ragingyoghurt » adventures in good eating etc.

two picnics in five days! i really do enjoy a picnic, even (or maybe, especially) when the preparation, in today’s case, has been along the lines of, “let’s get something from that food court,” and “shall we take it to that park on the corner?”.

sunday afternoon, we walked down darling in the hot hot heat. stopping at about life for as long as it took to procure:
– a bag of paprika potato chips
– a punnet of blueberries and a punnet of raspberries
– a large fruit salad, consisting two kinds of melon, pineapple, mango, strawberries and blueberries (so many blueberries — the ladle girl kept scooping extra spoons of blueberries as afterthoughts!)
– a tub of fetta stuffed red peppers
– a pearl barley salad and a roast vegetable salad
– a blueberry pop for me: watermelon, blueberries and sorbet in a blender
– a bottle of organic ginger beer for the boy: the surprise at checkout was that it cost $ 5.20 for 500ml.

…then continued walking (and walking and walking) to callan park where sprawling and eating ensued. dinner that evening was unnecessary, although i suddenly found myself finishing a half-eaten bag of paprika chips, and instantly regretting it.

this afternoon, we caught a ferry into the city and stumbled into a nearby food court that was just working up to lunchtime crush. we came away with:
– a schnitzel and eggplant focaccia sandwich for the boy
– a schnitzel and avocado and lettuce (like, a lettuce patch worth of shredded lettuce) wrap for me
– a very unusual pear, fetta and walnut salad (dressed in wholegrain mustard and mayonnaise. and raisins.

we like a schnitzel, our lot. although we figure the baby probably liked the pear more, the way she shoved fistfuls of it into her mouth, one after the other without bothering with such minor technicalities as swallowing… until we hid the tub of salad and pointed her in the direction of an ugly ibis.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 December 2005 at 6:58 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, lunch

i mostly never buy soft, white bread, ever. but seeing two tubs of pork floss on the internet forced me out the door and down the street one afternoon to find myself a loaf.

i just had to have pork floss on buttered bread.

two days of pork floss buttered bread breakfasts later, i’d had my fill. what to do with soft, white bread? i didn’t want to waste my fancy jams on it, and it would’ve been too meek to stand up to a scraping of vegemite. yes, i could’ve made french toast… but that would’ve entailed “effort”.

behold, the laughing cow cheese spread, bought on a whim at the supermarket last week. if you are unfamiliar with this product, it is sold as a little round cardboard box of individually foil-wrapped wedges with a little red plastic tag for easy unwrapping. the box label as well as the sticker on each cheese wedge features a red laughing cow.

when i was in vietnam a couple years ago, street vendors sold laughing cow banh mi sandwiches. i’d sort of wanted some back then, but the thought of cheese that had been sitting out in the tropical sun all day made me wary. this mild creamy spread is filed in my head as one of the tastes of my childhood, although the truth is we hardly ever had this at home*. my mother was more of a kraft singles mum; she even got the experimental flavours like “hawaiian” which had bits of pineapple mixed into the individually wrapped slices.

*oh! i have just remembered: it is possible to buy laughing cow obanyaki in singapore, and i did. that explains it.

soft, white cheese on soft, white bread: a perfect pairing.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 December 2005 at 6:25 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, snacks

call it reality blogging; this is what i’m eating as i type. a bowl of cherries, strawberries and raspberries, all sweet and flavoursome. it’s making me quite delirious with joy (or is it just the fruit sugars?)… except. there’s a sound of something being dropped in the sink upstairs, and some swearing, and then soft footsteps later, here is the boy at my side holding my most favourite drinking glass which i bought in new york several years ago, in three pieces.

call it irony; the emblem, now in two pieces, says, “drink cheer up”. meh.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 December 2005 at 8:54 pm

permalink | filed under boy, grumble, snacks

lessons i have learnt this week:

if you make banana buttermilk pancakes on sunday, and then save the rest of the buttermilk for an opportune moment when you can make a chocolate cake, even if it’s just two days later, when it comes to the part in the recipe where you add the buttermilk, you will find that you now have half a carton of thick, tangy yoghurt.

if you substitute normal milk for the buttermilk, the cake turns out fine, in as much as a cake can when you’re still experimenting with the hidden hotspots in a still-unfamiiliar fan-forced oven.

if the top of the cake rises way too quickly, and cracks a big, gaping smile all the way around one side, you can shave off the extra high upper lip, and then use pieces of it to fill in the sludgy hole in the middle of the cake where it hasn’t quite cooked through, which you discovered when you sliced the cake in two.

if you sandwich the cake back together with the pink grapefruit preserve that nellie gave you the last time she was in town, it will be a subtle and unexpected citrusy edge to the dark chocolate cake.

if you hide the scarred surface of the cake with a simple but decadent icing made of dark chocolate melted down with a bit of butter and a bit of milk, and if the chocolate you use is scharffen berger, which also came by way of nellie, it will be all glossy good.

it is a most agreeable thing eating chocolate cake for afternoon tea on the balcony, sharing alternate mouthfuls with the child, watching the planes go past.

if you leave chocolate cake on the kitchen bench in the moist, warm summertime, on the fifth day it will develop an intricate lace of tiny bubbles across its glossy chocolate icing, and make you wonder what will happen should you have another slice tomorrow.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 December 2005 at 8:27 pm

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, kid, kitchen

i was writing an entry, which began:

“everything is a little awry. a tad askew. maybe it all started a few days ago when the child pulled at the ribbon strap peeking tantalisingly over the edge of the table, and brought mr camera down with a resounding clunk. despite the clunk-that-means-business, it appeared that everything was fine — still took photographs, and stored them on the XD card — until i tried to turn off the camera and then discovered that the lens no longer retreats all the way into the body of the camera. in fact it retracts as far as it can, than stops and thinks about it, extends itself fully, and then tries again to become streamline… but in vain! all the while it makes a sad little whiny noise, before it gives up into a disappointed silence.”

…and waffled… mmm… waffles… on for a bit more, and then i got distracted and wandered off for several hours, and then i got back and lost interest, as i’m sure you have.

but wait! i have something for you! a festive quiz to celebrate the season which is upon us.

[ via jaki ] what xmas ornament are you?

i am the christmas holly. although prickly, it is said to be able to repel poison and defend from witchcraft. old legend declares that holly first sprung under christ's footsteps, its thorny and scarlet berries, like drops of blood, are symbolic of christ’s sufferings.

ho.ho.ho.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 December 2005 at 2:58 pm

permalink | filed under blog, kid

the apple has left the building.

i never really had the chance to bond with it, so y’know, whatever. in fact, to celebrate the return of $2000 to my bank account, i walked across the mall and bought a $7.15 loaf of bread.

this is the most expensive loaf of bread i’ve ever bought… um, unless you count that time i was in new york when the australian dollar was like, US50c — fiddycent — then i suppose all those loaves of bread win. damn you dean and deluca chocolate challah! $7.15 is not the most expensive loaf of bread i could buy though, around these parts. up the street at victoire, they have a saturday special loaf. this is because the raising agent in this particular loaf is a bottle of french beer. they are kind enough to sell you half a loaf, if is too much (because, obviously for a half loaf is much easier to swallow). why am i telling this story? i don’t know.

for the record, $7.15 buys you a work of art: sonoma‘s organic soy and linseed sourdough. chewy and tangy, and studded with whole soybeans. truly, worth every cent. all 715 of them.

[ insert clever pun: “that’s a lot of bread! guffaw!” ]

i’m sorry. i don’t know what has come over me. perhaps it is the worms.

our backyard has become infested with giant worms. fat, stubby giant worms.

last week, i said to the boy “i was hanging out the laundry today, and there was an enormous slater-looking wormy thing on the ground, and i thought it was dead and after, when i went to remove it, it was gone!”

i hate when that happens. when the dead cockroach/worm/slug/etc turns out not to be dead after all. they scuttle away and laugh at you from the shadows as your head whips round, a little panicky. where are you?

“those are native cockroaches,” said the boy. he is learned. “leave them alone.”

in the ensuing week, these native cockroaches started crawling out of the bushes in great numbers (so call me overreacting, but in the case of giant worms, three is a great enough number), and because it’s been so hot of late — 38°C on thursday — they have been dying of heatstroke on the sunbaked tiles and then gradually blackening over the next few days.

saturday, the boy was out back, and i pointed out the three corpses in varying stages of carbonisation. “why are they called native cockroaches anyway? they don’t even look like cockroaches.”

“oh. those aren’t native cockroaches. i thought you were talking about something else.”

“so they’re just giant worms?”

“yup.”

i was hanging out the laundry later, and i looked over at the child, who’d been quietly poking at a pile of dried leaves with a garden fork. she made a grimacy, wincy face and held out to me a flaccid black thing. it was a dead giant worm!! i don’t know if it was an instinctive girly reaction or if she had actually licked it, but we got the hell out of there, after i checked to see that the worm was still intact (it was), and shook her hand most violently to release the worm. i mean, i surely wasn’t going to touch it.

shudder.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 December 2005 at 4:56 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, kid

i was feeling virtuous the other night, having finally stepped into the swimming pool for actual swimming, as opposed to paddling or splashing about or pushing the baby and her floaty-seat-ring from one end of the pool to the other. i set my ambitions low; after all it had been a ghastly 20 months or so since i had the pleasure of doing laps. but after i’d done five, i thought maybe i could get to ten, and then when i reached ten, it didn’t seem so hard to get to fifteen, and by twenty-two i thought i could probably get to thirty… but i didn’t stick around to find out.

instead i came home, and made myself a celebratory mini kaiseki: miso soup with spinach and wheat cakes (the spinach and wheat cakes come freezedried in a silver sachet!), steamed beans, pumpkin and potato in a sesame-mirin-dressing, some bits of chinatown chicken and duck, and because we like carbohydrates around here, a bowl of white rice.

how pleasant, this tingly feeling in one’s muscles.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 December 2005 at 10:37 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen

what is a blog for if not to taunt a sibling on the other side of the world about treats you just found on a chinatown expedition? after a wanton display of white rabbits — lychee white rabbits — which i instantly coveted, nellie was nice enough to actually send me some.

you know white rabbits, no? the milky chewy candy wrapped up in a slip of rice paper? i was about to say that the lychee ones are even better, being somewhat less cloying and milky, but perhaps it is more accurate to say they are different. a little sharper with a mysterious and subtle… hmm, what’s that flavour? aahh. lychee!

a package of candy in the mail is a sweet surprise, but candy arranged snug in a blue leather candy purse (from orla kiely no less) is an interactive experience involving placing said purse on a worthy surface and savouring its beauty, unzipping and zipping and unzipping and removing piece by piece the candy, noting the differences between the original white rabbit wrappers and these ones (smiling lychee duo atop a banner reading “lychee” in chinese and english, with a tiny white rabbit logo along the edge), and then placing each little baton neatly back in its place. and then repeating the sequence over the next couple of days before finally unwrapping one and eating it, slowly. well, that was my experience.

a much more awful experience is taking a dud powerbook into the apple service centre at broadway, where the girl on reception will negate everything the phone support guys have told you over the last two days, and ask if you would like to book your brand new dud in and have the problem assessed in seven to ten working days.

“you ask like i have an option,” i said. “why, what else can i do?”
“yeah, no, yeah, you have to book it in.” she was blonde, but also, she was young.

if i want it seen to faster i can pay $80 for a rush service. she will not let me use her phone to call the support line, or the store, to verify all she has told me. “the apple shop and the apple phone support and us, we are all separate agencies and have nothing to do with each other. and we cannot call and speak on anyone’s behalf. ever. we can’t let you use our phones because it will tie up our lines. and we do not seem to have a phonebook we can lend you.”

resisting the urge to break her or the shiny white computer on her desk — or let’s be honest, the chunk of aluminium alloy weighing me down, i embarked on a chinatown expedition of my own. specifically i wanted meats. chinatown meats! but i was open to anything else that might throw itself in my way.

in front of a sweet shop i made the kind of abrupt stop where your whole body goes rigid, and then anchored at the feet, the top of you wobbles a bit and vibrates to a halt. they had constructed a stove in the window and were cooking up a storm of obanyaki. four flavours of obanyaki: redbean, custard (“the best in sydney”, is what the sign said), chocolate, and green tea. “delicious!” said mr. sign, and “buy three for $5!”, which i thought was diabolically clever, because which flavour does one leave out? in fact, none, because i played into their dastardly plan, and came away with custard, redbean, two chocolates and two green teas. “thank you. have a great day,” said the smiley counter girl.

and then meats were procured: char siu and siu yok and, because i couldn’t decide between soya chickane — i typed chicken, and this is what came out instead — and roast duck, i got a half of each. and green sauce. and because the bubble tea merchant is just a few doors down, and there was a sign outside that said, “happy 4th birthday easy way, 20% off all drinks”, i added some mango blended ice (for the boy) and pickled plum blended ice (for me) to my trusty shopping bag.

who’s the postergirl for that modern affliction of buying stuff to make you feel better? that would be me, doing lucky dips for obanyaki at the bus stop. it was the custard one, and may well have been the best in sydney, still warm and cakey on the outside, and creamy-gooey hot custard within.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 December 2005 at 7:58 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, candy, drink, grumble, nellie, shoping, snacks

i don’t know how these things happen.

saturday morning i left the house, leaving a speech bubble trailing behind me: “im just going to the apple shop up the street. and then maybe i’ll go into the city. i’m not buying a computer today. i’m just going to have a look. i’m not buying a computer today. i’m just researching. i’m not buying…”

going to the apple shop is like going to a cake shop, all those things i want to lick and touch, behind glass display cases. the cake shop is generally more fun, because i usually come away with something, and in the process i haven’t had to think of smart-sounding questions to ask the salesperson so he doesn’t think i’m a bimbo.

so, saturday, i think i asked about RAM and processors, and running classic, and so they knew i was a savvy consumer, i also asked if they give discounts for cash sales. (“yes, but not much,” was the reply.)

and then the bus to the city, and a bowl of hae mee (which, due to the two halves of a prawn and the 27 strips of chicken gracing the noodles, should be renamed “kae mee”), and a lift up to electronics where i asked about RAM and processors and classic, and “what do you mean, i won’t be able to start up in OS9 unless i have a hardware-specific version of the installation software and where do i get this from and are you serious? my friends or ebay?”

at one point, one of the questions i asked was, “what’s the difference between this model and this model?”, identical but for 10% off the one hidden in the shadows.

“oh. this one,” said the salesperson, pointing to the slightly more expensive one gleaming in the spotlights, “has a faster graphics card…”
“um. uh huh?”
“but also, if you take this one we will throw in microsoft office and a bag.”
“oh. um.” i said. “what colour is the bag?”

shortly after that i had to take the lift back downstairs. besides telling me that the bag was available in black and red or black and green, the salesperson also told me that the promotion ended today, no, actually, tomorrow. i had decisions to make. i needed strength. i had a weak latte and a tiny chocolate-raspberry brownie. i read the product brochures over and over. i sent out two SOS SMSs. one reply came immediately: “do it”. the other, much later: “i was asleep”.

procrastinating, i got off the elevator at christmas foods and finally surrendered to the pink and silver-foiled wonder that is lindt’s new petites merveilles, that i had stalked twice previously while prowling the twinkly aisles. that gnawing feeling in my stomach intensified as i rode the escalator up a floor, but i couldn’t tell if it was the coffee or the impending purchase.

“ah! you’re back,” said the salesperson. “you went for a walk to think about it?”
“i had some chocolate and thought about it,” i said, and, “i’m a little bit stressed out right now.”

and so. it sits gleaming on my desk right now, this magnificent silver beast. stone cold. i haven’t really used it yet, because the battery doesn’t charge. two calls to the tech support boffins, and still the battery sits at 0% full — the optimist in me would say 100% empty — and the time needed to fully charge fluctuates between 144 and 200 minutes, even though it’s been plugged in for three days.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 November 2005 at 5:12 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, grumble, shoping

i bought a tray of brussels sprouts some time ago, and they’d since been sitting at the bottom of the veggie drawer in the fridge. i’d say about three weeks, as they were purchased while i was at the fish markets with my mother. of course.

i remember, when they were still fresh, or at least, freshly procured, that i said to the boy, “and i’m going to roast these! with bacon!” to which he wrinkled up his nose and said, “i like them boiled.”

“but,” i said, “roasted, with bits of bacon!”

and so nothing ensued.

last night i announced, “i’m going to make brussels sprouts pasta. with bacon.”
“you could use the leeks.”
“um.”

the bacon was also from when my mother was here. and what’s this? half a tub of rocket, from when my mother was here? sure. and this pesto? three weeks old and counting? ah what the hell.

it started with butter and olive oil, and then gradually, bacon fat; it could not go wrong. in my bowl it was slurpy and salty and bitter ’round the edges.

—

meanwhile, in the mailroom today, look what stellou sent me! the new chris ware book and a large bar of pink cherry nougat only slightly soft and squidgy from the perils of international post. it was just sunday that i stood in front of a bookcase at kinokuniya, gazing wistfully at said volume and then stroking it most gollum-like. and the nougat? well, it’s pink! and there are cherries! and it’s from carluccio. thank you, nellie! happy birthday to me!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 24 November 2005 at 10:48 am

permalink | filed under bookshelf, dinner, nellie, snacks

Click

Search

Categories

Archives