ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: tv

“californication” eh? somehow i made it past the advertising blitz, the suntanned duchovny busstop posters, the pneumatic breasts of the first episode, the last-minute “mum, i want you to read me a story”… to watch episode two with a chocolate treat and a pot of mint tea by my side.

is hank moody the new carrie bradshaw? is this just sex in the other city? i much prefer new york, but i do like david duchovny. on tv. remember when he was on “the larry sanders show”? or when he did that episode of “dr katz“? a pan could not be deader. i’m pleased he’s not doing stoopid alien movies anymore.

at zumbo yesterday morning, i admitted my unease at the delicious way the cakes just melted away on my tongue. “you know why that is, don’t you?” asked counterboy.

“because they’re the fattest things on the planet?”

“yep.”

alas.

behold the chocadz. the salted butter caramel ganache melts away to nothing; so quickly, it is just a memory of a ribbon of salty-sweet. sitting on its crunchy hazelnut meringue biscuit base, it is draped in a thin coat of milk chocolate, and a dense sprinkle of rough-hewn hazelnuts. the first time i had this, i was on a plane, too early in the morning, up in the air somewhere between sydney and melbourne. i liked it then, hence the reprise, however it was much funner eating it in bed.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 September 2007 at 9:08 am

permalink | filed under chocolate, tv

i recently met this woman… ok, another mum in the kid’s tuesday music class, and this is what she said to me:

“my husband is away on business tonight, so i’ll be having a lean cuisine — pasta with salmon — and a glass of white wine. and watching “the bill”.”

i mean, in essence this is probably what i’d do too, except what i’d be pulling from my freezer is that braised lamb, mushroom, brandy and rosemary ravioli from peppe’s pasta. while that was boiling, i would saute diced onions, garlic and carrots in olive oil and butter, with a bay leaf and a few drops of water to keep it from drying out. towards the end, i’d add some small florets of broccoli. and then, probably, right at the end, i’d stir in a little extra bit of butter, i dunno, for shine?

by then the ravioli would be ready, and i’d add it to the sauce and swirl it all around just to get it all coated, and i would empty the pot into a large bowl, and it would be delicious, because there is real meat in the pasta, and none of that sawdust or breadcrumb filler you get in the $4 bags of tortellini at the supermarket.

i would eat, propped up with cushions on the blue sofa, and i’d be watching my season 1 DVD of “gilmore girls” with no commentary from the sidelines, and it would be great.

(and then later, while tidying up, i would try to open the fridge with the same hand i’d be using to hold my ceramic butter dish — the one with the cow moulding on the lid — and the fridge door would jerk open suddenly, and the butter dish would spring from my hands, and shatter into several pieces on the floor. which would not be so great, actually, but i would not be upset.)

this woman also said to me, “i don’t eat a lot of bread, because when you think about it, it’s just flour and water, and what is that? glue!”

i don’t know that we can be good friends, is all.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 September 2007 at 11:55 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen, tv

my desk is a mess again, and i haven’t even arrived at the busy time. i am circling the periphery, looking in, pacing myself. just pacing.

at my elbow i have sheets of paper, covered in scribbled lists: lists of amendments to layouts; lists of drawings to make; lists of invoices to send; lists of where to go in queensland.

i have passes to a film on the weekend: “an epic tale of mothers and sons, mothers and daughters, unrequited love, betrayal and secrets… the true story of a glamorous shanghai nightclub singer, who struggles to survive in seventies australia with two young children“. phew!

i have tea: muji jasmin tea ball in a muji glass teapot, good gifts from my good mother.

i have chocolate: a monsieur truffe bar with cocoa solids of 64%. there is some guff on the back of the package about fresh fruity notes and bouquets of dried fruits, but i am simply impressed by how a dark chocolate bar — french, no less (by way of melbourne) — can be so goshdarned creamy.

i have an urgent calling to watch that hideous show, “age of love“.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 August 2007 at 10:30 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate, misc, tv, werk

you feel a little uncomfortable, don’t you? like you need to cross your legs, or check to see if i moo, or something? i can assure you, i continue to be simultaneously enamoured and repulsed.

so, i guess they are more socks than sneakers: japanese socks with rubber soles. apparently, in japan, construction workers and miners wear them? i wonder if pickaxe-through-the-toes incidents are much higher in japan than over here in the land of steel-toecap boots.

of course, i have no need to worry about pickaxe accidents as i whisk deftly up the street in my new cloven-toed sneakers! or, as deftly as i can move while keeping pace with a small person whose legs are just over a foot in length.

when i returned to the store last friday afternoon, the shopgirl asked in greeting, “so, shall i pack these up for you?” she pointed at the ones i’d tried on that morning, black soles, black fabric, chunky white numbers. i looked around the room, trying to buy time, and out the corner of my eye, i saw the flash of red. and i asked to try them on. and i don’t know why i do this to myself, because now i had another thing to wrestle with.

[ red shoes on, red shoes off; black shoes on, black shoes off; repeat ad infinitum... ]

by the end of it, i was squinting into the mirror with a red shoe on my left foot and a black one on my right, and the shopgirl was pretty convinced that i wasn’t a black shoe kinda girl.

so yeah, i got the red ones, and they have a lovely pink lining which matches my pink cloven-toed socks, with the chunky white numbers. they are so light to wear, and the thing i thought would bug me — that wedge inbetween my toes — my feet got used to pretty quickly. in fact, my toes are spread out most comfortably, and there is none of the crippling pain that comes after a day of having them wedged into my allstars, or that pinchy twinge on the side of my little toe from the slightly more comfy jack purcells. the only thing that concerns me is that such whispery light and thin soles are not cushioning my heels as i pound around my concrete environment, and i’m going to pay for this fashion moment with years of chronic knee problems.

(the only other thing that concerns me is that i may have to go back and get the black ones after all.)

but, y’know, fashion! it affects us all at some time. like, the kid has been seeing the new bonds ad on teev. the one where a ring of nubile underwear-clad girls cavort joyously to an infectious brazilian tune? the second time it came on, she said, “give me a little bra and panties, so that i can dance like that.” so yeah, advertising, your work here is done. clearly she is on track to wanting a harem of hideous bratz dolls by the time she’s four. meh.

farewell, my battered jack purcells, you have served me well.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 August 2007 at 9:53 am

permalink | filed under (after a) fashion, around town, kid, tv

i have just eaten too many mini daim candies in quick succession. eight, to be exact. i was pretty sure i’d stop at four, and then six… and now i feel a little tight in the throat, so eight it is. when i impulse-bought a sack of them at the duty free candy shop in the singapore airport, i thought that maybe i now had too many daims, and that it would be a struggle to get through them. but now i see that the cunning daims, with their thick, milky chocolate covering, and their crunchy, salty toffee caramel centers, will have no trouble getting eaten. at all.

i am about to be buried in an avalanche of werk, and will certainly need sustenance. i recently read about someone designing a 144-page exhibition catalogue in four weeks (via india, ink.), so perhaps it can be done after all; i think i have three weeks, for 124 pages.

i wonder, though, if the designer of that catalogue looks after a kid all morning, going to pirate storytime at the library, or two playgrounds on the way to the supermarket to buy watermelon, or like this morning, a meander through the tokyo fiesta in martin place followed by a quick look-in at the lindt shop followed by a sushi picnic at circular quay followed by a clamber up the opera house steps to buy tickets for the babies prom, “yummy in my tummy” in a couple of weeks followed by a trek through the botanical gardens (including somersaults in the grass and duck-chasing) followed by a busride through the city and home followed by stories and successful pottytime and tucking in for naps (followed by eight daims and procrastination reading about the riot at target for stella mccartney frocks. people are crazy.).

my mum has a friend in singapore — her boss, really — whose daughter had twins a little while ago, and worked out this arrangement: the babies stay over at the grandparents’ house during the week, nights included, and then the parents retrieve them for the weekend, unless the boss’s daughter has like, a dinner to go to, or an appointment for a facial or a massage or something, then the babies stay at the grandparents on the weekend too. nightfeeds, night wakings… all done by the grandparents. she’s lucky that way.

because maeve is going through this phase at the moment, where her sippy cup has to be tucked in, and every last finger too, and if something should come untucked during the nap (or, even worse, during the night) then the keening begins.

“maybe her toes are cold,” said my mother, mishearing, over the phone a couple nights ago. “maybe you should put socks on her so she won’t feel the cold and wake up.”

“no, not her toes. she wants her cup to be tucked in.”

my mother is speechless for a time. “wha… her cup?”

“yah.”

“that is sooo funny!”

“funny meh? why don’t you come and tuck her in?”

anyway. so, mother’s boss’s daughter. works in the logistics department at apple. on a whim, i wrote to ask if she could do me an employee discount on an ipod shuffle. she said she had a spare one sitting on her desk, because they just give her one every few months and she’s had so many that she didn’t know who else to give them to anymore. and so she gave it to me. we picked it up on the way to haw par villa. i am lucky that way.

i christened it with “take on me“. mostly, though, i’ve been using it to listen to the mr brown show while doing the dishes after dinner.

i wonder if that exhibition catalog designer has to do the dishes.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 March 2007 at 3:05 pm

permalink | filed under around town, candy, chocolate, kid, tv, werk

perhaps you’ve stumbled across “ready steady cook” in the pandora’s box that is afternoon tv, a sort of cooking gameshow which pairs everyday people and their bag of random groceries with actual chefs (think darren simpson rather than huey or aristos). maybe your favourite chef on the show is tobie puttock, because of the way he curls his lip with scorn at the showoff host, or because he seems irritated at the contestant he’s been dealt, if she is more inclined to chat vacuously to the host than to chop the spring onions. because he’s, like, sort of cute.

you may then already know that he will be heading the melbourne franchise of jamie oliver’s fifteen restaurant, and that he has a cookbook just out, “daily italian“. from this book came the recipe for friday’s potatoes.

sliced potatoes baked in milk with rosemary and garlic. it comes out with a curdly-crunchy crust. the perfect accompaniment for salmon panfried with capers, and a melange of green beans, broccoli and peas cooked up in a tin of tomatoes.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 July 2006 at 3:03 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen, tv

do you eat chicken? do you watch sunrise? i do, quite a bit, and i, um, do… only sometimes, and in small amounts, honest. this morning they had a lady from the chicken board on, to set the record straight on the state of today’s poultry.

and now that i’ve googled “australian poulty association”, i see that that the board are actually called the australian chicken meat federation, and three days ago revealed in a press release that “almost 80% of australians believe that something is added to the australian chicken to make it grow artificially larger, with a staggering 66% of australians believing added hormones are a contributing factor making chickens larger”. ok.

well, i mean, that’s what i thought! have you seen the size of those chicken breasts in the supermarket deli counter? monstrous! sometimes, from my old supermarket at least, they even tasted like chickens of death. but in fact, what the chicken board woman said was that modern chickens are a different breed from the dainty specimens of the past, and comparing the two was like comparing a shetland pony with a workhorse. (and also that any antibiotics given to the birds are no longer in the meat by the time it reaches the consumer, and that organic chicken is no better for you than the other kind is.)

so. you’d believe it wouldn’t you? this chicken lady on a tv show where businesses and tourist attractions pay money to be included in the lineup?

it’s just, having read “my year of meats” (ruth ozeki) a couple of times, and sort of wanting to read “the way we eat: why our food choices matter” (peter singer) — but being sort of afraid to — and to be honest, the size of those chicken breasts is still a little disconcerting…

it’s just, the kid really likes chicken.

hormones and antibiotics aside, organic may not necessarily be better for us, but it probably is a bit better for the chickens. but then after the playground we went to the supermarket to buy a roast chicken for lunch, and the woman behind the counter asked if i wanted the regular $8.48 chicken, or the reduced-for-quick-sale $6 one.

“why’s it reduced for quick sale?” i asked.

“because it’s been out here for more than four hours,” she said, almost like a challenge.

the unspoken question, i suppose, was, how much longer than four hours had it been out here? (and also, did the chicken have a good life?)

but i took it. it fell apart in the woman’s tongs as she wrestled it into a bag. it made a tasty sandwich, on soy and linseed, with avocado, tomato and cheese for the kid, and avocado, sesame seed furikake and chili pepper sprinkles for me.

i still don’t know how i feel about the chicken debate. i want to read the book, even though i know it will make me (more) uneasy about the food i choose to eat. i mean, we can’t all be fruitarians, can we?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 June 2006 at 9:45 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, lunch, shoping, tv

the boy brought home a fundraiser box of maltesers this afternoon. i generally won’t eat cheap and nasty chocolate, but the maltesers? they have undone me. you know them. they are the marble-sized crunchy malty centers in a polished chocolate coat. who’da thought — all that crunchy malt center, and still, according to the ingredients list, the chocolate makes up 75%. the nutritional information below said list informed me that a serve of maltesers would be me consuming just over 10g of fat. there were four servings in the box, and i’m afraid i could quite easily have eaten them all. so i stopped, and put the box back in the fridge, and while i was there i made a simple sundae of vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and a topping of a crumbled up pistachio biscotti, a bright green chewy almond pastey biscuit coated in whole pistachios. hey, i feel good about not getting 42g of fat all from the one source.

i feel bad about not blogging though. it’s not that i haven’t been eating delicious things almost every day…

a couple weeks ago, delirious with hunger on a thursday night shoping expedition, i stumbled into the australian homemade store in the city mall. such a naff name for a shop selling premium chocolate and ice cream, and such a blah logo, but lordy! the chocolate! i bought three squares: dark chocolate with cranberry, earl grey milk chocolate with nuts, and a fig bonzer.

“oh, that is my favourite,” said the chocolate boy. it is a slim layer of soft chocolate and then a fat layer of seedy, figgy bits in caramel, all walled up in milk chocolate. in fact, it was so good it is now my favourite too, and i went back the next week and bought three more.

so, delicious things. the boy made a delicious risotto a few nights ago, with zucchini, peas, parsley and a can of shitake mushrooms. no wine, and no extra-dry vermouth, as counseled by well-wishers on my messageboard, but it was salty and buttery and lacking in nothing. he made it with a whole bag of arborio, so i also had risotto for lunch the next day, and dinner again, and then lunch the day after that.

we also had some delicious pizza one night, from zesti's, up the road, where you can look into the big windows off the street and see chinese people making your pizza.

an ad for some delivery place came on tv as we sat eating.

“argh! look! now they’re making pizza on puff pastry!”
“that looks bloody awful.”
“but is it worse than that three-cheeses-sandwiched-between-three-layers-of-bases thing they did before?”
“that looked awful too.”
“but what about the one where there’s a ring of little cheese-filled rolls around the edge of the pizza, so you can pull them off and eat them one by one?”
“that was revolting!”

our pizza had lovely thin bases, with crusty polenta bottoms. one was topped with: baby octopus, prawns and scallops, none of which were rubbery. the other was topped with: green — pesto and minced-up spinach, and many little cubes of fetta.

so, delicious things a-plenty. but i’ve also been working, and reading a really good book — “the language of baklava“, and coming to terms with the fact that the child may no longer take a second nap in the day, and well, i’ve been trying to not watch so much primetime tv (daytime kid’s programming chews up enough hours), although in my post-malteser-sundae stupor i found myself slumped in front of the men’s olympic ice-figure-skating coverage…

and of course, there’s been “carnivàle“. monday morning i woke at 5.30, and couldn’t get back to sleep. a combination of anticipating the child grunting herself out of slumber, and also the memory of brother justin crashing through the cornfield with a sickle and sophie with her eyes gone black. mainly brother justin though, and as it was, maeve slept in until seven. tchk.

um, what was i saying?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 February 2006 at 9:49 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, boy, chocolate, dinner, kid, tv

what is it with the hoarding? surely not because my grandmother lived through the war? these boxes of cardboard and cardboard boxes, the magazines — you know those stories, the jams, the teas… right now it’s chocolate bars. i go up to the shops knowing that i cannot buy another bottle of jam or packet of tea or bar of chocolate, but despite my best intentions…

despite the valrhona bar (from my kind mother), the pack of haigh’s chocolate-covered marzipan (from my kind father), the scharfen-berger block (from my kind sister, and it’s really cooking chocolate, so it doesn’t count), the slab of italian chocolate nougat (from xmas(s) past… oh dear) all stashed away in a shoe box, i left the supermarket the other day with a lindt intense lemon bar: 47% cocoa with bits of lemon and almond slivers (and oh! apple pulp and pineapple), and then a day later, all giddy like a schoolgirl from being in the wonderland that is about life, i bought (raspberries-blueberries-half-a-pineapple-and) a grizzly bar.

the grizzly bar is one in the managerie of the endangered species chocolate company. the display at checkout was row upon row of chocolate bars with wildlife photographs on the labels: zebras, giraffes, koalas, snow leopards, marine iguanas… the kid started making monkey noises at the chimpanzee bar (72% dark chocolate), but because she is also partial to bears, i managed to get away with the grizzly (70% with raspberries).

you get more chocolate for less money compared to the dagoba roseberry bar and, bonus, it feels creamier on the tongue. later, sitting at the computer, i was going to have a square, and suddenly the entire top row was gone. the thing is, the squares on this bar aren’t even all that clearly delineated; there are suggestive mounds where you can break around if you are so inclined.

at the store, i turned the bar over to see where it was made: unsurprisingly, oregon. 10% of profits are donated to protect endangered species, and the inside of the label contains conservation tips such as:

“Don’t Feed the Bears
Bears that obtain human food, birdseed, pet food, or garbage quickly lose their natural fear of humans. This poses a risk for both human and bear safety. If you visit or live in bear country, learn ways to secure your food and trash.
Protect Our Planet…
It’s the Only One with Chocolate.”

speaking of bears… we have been watching a really good cartoon in the mornings: eddy and the bear. or at least, i have been watching while the kid does her rounds of the living room. nellie, i must insist that you click on the trailer link.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 January 2006 at 11:40 am

permalink | filed under chocolate, kid, tv

o what an inauspicious start to the new year. somehow my < div > tags have become magic spells, which spirit away everything that follows them.

what i wrote last night was that i had a choice between writing an entry, watching reruns of “lost”, reading and sleeping. the blog won, but clearly i should have spent the hour watching “lost” instead. first time ’round, it seemed like the kid would wake for a feed in the last fifteen minutes of every episode. that and the fact that the promos kept promising things that were never delivered… in the end “lost” lost me. i am assured however, in the promos for the next season, that i will find out what’s at the bottom of the hole, in the first three minutes. we shall see.

new year’s eve, me and maeve were talking to the friendly neightbours across the way, and i asked what my balcony was like for that night’s fireworks. “this is the place to be,” they said, and pointed to a large flat thing being towed across the water into our line of sight. “look! here comes the barge from which they set off the fireworks.”

come midnight, i was perched on the balcony, chin on the railing. the fireworks were right there and the building trembled from fifteen minutes of crackle-crackle-BOOM. miraculously, maeve slept through it all.

this year i resolve to be better.

look ma, no < div > tags.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 January 2006 at 7:15 pm

permalink | filed under blog, tv

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