i’m not much of a twitterer (tweeter? twit?). that whole twitter scene is far too noisy for me. of course, it has its uses: i did get that chocolate bar from @thirdrawerdown.

and just the other day, a tweet by @grabyourfork alerted me to the existence of scone toast. i have been mildly curious every time i’ve been to the supermarket and noticed the crumpet toast, but have so far managed to not buy it due to my general meh-ness about crumpets. but scones — scones are different: warm and fluffy vehicles for copious amounts of jam and cream. in fact, what i twittered back was “any excuse to eat thick cream on bread”. and then i went out to the supermarket and bought myself a loaf.

scone toast is part of tip top’s café range, which you may remember from café raisin toast, which i had dismissed as being ridiculous because it appeared to be normal raisin toast, only sliced thicker. scone toast, according to the website, “has been inspired by the taste and texture of traditional scones, and is presented in a thick cut, flour dusted loaf.”

thick slices indeed! 2cm blocks of spongy white bread. once toasted, i ignored the pitiful serving suggestion on the bag — note paltry dab of cream attached to the toast with a tiny puddle of jam — and slathered the slice with raspberry jam, several dollops of whipped cream, and sliced strawberries. and it was… ok. it had quite a light, chewy texture, and a fleeting taste of an actual scone, but in the end it was more bready than crumbly-cakey. quite a bit more enjoyment was to be had from the berries and cream.

the next day i had another slice with a good smear of home-made lemon curd, and i couldn’t help but think that there were other, better breads that i’d rather be eating.

so yeah, it wasn’t terrible by any means, and i can’t even say i’m disappointed. i mean, if it had been delicious and sconey then i would have been truly surprised and pleased. for now, i’ll save my stomach space for real scones, and half-heartedly await the next installment in the café series. maybe a sub-par banana bread?

speaking of twitter, i recently added @farmtable to my stream, a restaurant in san francisco about which i know nothing; it was mentioned randomly on someone’s blog. they mostly post their daily menus, which makes for quite a delicious stream-of-consciousness:

chocolate cake w edible flowers
about 7 hours ago

prosciutto butter sandwich w scallion oil. chicken posole soup. little gem salad w cherry tomatoes zucchini radish & creamy basil dressing
about 8 hours ago

hb eggs over baguette w smoked salmon capers zucchini yogurt dill sauce. dt=ww w panir honey strawberries boysenberries. apricot bcakes.
about 11 hours ago

pm: roasted zucchini w housemade hummus & mint oil on sourdough, chicken pozole soup, mixed greens w tuna salad
4:45AM Jun 17th

spicy tuna salad sandwich w eggs. moroccan chickpea soup. mixed baby green salad w nectarines pecans chevre & vinaigrette. cherry pie!
4:36AM Jun 16th

hb eggs on baguette w summer squash, leeks, pantaleo cheese. dt=pan de mie w white nectarines fromage blanc blueberries. cereal is back!
1:50AM Jun 16th

pm: farro salad w basil spring onions baby carrots & avocado, moroccan chickpea soup, pulled pork on challah, yogurt cake, cardamom palmiers
5:02AM Jun 15th

am: cherry brioche bread pudding, hb eggs over baguette w burrata carmalized spring onions basil oil, dt-mascarpone bananas toasted pecans ww
2:02AM Jun 15th

white peach bread pudding, roasted white peaches bacon chevre on pan de mie, dt-pan de mie mascarpone cherries pecans, coconut chard soup
4:32AM Jun 13th

little gems blue cheese radish lemon walnut dressing, yogurt cake, fromage blanc tart w mixed berries, orange blossom olive oil cake
4:32AM Jun 13th

pm: meatloaf friday! coconut and red chard soup, mixed greens strawberries walnuts balsamic vinaigrette, pecan rounds, fudgy brownies
4:58AM Jun 12th

pm: bacon arugula ascutney mt cheese on baguette, carrot & german butterball potato soup, mixed greens w strawberries chevre walnuts balasami
4:58AM Jun 11th

pm: egg salad on sourdough, creamy tomato soup, rooftop greens baby carrots radish spring onions w housemade green goddess dressing
6:21AM Jun 10th

am: dt-pan de mie fromage blanc mixed berries honey, hb eggs over baguette mixed sauteed summer squash fresh chevre, polenta maple b cakes
2:30AM Jun 10th

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.

call me common, but i really like sweet, flavoured yoghurt. if they would just make a chocolate cheesecake yoghurt, i would be the first in line. but it looks like the brief period of a couple years ago, where the refrigerated shelves held such exotic flavours as blueberry pancake yoghurt, is just so two years ago. these days, it’s all the regular fruit flavours, or vanilla. so i don’t really buy the glop anymore.

that said, i really do like the new range from dairy farmers. in particular, i really like the packaging of the new range from dairy farmers, particularly in particular the raspberry-and-cream one. just look at those dewy, plump raspberries, covering the entire surface of the waxed paper cup. it feels good, this waxed paper cup, a hefty little thing in your hand, being pulled off the shelf and into your basket.

it is thick and creamy, as the label says, even though the good, honest country folk in the ad don’t say anything about the gelatine, tapioca-based thickener and vegetable gum in the mix. whatever. it feels good going down.

it is pale pink, and not cloyingly sweet (though this would really depend on your personal sweetness threshold), and there are bits of real raspberries in there. i thought it might be extra good if i added some fresh berries (fresh from the punnet) too. and it was!

the bag says: yogurt gums. soft yogurt confectionery. with real fruit juice. no artificial colours. 99% fat free. less kilojoules than many other treats.

still, the first ingredient listed is sugar, followed closely (in second place) by glucose syrup. and because i’m sitting here (dressed rather fetchingly in the singlet and boxer shorts i slept in, and with my hair in a messy pony tail — oh yes, i feel exactly like heidi klum in the ad) eating them from the bag, my throat has that tight gaggy feeling from eating too much sweet all at once, and my stomach feels raw and empty.

i shall stop eating them now. for now. the yoghurty tang is most compelling, and the pear-flavoured gummy tastes just like a real pear.

[ i also found, in kmart, peach yoghurt chupachups, but perhaps that is a story for another day. ]

but the yoghurt bounty continues. trawling the aisles of another supermarket on sunday, i found biore with yoghurt extract. i’m not sure exactly what the yoghurt does in the facewash, and the packaging blurb doesn’t go into such detail; maybe they don’t know either. maybe it is just a cunning plan to sell facewash.

the thing is, a girl needs to wash her face when she’s in singapore, all hot and sticky. yes! here i am!

it’s just, my way of keeping the junk food beast in check is to only buy things like chips or chocolate biscuits or ice cream when they’re on special.

ok, plus, i’m just sad that way.

monday night, almost 8.30, i walked to the supermarket after putting the kid to bed. we needed milk. it was drizzling a little and the sidewalk was mostly clear except for those people outside the thai restaurant and the kebab shop. the supermarket aisles were easy.

this is what was on special, that i bought:
- two bottles of fresh peach fragrance dishwashing detergent
- a bag of frozen baby peas
- a toothbrush
- an avocado

this is what was on special, that i didn’t buy, although i really wanted to:
- english lamb and mint flavoured potato chips
(i think they’re a special release for the commonwealth games. there was also australian sausage sizzle and canadian bacon and cheese, but, hmm, no representatives from all those other countries with predominantly black or brown or yellow people.)
- oreo wafer sticks
(chocolate wafers filled with that pigfat stuff, covered in chocolate. i almost got them, until i read the ingredients list and discovered the primary ingredient was vegetable oil. maybe i should have got them anyway; i mean, what a testament to alchemy!)

then there was this:

what happens when a 23-year old marketing graduate gets together with a brand management guru with 20 years experience is tampons in a little pink stripey tin. apparently they are redefining tampons as “a premium fashion accessory” and “a gorgeous indulgence”.

they weren’t on special, but i bought them anyway. clearly i need to do the grocery shopping in the daytime, with the increasingly grumbly kid in the unwieldy stroller, bumper to bumper with all those other urban warriors. clearly.

some nights what you want to do is sit, legs up, lengthways on the couch, reading “vogue”. eating an ice cream sundae. see? it’s even a suitably gaunt ice cream sundae. (i’ve actually only done this the once, last week, but it was so pleasant i will do it again.)

[ in response to your question from the other month, hikaru-san, i don't subscribe to any magazines -- call it a lack of faith: maybe next month will suck -- but if someone were to bestow a subscription on me, "vogue" would be on the wishlist. whoulda thunk? and then would it be the US, UK or um, Australian edition? one day i will buy myself a subscription to "the new yorker". when i was younger, i subscribed to "new internationalist", and then younger still, the "lucasfilm fanclub newsletter", and further way back, "stickers and stuff". in between i was also given subscriptions to "readers digest" and "national geographic". i know. ]

the morning after the ice cream sundae, i was cold sweating and blacking out in a photo gallery, vomiting a bottle of fizzy apple juice into a gutter, entangled in stomach cramps and dizziness, and seeing through the weekend on all of two cups of sweet black tea and three slices of buttered toast. no doubt some strain of monster flu to herald in the spring. however by sunday night i decided that the dizziness and pangs were by now actually caused by hunger, so i cooked up a pot of spag bol (but with curly fettucine. have you seen it? it’s like normal fettucine except one edge of it is ruffled! oh the mouth feel!) and staggered down the road to recovery.

is this what blogging is? i can’t quite remember. a couple weeks away becomes a month, and then another month of being without the internet as the ISP passes you on to the phone company and the phone company returns the volley… to another phone company. ch. and so a new season, and a new suburb…

…and this morning at the supermarket there was a new product, i think a cross-promotion with the willy wonka movie: bite-sized chocolate pikelets — “eat them straight out of the bag!” said the bag. i just did, and i think the people who wrote the bag were being optimistic. the pikelets were chocolatey, but somewhat flaccid, and cold. yes, i ate the second one to be sure, and then the third because hey, they had grown on me. the thing is, don’t eat them out of the bag, but toast them lightly and then put ice cream on them, and berries, and chocolate sauce.

you see? always it comes back to the sundaes.

i found myself in the city again today, due to my mobile phone jumping out of my bag while we were at david jones yesterday; someone nicely handed it in at the cashier’s desk. of course had they decided to take the phone and ring up a great whopping bill, they would have discovered that i had all of $2.70 credits left. so, bah, there was no reason for me to upgrade to a shiny new phone with a colour screen and a camera. anyway, it’s not like i have a spare $500 lying around.

fortunately, this afternoon i had a spare $8.80, which is what four krispy kreme doughnuts — including a caramel crunch doughnut — cost. and suddenly there i was at the store, trying to wrestle the urban warrior pram up to the counter.

i’m not a fan of caramel, but i thought it was necessary to have one for research and documentation purposes. so. this is a yeasty doughnut filled with rather less caramel kreme than you’d hope for even if you weren’t a fan of caramel. the top is glazed with chocolate, and then sprinkled with crunchy bits. it was not as sweet as other kk doughnuts i’ve had (i usually go for the sugar glazed variety: the other three i got today were glazed sour cream, glazed devil’s food and glazed blueberry), and in fact it was a pleasant doughnut experience that i would repeat, especially with a cup of unsweetened black tea. perhaps next time i will try not to crumb all over my desk.

in short, it was rather like eating a golden gaytime, in doughnut form.

which reminds me, you can now get a tim tam cornetto, but having only seen billboards for this new product, i can only imagine that it would be somewhat less good than a tim tam, and possibly a little better than a regular cornetto. has anyone encountered one?

you know how sometimes you want pancakes for breakfast, but you’re too sleepy to chew? guess what!

yes, it’s creamy blueberry pancake yoghurt, which is a delicate purple colour and studded through with actual blueberries. it comes in a six pack with strawberry pancake and lemon pancake yoghurt, and i was walking down the dairy aisle of the supermarket a couple weeks ago, and suddenly the block of yoghurt was in my hands.

i was telling my sister about this quite impressive alchemy, but she interrupted me with an unpleasant gagging noise and said, “stop! do not tell me anymore, i don’t want to hear it”. the thing is, it really wasn’t horrible at all.

there are three new sorts of tim tams: one with a truffle cream filling (maybe a truffle creme filling), one with a chilli chocolate filling, and the one i did buy, the black forest tim tam. dark chocolate on the outside with a slightly gummy thread of “cherry” flavoured goo on the inside. feh.

there is possibly the best kettle chip ever! kettle chips are the tastiest chip to begin with, and the sour cream and sweet chilli ones really raised the chip stakes. but now that they come in wasabi and soy flavour, there is just no need to spend any more time in the chip aisle wondering which bag to get. this is a salty and tangy and crunchy chip, with a subtle wasabi effect. none of that nose-clearing, face-scrunching bravado that pepsimax sorts in sushi restaurants display, dredging their bits of fish in the little green mountains. hurrah!

there is this:

according to the text on the back of the package, the chips are “combined with your favourite chinese flavours. so you don’t have to leave home to experience the taste of your favourite chinese restaurant.” these chips were not discernably beefy (or special saucy), but they were kind of alright. the chinese fortune that i found inside said “someone called larry will call you soon”.