ragingyoghurt » snacks

Category Archives: snacks

after a month of print deadlines (it makes me feel alive, dammit!) for a month of arab films, i find myself in singapore. seven hours passes surprisingly quickly on a plane, with a wriggly kid who gamely stays awake for the first five hours, which is about five hours past her regular naptime. and now, here we are.

my parents’ house is filled with a selection of german xmas gingerbread, and marks and spencer chocolate bisuits. last night i had a paper thosai the size of a newspaper — and not just a tabloid; a broadsheet. so far so good.

we’ll forget the screaming tantrum in which, over the course of twenty minutes or so on an otherwise tranquil sunday afternoon, a child pushes herself on her back, up the length of a department store elevator lobby floor. it can be done!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 February 2007 at 3:04 pm

permalink | filed under kid, snacks, trip

you know that episode of “friends”, where joey is halfway through reading “little women”, and it’s not looking too good for beth, so to spare joey any trauma, rachel puts the book in the freezer? i wish someone had taken the copy of “oscar and lucinda” i was reading, and shoved it deep, deep in the frosty depths of one of the three freezers in the old house at the rock.

but, no. and now, trauma. i’d thought it would be a good chronological following on from “the secret river”. how can a man, peter carey, invent such a story within the confines of an average-sized human head? my head tries to blog a lucky last entry for the year, and i get distracted on some other page, pondering the second chance to avail myself of the complete “sex and the city” boxset, with portable pink dvd player, now only $269.83… and an hour (and one fireworks display) later, i’m finishing paragraph number two.

tops.

i looked out the balcony earlier this afternoon, and saw the barge moored a little way off, and it struck me like a kick in the guts, that it had been a whole year since i posted pictures of the amazing fireworks display i’d seen, just me perched on the balcony railing, and i remembered it so clearly, like it was maybe just a couple of weeks ago. not fifty-two.

but so. a week in the parched country heart of new south wales, with not too much to do but read about new south wales a hundred and fifty years ago. midway through, i asked the boy, “i wonder, if all the migrants ever left tomorrow, would the aborigines go back to their dreamtime existence, or would they…” i wasn’t sure exactly how to continue: would they successfully take over the lifestyle shaped by this many years of white settlement? would they keep sniffing glue and petrol? would they embark on a crazy spree of looting and pillaging?

but the boy, being quick, seemed to pick up where i had trailed off. “well, the centrelink cheques would dry up pretty quickly, wouldn’t they?” which, i guess, still leaves the question unanswered. thinking, on the outside, is most unproductive.

but for the most part, in the last week, we sat around, moving from one room to another, trying to find the cool room on the hot days, and the warm room on the strange freezing ones. we ate ham, ham, ham over days and days, and then for a change we headed up (twice!) to the chinee restaurant at the rock bowling club, the only restaurant in town, and the only eating establishment (out of two) open over xmas.

short soup, honey king prawns, sizzling beef, prawn crackers, fried rice (with ham), vegetable omelette, combination chow mein, satay chicken, steamed dimsims, garlic king prawns, mongolian lamb, sizzling black pepper steak, deluxe combination. and a plate of hot chips, thanks.

we cut slabs out of the tray of baklava from the hellenic bakery, warmed them in the microwave and topped them with blue ribbon vanilla ice cream. we went through tins of beetroot. we sliced more ham off the bone. we devoured a festive pavlova, green in the base and crowned in a cloud of pink whipped cream. there were two birthdays, and four birthday cakes. there were boxes (and boxes) of lindt chocolates. on the last night, there was a magnificent sausage sizzle with fifty or so assorted snags, a large glass bowl holding two tins worth of whole baby beetroots, a small melanine bowl of buttered, salted corn. a pity, the salad from a couple nights before did not make a re-appearance: sliced hard boiled eggs and sliced celery, in mayonnaise. yum.

two hours now to the big fireworks display. the nine o’clock one — family fireworks — which this year could be seen from our balcony, and which must have cost an extra billion or so dollars, only succeeded in perplexing the kid. head buried in the boy’s shoulder while we two gasped and wowed, and really meant it! they can make pink fireworks which explode into the outline of lovehearts! and this new one, which quietly puffs out into clusters of golddust, just lovely.

happy new year. see you ’round.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 31 December 2006 at 8:36 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, breakfast, cake, chocolate, dinner, lunch, snacks, trip

the boy has a different relationship to food than i have. in that he seems not to need it. sort of. case in point: on any given schoolday, he will break fast with a large mug of sweet, milky coffee, all the sustenance required for a day of beating (metaphorically) classrooms-full of disinterested, grunting teenage boys into submission. in theory, there is recess, and lunch, but apparently there is playground duty to be done at recess, and like, detention or something, everything, to attend to at lunch, so he goes all day without eating. he arrives home in the mid-afternoon, grumpy and hungry, and growling, “i haven’t eaten anything since last night.” but still, wearing this hunger like a badge of pride.

can it be that all the other teachers are not eating all day either? what is the teachers’ federation doing to earn their annual membership dues? what are they striking for if not for recess and lunchtimes for all?

yesterday, there was an extended period of rustling, organisational noises upon his return, and then he lumbered downstairs to announce, “i just bought $170 worth of groceries.” part of it, at least, had gone towards the 6-pack of toilet paper under his arm. “i bought us lots of treats,” he said. “i think it was because i was starving when i got to the supermarket.”

and so, there is a tower of tinned sardines in the pantry. there is bacon in the chiller, and vanilla coke; ice cream in the freezer; just one packet of timtams on the counter, because the other is already open, and stashed away in the fridge.

maybe the teachers’ union isn’t doing such a bad job after all. (oh yes you are, slackers!)

as for the rest of the household… you must have already surmised that we are obsessed with food. we build playdough cakes during the day. “this is pretend food,” i stress, “so we just pretend to eat it.” she holds a sticky bun a half centimetre from her mouth, and says, “eat, eat, eat.”

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 November 2006 at 4:09 pm

permalink | filed under boy, cake, kid, snacks

the third time the swede caught sight of us, according to deborah, he had to look again, just to make sure. i didn’t notice; my attention was on the daim cake.

he had first seen us four hours earlier. we had worked our way through the magical maze that is the ikea showroom, and had arrived at the cafeteria, only an hour and a bit into the adventure; we had a modest haul of wooden cutlery caddy (to double up as pencil organiser), teddy bear bedlinen and two notebooks. it was still early, as lunchtimes go, but i figured if we ate early then there’d be an opportunity for afternoon tea later. we joined the queue and filled our trays. organic apple-guava juice, salmon with chips and vegetables for me, organic apple-guava juice, meatballs and chips, herby bread roll for deb. potato salad and beets to share.

“can we have chips and vegetables with the meatballs?” asked deb as the efficient lunch ladies plated up.

“no.” said the efficient lunch ladies.

i suppose we had already taken up too much of their time deciding if we should get ten meatballs, or fifteen. we were going to split everything, but lurking in the back of my head is the awareness that there can be too many meatballs. even if meatballs have been the main drawcard for a long-overdue ikea excursion.

it only seems like i have too much spare space in my brain, for lurking.

the swede, you remember, from the start of this story, checked us out., by which i mean, at the checkout. “ah!” he exclaimed, on spotting the pink juices, “this is organic apple and guava juice! it is new.” he seemed pleased that we had chosen so wisely.

and then a long and leisurely lunch, where i discovered a couple of the carrots had a strange frosty appearance, even though they were perfectly… room temperature. despite being hard and crunchy, they had an un-carrotlike texture. i was flummoxed, and then in spite of that, i decided that ikea should launch a string of ikea cafés around town — no furniture or curtains on show, just a refurbished mcdonald’s with cheap meatballs and salmon meals behind the counter, and a room full of coloured plastic balls for the kids. you would go, wouldn’t you?

it only seems like i have too much spare space in my brain, for lurking.

and then a long and winding wander through the downstairs maze of the market hall, where our restraint from upstairs was gradually undone. damn you, kitchen department! but we got through it. we even sat down on a saggy, discounted sofa in the bargain basement and reviewed our loot. one of us, not me, even put stuff back on the shelf. we joined a short queue and paid. and then we came face to face with the ikeafood(c) store.

sigh.

at least i had known ahead of time, had not pretended that the rows of swedish jams and cordials and ginger thins would not move me. too soon a shopping bag — “the taste of sweden” — was filled with cloudberry jam and blueberry jam and lingonberry jam, a single daim bar, a bag of salty licorice fish (for the boy; i shall not touch the stuff again), a bag of dillchips — and this is where the swede bumped into us again. “ah, these chips are really good! but i like these ones better,” he said, pointing to the american style sour cream and onion. but, ch, you can get sour cream and onion potato chips anywhere. dill-flavoured chips are hard to come by.

remember, in greece, all those oregano-flavoured potato chips you ate, not because they were so delicious, but because, where else will you come across these exotic crispies?

things that didn’t make the bag this time: creamed crab in a tube (30% crab meat!), gingerbread house kit, instant meatball sauce powder. as it was, the magical display of pulling rabbits out of this hat was quite a sight to behold, this show i put on at the checkout counter.

we were pleased, but wilty. the girl on welcome duty at the foot of the escalator looked confused as we rode back up; we were already weighed down with sweden’s best. back in the cafetaria, we sat beneath jaunty polka-dotted lamps and ate cake and drank tea. that’s when the swede did the double take. we’d been there about five hours. by the time the last crumb had been eaten, we’d have nudged it closer to six.

the feeling we had on realising it, i do not think that you could call it pride.

but it wasn’t bad.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 November 2006 at 2:42 pm

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

such is the lot of a vegetarian, that if you were attending the soya awards at the after hours art gallery tuesday night, you would have been waiting, waiting for one of the few circulating platters to come by with maybe a stuffed mushroom or a scrap of artichoke atop a cracker. alas, time and again you would have been confronted with a disc of duck sausage on a melba toast, or a grilled scallop nestled in a cauliflower puree, or a minced prawn satay conconction, or an artfully crafted block of layered sliced potato with a knot of mystery meat, possible airdried, perched on top.

fortunately i am not vegetarian, so i ate them all. apparently there was a platter of salt and pepper squid, but it never made it this far. understandably.

but because amber is vegetarian, and krissie semi-vegetarian, and i, someone who needs more than five bite-sized bits of dinner, we thought it best that we sneak out in search of real food.

i suspect that amber was a little doubtful as i led the way to BBQ king, with the meats still hanging in the window after 9pm, and the lurid photo montages of a thousand roast ducks. but listen, you vegetable lovers, it is possible to share a three-course vegetarian meal at this most meaty bastion. a mountain of salt and pepper tofu, with its dense covering of coriander and sliced chillis, will be completely demolished, the most delicious thing in the world tonight. virtuous mixed vegetables topped with cashews, mostly conquered. buddha’s vegetables chow mein, all crispy-edged and drenched in brown gravy… only the smallest tangle of noodles remain.

my friends, they have gone back up the mountain, but we will always have the tofu.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 November 2006 at 3:32 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, snacks

“would it be inappropriate,” i asked deborah, “to have a choc top during the film?” i bit into a whole tempura’d shiitake, and slurped some cold soba.

thursday night, rather than go late night shoping, rather than stay at home and watch “jamie’s kitchen australia”, we were off to see the al gore global warming movie. because we are thinking girls! thinking about issues such as: what would be not too frivolous a snack to have during a serious and important documentary?

turns out, a chocolate choc top, and a blended icy-biscuity-chocolatey drink, topped with chocolate cream and chocolate syrup from gloria jeans downstairs. go us!

who woulda thought people would pay money to go see a film about how the world is doomed? i mean, one without bruce willis in it. and if bruce didn’t end up saving the world, would the audience take that responsibility home with them? and the people who choose to see this film, they’d be sort of that way inclined anyway, wouldn’t they? what of the rest?

we are already living in one of those made-for-tv movies, about when the weather went crazy.

a couple days ago, a nice man from the electric company came ‘round our place and changed all our regular light bulbs to low-energy ones, gratis. everything’s a much lower wattage, but burns twice as brightly. monday, i’m switching to green energy.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 October 2006 at 4:36 pm

permalink | filed under around town, at the movies, chocolate, dinner, drink, snacks

sometimes you know the solution to a problem. that is, you know of its existence, independent to the relevant problem, but you haven’t quite put the two together.

for example, i’d known about the orange grove organic market since shortly after i moved into the area. i’d also known that the 445 bus sort of headed in that direction. but to me, the market was always just a little bit too much of a walk. i’d say it would have taken over half an hour to hoof it. it was only recently that it clicked that i could take a bus there, and that the bus actually stopped right outside the market. brains — what would we do without them?

saturday morning, we walked to the bus stop with a spring in our step, and not too long later, we were on the bus with three other families with young ‘uns. off the bus, there were kids, and dogs, and sunshine, and bouncy castles. it was spring!

we did a couple of laps around the market, with no particular plan, just to see what was available (which was lots). i take a little while to warm up at markets, but then once the first purchase is out of the way, it always spirals out of control.

as it happened, that first crucial purchase involved standing in front of the artisanal lemonade stall for longer than you might expect. there wasn’t actually a queue, mind, it was just me trying to decide if i wanted the pineapple lemonade — a great beehive of glass filled with sunny yellow, with small chunks of fresh pineapple floating inside — or the raspberry lemonade — deep red, and copiously seeded. there was also a rather complex looking ginger ale with bits of chopped up chillis and other vegetation, but i thought that i’d save it for when i didn’t have to share with the kid. the lemonade guy recommended the pineapple… and it was nice and all, but i was too busy trying to drink my share of it, before maeve guzzled it all. the last i saw, her grimy little paw was sloshing about in the dregs, fishing for the fruit.

but so. now the purse strings had been freed! there was interesting bread, but we already had two loaves at home. there were two stalls with pink lady apple pies, but it was too soon after breakfast. there was some lovely rose geranium soap, but it was $5.50 a bar. we worked our way through the maze, accepting samples of nougat and oranges and raspberry ricotta cake. the south american food was inviting, and the calabrian too. the g–zleme ladies were there too, with variations i hadn’t yet encountered: organic chocolate and banana (must have been $15 g–zleme).

i bought: a brown bag of pink ladies; a packet of eumundi smokehouse double smoked bacon and a red wine and garlic salami; a small tub of gympie farm butter; a tomato and olive pastry, for sustenance; and some mushrooms.

ah the mushrooms. they were spread out in boxes across the counter: button, swiss brown, oyster, king brown, shitake, enoki, chesnut. i wanted them all. “can i buy a mixed selection?” i asked the mushroom man, and “how much are they?”

“they all cost the same,” he replied, “$4.50 for a hundred grams.” he even measured out 100g of oyster mushrooms, so i could see what 100g of mushrooms looked like. and then i asked for a 400g mix of the five more exotic funghi.

there were so many, he packed them into two of his sturdy brown bags. “$18,” he said.

see, i know that four times $4.50 is $18, but somehow i didn’t do that calculation in my head when i put my order in. and so when we caught the bus home, i had just under a dollar left in my wallet. but a bounty! of tasties! in my shoping bag.

dinner was fettucine with a myriad of mushrooms, fried with bacon and garlic in gympie butter. all together now: mmmMMMmmm.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 September 2006 at 9:05 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, drink, kid, lunch, shoping, snacks

it’s all about time management innit? if you get it into your head that you might make something for a sunday picnic? the monday plan to meet up for a hot chocolate on sunday morning quickly snowballed, and suddenly, a sandwich and dessert picnic was only a handful of days away. not even a freak hailstorm could put us off. by friday, the sun was shining again.

friday morning
playground excursion, followed by supermarket excursion, to buy such exciting things as almond meal, cocoa and icing sugar. i’ve spent days convincing myself that i can make macarons, though i haven’t quite decided from which recipe.

friday afternoon
naptime for some, half an hour spent pushing almond meal through a sieve for others. have i made a horrible mistake? it’s not too late to just buy a packet of bisuits from the deli up the street. still, small circles are dutifully drawn on sheets of baking paper. when maeve awakens, the electric mixer goes on; the batter does not “flow like magma”. in fact, it’s a real bitch trying to pipe it through the unwieldy cookie press into 80 or so small discs.

when the boy gets home from work, i am still brandishing the cookie extruder like a pistol. a cup of tea later, boy takes kid to the park, i do some “real” work, the biscuit dough sits for a couple of hours to develop a skin.

friday evening
while the biscuits bake, i make a quick salmon congee for the kid. after the biscuits bake, i realise i can’t be bothered making a “real” dinner, so it’s salmon congee all ‘round, supplemented with a plate of frozen dimsims, steamed, for the boy. the biscuits look nothing like what they’re supposed to.

saturday morning
awake too early. playground excursion involves two parks — at the second one, a charming boy steps on maeve’s head as he asserts himself on a climbing thing. supermarket excursion for…

saturday afternoon
back home, i make lemon curd with the egg yolks left over from friday’s biscuit recipe. the boy goes out to watch a football game. make maeve a sandwich and sterilise a jar while she eats. activate some yeast in warm milk. sift flour and cocoa. let maeve pretend to mix the dough… pretend to let maeve mix the dough? knead the dough. the dough feels nothing like it’s supposed to. dough rests, maeve naps, i make chocolate ganache.

maeve wakes. dough is punched down. biscuits are sandwiched with ganache. they really do not look anything like what they’re supposed to. an apple does not appease maeve, so it’s off to park #3.

saturday evening
boy not home from football. just the two of us for dinner: panfried salmon with capers, mashed potatoes, steamed beans and corn. bread goes in the oven, bread comes out of the oven. it looks… only somewhat like how it’s supposed to, but it smells deep and chocolatey. whisk ricotta with a dusting of icing sugar, vanilla and lemon juice. for dessert we each lick one whisk bit clean.

boy not home from football. wash the kid. read to the kid. kid goes to bed. boy txts to say that he’s out drinking and will be home tomorrow. put some frozen raspberries in the fridge, to defrost.

sunday morning
while maeve breaks fast, i fold raspberries into ricotta. slice chocolate bread — why is it so dense? why is it so wet-doughy in the middle?? it’s not too late to dash up the street to buy a loaf of white bread for emergency plan B lemon curd sandwiches, is it? passable bits of chocolate bread are sandwiched with ricotta mixture. a jasmin tea bag is chucked into a bottle of iced water. we scrub up, we are out the door! the bus is coming! keep walking, maeve!

halfway to the bus, meet the boy driving home. he does the right thing and offers to drive us to the park.

a glorious time is had by all: after a civilised start across the road at toby’s estate, we traipse back to the park: helen, deborah, the kid and i, to find a shady sunny spot close to the playground. we unpack a picnic of sandwiches to find that everyone’s had cheese on their minds, and chocolate. helen’s sister arrives with husband, babies, and more cheese in the form of a whole greek ricotta cake.

this sort of fun, it could go on forever, except it’s way past naptime, and there’s a bus due, and a funky brown something wafting out of maeve’s nappy. we bid our farewells amongst hurried gifting of chocolate and cheesecake, and then it all collapses into a three-hour nap for the kid, and me? i eat my rare and precious mountain pepper truffle, from deb, (and i cunningly leave the single origin lindt, from helen, for later) and then collapse too, on the couch, to watch “the incredibles” supplementary behind-the-scenes dvd.

this behind-the-scenes stuff; always fascinating. like the way you get to see how half the recipes went a little bit awry, and somehow at the end — through the magic of springtime and cheese sandwiches — it all tasted just fine.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 August 2006 at 5:18 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, chocolate, kid, lunch, snacks

sometimes (though not often!), you may not want an inventive maccha-infused, bean-studded bun from a shiny modern asian bakery. sometimes, the exercise of walking the edge of chinatown in search of a printer capable of spewing out a two-metre wide poster will put you in the vicinity of the grimy little chinese bakery perched above the burlington supermarket.

you may have already bribed the child to get back in her pram again, after the half-hour wait for the bus, and the half-hour busride, and the half-hour spent looking at polypropylene samples in the backroom of said printer, with the promise of a bunshop.

so there you have it.

where the newer bakeries may have 20 or so cases filled with all manner of bundom and flossy bread, this one — and i have no idea what its name is; i just call it “the chinese bakery on top of burlington supermarket” — has a small wall of nine. but the nine cases hold more than what we need. it is always difficult to choose just one, from the bank of old-skool classics: pork with pickled mustard bun, ham bun, curry bun, taro bun, pineapple bun, pineapple custard bun, pineapple red bean bun, chocolate bun (filled with solid slabs of chocolate in lieu of the chocolate creme patisserie you might be expecting), those tall spongy cupcakes…

but here is an empty case, containing none of the bun i really want: the best ever baked charsiu bun, with a sweet sticky glaze and a sweet sticky filling containing actual bits of meat (rather than bits of fat and gristle). i looked around, panicked, those minutes passing all too slowly until a cheerful girl emerged from the inner sanctum with a fresh tray.

they were still warm.

i tonged one, and then two, and then a pineapple red bean bun, and then an afterthought, this ethreal “sticky rice with custard”. a soft, moist mochi (even a day later) in a coconut coat, with a pale yellow centre. it was sweet and delicate, and why have i never bought one before??

we ate the pork buns on a park bench, before a steadily advancing arc of seagulls, pigeons and ibises. at the end, maeve wore a joker smile of red and sticky.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 August 2006 at 2:28 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, snacks

a surprise midweek jaunt into the city put me once again outside the plexiglass lockers at breadtop, looking in. the buns sat there, glowing a faint green… and then i bought them, finally.

a single hefty green tea melon bun, and a bag of six little green tea buns, filled with red bean paste.

the green tea melon bun — where the melon refers not to a flavour, but the crisscross pattern on the surface of the bun — has all its flavour concentrated in the crust. you crunch through this sturdy green armour to get to a plain yeasty sweet bun beneath. it’s like kogepan’s friend, melon-pan, come to life! a life that sadly came to an end after dinner wednesday night, washed down with a pot of jasmin green tea. mmm…

the next morning, a green tea-red bean bun fulfilled its destiny. this bun had green tea flavour (and colour) all through the soft dough, and contained just the right amount of sweet red bean mash.

the next morning, the kid and i, and another kid and her mum, trundled down the street in the rain, to about life, again! clearly i am deluded about the amount of money i’m earning with my high-flying, stay-at-home mothering, extremely-part-time graphic designer job (except, i’m not, because i just calculated my entire year’s earnings for my tax return, and even though i thought i was doing more paid work than last year, i actually ended up with less money! sucks when that happens!)

but my $9 bowl of mushroom soup made it all better. up on the chalkboard it said “cream of mushroom soup”, but after interrogating the countergirl to find out if there were actual mushroom bits in it, i was delighted to receive an enormous bowl of pureed brown mushrooms, with mushroom bits, slices even, all the way through.

maeve ended up eating most of the oversized inside-out unagi maki that i’d thought we’d share. it was a splendid vision in the glass case, its outer layer made up of artfully sliced avocado and seaweed sprinkles. it came with a salad of lightly dressed rocket leaves, and a little receptacle of wasabi and soy sauce fish.

we are thinking of moving in.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 July 2006 at 5:10 pm

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

Category Archives: snacks

Click

Search

Categories

Archives