, and then the black sesame. that it was covered in chocolate was a bit of a bonus i suppose, but chocolate in asian confectionery is decidedly hit-or-miss. sometimes it’s floury, or grainy, or oily; sometimes it just has a peculiar wrongness. such a gamble, but in this case — chocolate-covered black sesame rice cake — it was a gamble i was willing to take. plus, y’know, two-fiddy.

this particular chocolate — a thin shell — broke with a soft crack when i bit into it, and melted smoothly away. it was not too sugary, and had a rich, dark chocolatey flavour. the soft chewy mochi, which replaced the marshmallow portion of a traditional choco pie, pleased me with its mild sweetness. the inner layer of black sesame paste delivered a nutty taste that lingered, and it was all i could do to stop myself chasing it with another serve.

so i’ll concede that these turned out to be the perfect size after all — the delicate and well-considered balance of the various flavors and textures just called to be contained in a package this petite. and i grant that the individual wrappers make you pause a while, instead of just shoveling the little cakes into your gob, one after the other, until they are all gone, because they are that delicious.

if only they’d thought to put more of ‘em in the box.

more pink cake! we found ourselves in newtown on friday afternoon, quite famished, and stopped into black star on our way to an errand. being close to the end of trade, there wasn’t all that much left in the counter. on the counter, however, was a large jar of macarons. such pale, encrusted beauties. when i learnt they were rose and lilac, i was a little bit hesitant, because apart from rose, i am not a fan of floral flavours in food.

i should not have worried. the biscuit was crisp and then chewy, and then all heady rose perfume wrapped up in smooth ganache.

it was so good in fact, that post-errand, even with the sidewalk stools piled up high and the countergirl wiping down the counter for the day, we sweet-talked our way into buying another one.

on saturday, an impromptu and fun excursion with my cousin took a displeasing turn after lunch when we found no cake in the city.

no. cake.

to be precise: we did not want dried-out-from-sitting-in-the-display-case-all-week cake (city center); we did not quite want fancy french moussey gateaux (the rocks); we did not want spongy airline chinatown cake (chinatown). two of us wouldn’t have minded cupcakes, but one of us has an ideological issue with them. so we went our separate ways and in lieu of cake, the kid got her first pair of lace-up shoes: silver all stars.

zoom-zoom.

and we saved the cupcakes for sunday. this is what you get when you rock up to cupcakes on pitt and tell them you don’t need a box for your cupcakes because you are going to eat them right away: a little cardboard cupcake caddy. adorable, no? my zero-packaging plans were derailed, but if i remember to tuck it into my wallet, i will always be ready for a cupcake on the run.

i expect i will always be ready for this raspberry cupcake: moist raspberry cake, and a fat swirl (and then some!) of raspberry buttercream. infinitely pleasing, and gone in four chomps.

we don’t get to ballast point park often enough; it’s just that bit further than a regular after-school jaunt. also, it’s not quite your regular park in the traditional sense of the word, with trees and grass and playground. what there is, on the site of the former caltex fuel depot, is a lot of architectural history — isolated walls from where buildings used to be; enormous tanks still standing proud like monuments to fuel storage; boundary walls made of broken-down rock and tile from the old structures, contained within a frame of thick steel wire…

i don’t know how or when it began, but those of the romantic persuasion have been attaching engraved padlocks to the metalwork. two of the ones i found yesterday must have been added only minutes (or y’know, hours) before we got there, their dates freshly etched. the one from last year has already corroded in the salty air.

we picnicked up on the hill overlooking the harbour — an apple and an orange to share, and an iced donut each from the discounted supermarket selection we had bought earlier in the day. and we explored the many complex levels and hidden pockets of grass that make up the site. the kid had dressed up as supergirl for the occasion, and valiantly defended us against the gulls.

there’s a little bunker built over the edge of the water, with three tiny portholes addressing various vistas. just shy of sunset, the sky over the bridge was the softest pink. all this i will miss, one day.

one of the other things that commandeered my attention at the japan centre on regent street was a humble plastic takeaway container fastened with a length of curling ribbon. the cookies within were a most enchanting shade of green.

i know, i know. they are just a simple maccha sablé, and i could google a bunch of recipes and make my own. well, fine. maybe i will, now that these are gone. they were rather pleasing: a good crunch on impact, and then a mass of buttery crumbs on my tongue. they were mild in taste to begin with, but after eating four or five in a row, the verdant bitterness of the maccha kicked in. really, a smart regulatory measure to keep me from eating the whole pack in one go.

i was actually more intrigued by the other box that i pulled from the shelf: the buckwheat cookies. they were nutty in flavour, almost savoury, and surprised me with the most satisfying little crackly bits, courtesy of the grains of toasted buckwheat scattered through each biscuit.

there were also black sesame cookies on the shelf, but i thought it best to leave them. these were very persuasive biscuits. you may be lulled safe by their spare decoration and their homely good looks, but take them home and they’ll have their wicked way with you.

i’m filling in a questionaire at the moment, and the number one question is: what is your secret food shame? it took me aaages to think of something. i mean, i eat a lot of crap, but i’m not necessarily ashamed of it. i recently came to the conclusion that my favourite food may well be hot chips, but i wear that badge proudly. (figuratively, mind; i might now have to set about making an actual thing with a pin in it, oh boy!) i don’t like oysters? is it not possible to have a dedicated interest in food while studiously avoiding those slimy, putrid bivalves? sure!

and then it struck me: my secret food shame is that i horde food. i don’t mean to. behold, this rather dramatic looking chocolate mooncake that i won off grab your fork way back in — ahem — september last year. where does the time go, i ask you!

do not fear. it has been cryogenically preserved in my fridge, still sealed in its ornate plastic packet with its little sachet of desiccant. i broke it open this afternoon, desperate for a mid-annual-report-layout snack. the bag emitted a barely perceptible sigh as i cut it open; at last the mooncake would fulfill its destiny.

it was the smell that struck me: an aroma so rich and chocolatey that i was surprised when i bit into the skin, and discovered it actually wasn’t. instead it was mild and cakey, with an undercurrent of regular mooncake pastry. no, the chocolate lay beneath.

GAH. a big, moist mouthful of fudgy chocolate. mmm… quite trufflicious. and here’s the surprise: a pure white heart of mochi. well, ok. so i wasn’t so surprised. having eaten a couple of them not quite — ahem — six months ago, i knew of the chewy treat within. and also, there’s the sticker on the pack that says, “o-mochi mooncake”.

yes folks, this is mooncake innovation at its… well, that level a little way short of “finest”. the mochi isn’t really there for flavour i think, but it does a good job breaking up the mass of sweet, sweeet, flavoured lotus seed paste — mellows out the flavour while providing some thought-provoking texture. and how striking it is, against the chocolate.

i like it. taste aside, i love the sharp impressions in the skin, from the mould. it looks like it’s been carved out of ebony, no? the macha omochi mooncake looked to be an objet d’art crafted in jade. when mooncake season comes round again, i’ll be looking out for these in the usual chinese grocery shops.

so yes, i am a little bit embarrassed that it’s taken me six months to eat it. but hip hip hurray for those food technicians who engineered this long life mooncake, still delicious after all that time.

anyway. the reason i’m filling in this questionaire is that a picture i submitted on a whim to eat. drink. blog. was selected to be part of the SBS photo exhibition at the inaugural australian food and drink bloggers’ conference in melbourne this coming weekend. hopefully it doesn’t melt away into a little puddle, my snapshot of a watermelon and pineapple ice pop, amongst such illustrious, gorgeously styled, DSLR macro company.

i woke up the other morning, and my room was bathed in a glorious golden light. just beautiful, it was, until the kid and i thought we might open up the blinds to see what was causing this enchanting illumination. at this point it became just weird and scary. we were quite unsettled to see… well, not much really. our entire vista had been blanketed in a silent orange fog. we were to learn later that it was a tonne (actually, many thousands of tonnes!) of red dust blowing in from the desert. good thing we hadn’t been up an hour or two earlier, when the sky was red: we might have just crawled back into bed and cowered until the apocalypse was over. at least, had we been forced to bunker down, we would’ve had snacks!

appropriate, no? “remember the passed food” indeed! i don’t remember these from my past (perhaps it is taiwan-centric — note the evocative island-of-taiwan-shaped logo), but i guess someone out there must be nostalgic for these little bricks of puffy fried dough bits held together with a barely perceptible glue of brown sugar. after the soft crunch of the first bite, the delicate block yields to become a chewy mass that sticks to your teeth, and tastes mildly of the sum of its ingredients: wheat flour, milk powder, maltose, brown sugar, vegetable oil. simple pleasures, yes, with a slightly oily (and not thoroughly unpleasant) aftertaste.

next! behold the exotic chocolate gift presented to me by ms d on her return from new york city: the bacon bar from vosges haut chocolat, which contains not only smoked bacon, but smoked salt.

when i first showed the package to the kid, and i mused, “i wonder what chocolate deborah gave us,” she paused a moment to decipher the large clue on the box.

“meat chocolate?” she asked.

“yeah! but i wonder what kind of meat it is.”

“bacon?”

“yeah!!”

her smile was wide. “can i have some?” she asked. o, proud moment for a parent!

so we packed it as part of our picnic two weekends ago, and after the cheese and apple sandwiches, and the mandarins, and the chocolate-dipped greek shortbread biscuits sandwiched with sticky red jam, we were suitably impressed by the rich milk chocolate, the comforting tang of salt, and the nublets of bacon packed all the way through. the meat was not always crunchy — alas — but it was a fine contrast to the sweet and creamy. it’s true, what the slightly overwrought, overwrit guff on the back of the package says: you can smell the bacon. even better, you can taste it! the smoky flavour is most enticing, and the randomness of sometimes crunchy bacon edge, and sometimes chewy meat makes it seem you’re eating the real thing. i will be hoarding this chocolate, making it last. truly, a worthy snack to bring you to the end of the world.

around 9pm, in the waiting room outside the operating theatre, i’d made a cup of black tea from one of two teabags left in the communal trough, and rationed out the two green tea caramels from the bottom of my backpack. and before that? well, i’d been lucky enough to have a delicious brunch of justin north’s best salad nicoise (and tea and pudding after) at the alliance francaise. a little before two.

when i picked the kid up from school, she spent a good twenty minutes playing chaseys around the preschool playground with her new chasing-tickling buddy, and then a good three minutes skipping merrily on the concrete stepping stones over in the main school yard. and then there she was, slumped over a mis-stepped stone, screaming. these things happen often enough, but when i turned her right way up, her face was awash with blood, and there was a cut, a gash, a hole that seemed to go in a distance, just above her right brow.

“blood,” she cried. “blood. i can see blood.”

i reached past her, into her schoolbag. chose in a split second the green stripy hoodie over the pink one. pressed it to her head. there was a lot of blood, but the bleeding stopped quickly.

here’s the weird, spooky, lucky thing. the careflight demo helicopter had been at the school that day, and they were just finishing up their last session. the paramedic ran over with her bag of dressings, and in three minutes had doused a gauzy pad in saline, wrapped the kid’s broken head in a length of bandage, and directed us to the most appropriate hospital. the careflight demo helicopter, you see, has neither propeller nor tail. i called my cousin, who recently moved into the next suburb, and took her up on a previous offer of a ride when i needed one. in the time it took us to walk home and retrieve medicare card and coriander cat, she was at our door.

the kid’s head is in my lap, in the car. she is stretched out across the back seat. she is adamant that no one will be sewing her up, mostly, i think, the bitter memory of watching “coraline” some weeks back. and sometimes her eyes shut, and i make inane chatter as we zoom up anzac parade just so she will respond.

after ten minutes at triage, we are sent to an inner sanctum, labelled — somewhat reassuringly — ‘fast track waiting room’, where we wait for a doctor who is all lighthearted until she undoes the bandage. silence. a quick inhalation. the hole in the kid’s head is beyond the spectrum of ER. we wait then, in the fast track waiting room, for a plastic surgeon to come and see us.

then the waiting, and waiting, and around five, the plastic surgeon tells us that eight o’clock is when we could be scheduled for stitches; the procedure will need to be performed under general anaesthetic, and the kid must not have eaten anything for the preceding six hours. we wait, mostly cheery and chirpy, unless anyone mentions the word “stitch”.

and eventually, the kid is suited up in the children’s hospital’s best puss-in-boots print gown, and given a shiny pink sticker, and a brisk walking tour though the labyrinth of corridors, and fitted with a tiny rubber mask, and made to breathe, slowly. and her eyes roll back, and shut, as she struggles against the sleep. and i am dispatched to the waiting room, with her black cat and her pink sandles, to two teabags in a communal trough.

but it only takes a little more than half an hour, to sew stitches in three layers of tissue. the doctor comes by to say that the cut didn’t go all the way to the bone, as he had expected, and only the muscle and two layers of skin had to be repaired.

when i finally get to see her, she is extremely surprised that they sewed her up after all. “but i didn’t feel it!” she says, eyes wide in wonder, and then she asks for apple juice. later, in the ward, she scores a lemonade icy pole and a jam sandwich, and chats, snug in warm blankets, about how it is way past her bedtime. and some hours later, when the nurse is happy, we are released into the dark and silent hospital corridors. we pad silently across the shiny floors, just us in the world, but for someone’s dad sitting alone in the pale light of an internet terminal. my good cousin drives across town to take us home, and only stops once for the kid to vomit up her paltry dinner.

eyes open or shut, i see the gaping wound. i saw it, right after it opened, and then every time the bandage was unwrapped while assessments were made. i may see it for some time yet, although a day later, the horror has lessened. in the early hours, when the house was quiet, i had four slices of vegemite toast, and watched an episode of “buffy the vampire slayer”, so that i could go to sleep.

it’s the morning after the night we poured ourselves through the chinatown new year night market. every year we go, and every year we say how insane it all is, and then a year passes and we forget, and we do it all again. the kid spent two hours in someone’s arms, buffeted, or on someone’s shoulders, above the crowd, so she basically did ok. the rest of us stopped when the crowd did, moved when it moved, and if we were sweaty enough at a certain point in time, we slimed past whoever was in the way.

me, i seemed to be sweatier than most, because we had thought it prudent earlier in the evening to dine on bowls of bakut teh and steamed buns; my body temperature was already up by a couple of degrees. eventually, when we tired of seeing the same exotic delicacies being peddled by every third shop (this year’s new inclusions appeared to be a range of flavoured taiwanese rice cakes, and fig jelly), we insinuated ourselves into a quiet crevice between two stalls, and replenished our sweat glands with icy cold sour plum drinks.

“will we go again next year?” i asked my mother.

“no,” she said, most decisively. “except maybe to buy mushrooms.”

right now i am fortifying myself with a mug of almond-flavoured soy milk. i had seen an ad for it on the back of a bus on the way home from the airport a week ago, and had rushed out and bought a carton the very next morning. see how effective an 8-ft high photograph of a carton of soy milk can be?

but i am particularly susceptible to soy beans this week. so far i have acquired:
• enormous rice crackers embedded with whole roasted black soy beans
• black soybean hot cocoa mix
• some sort of roasted soybean snack, which i really bought for the carton
• soft serve soymilk ice cream

the last of which i would be quite overjoyed to eat every day, but which would leave little room for the bakkwa-on-white-bread sandwiches, or the sambal prawn rolls, or the mangosteens/duku langsat/jackfruit trinity.

if only this could be my only quandry, rather than the pathological fear the kid has developed, of public toilets which flush automatically. in this city, that is the most tiresome thing of all.

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