ragingyoghurt » adventures in good eating etc.

i was reading technicolor.org yesterday, when the boy, seeing the whimsical drawing which serves as the page header — who doesn’t like whimsy? — asked, “what’s that?”.

“um, it’s just this girl’s website,” i replied. “just a blog.” the boy does not approve of this blogging business. at the best of times, he shakes his head and rolls his eyes and mutters something about strange lifestyles of the young generation; at the worst of times i am chastised for my affliction of reading and writing on the internet, instead of interacting with real people.

yesterday, after he shook his head and rolled his eyes, i explained that my favourite fiction reading was that sort of first person chatty rambling, all that jay mcinerny, hanif kureishi stuff i read while growing up, and so it wasn’t all that different reading blogs.

one of my favourite blogs is momo freaks out. o how i have laughed out loud reading it over the last couple of years. but momo is ending her blog in a month, and i feel a tinge of sadness. it is only a small tinge. after all i do not know momo, and chances are another blog will come along and win me over with wit and charm.

today he told me he hates me.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 May 2005 at 6:40 pm

permalink | filed under blog, boy

note, if you will, that the level of purple beet brine in the jar is “half”. o treacherous beet brine! how you conceal the fact that the number of pieces of pickled beets within your murky depths is “two”. by the time this disagreeable fact was discovered, the turkish bread had been toasted, the avocado sliced and arranged, and the mind set on a crowning glory of pickled beets.

alas. the crowning glory ended up being mainly bits of onion dredged from the beet brine, and a slice of salami. of course, it was yummy nonetheless, so i’m not really complaining. alls i’m saying is sometimes you just really want beets…

tchk.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 May 2005 at 9:11 pm

permalink | filed under grumble, lunch

and so the feta adventures continue. one of my favourite things to do with feta or goat cheese … (or maybe any sort of spreadable or crumbly, salty white cheese, or maybe any cheese — except blue or that maggoty sicilian stuff) is have it with bread and jam. oh that combination of sweet and salty, fruity and creamy, mmm… today’s program was brought to you by a slice of light rye and sweet-tart cherry jam.

in other food adventure news… well, there must have been some food eaten, after all it has been like, 5000 years since the last update. what stands out the most though, has been the daily lunchtime treats of vegetable puree. i have run the gamut from carrot to sweet potato to pumpkin and back to carrot. yes. the child is being “introduced to solids”, and now she probably thinks that all food is orange.

in between steaming and blending and getting it all into a very small mouth, it’s been inevitable that very small spoonfuls have made their way into my mouth too. it really is just so tasty! and it’s a bonus that i don’t have to chew.

today’s lunch of cauliflower puree (tinged orange because it got mixed in with some leftover carrot puree) was well-received by all parties, and ended with teething rusks all ’round.

well. i thought it was important i familiarise myself with these exotic new tastes and textures. (sadly this extended to a sip of the prune juice that the early childhood nurse recommended to deconstipate the child.)

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 May 2005 at 3:11 pm

permalink | filed under kid, snacks

at about 4am i was on the couch downstairs to escape the boy’s snoring. it was to be the last time i would be asleep all day. i knew i was asleep because i was dreaming that i was sitting at my computer, and i heard the baby cry, and the boy brought the baby to me to be fed, and by “brought” i mean that he held her hand and walked her over, because evidently dream baby could walk. real life baby though, cannot, and so i sleepclimbed the stairs to the bedroom, where she actually was having a bit of a grumble. the boy optimistically thought he’d be able to put her back to sleep and sent me back downstairs, where for an hour and a half i lay awake listening to her emit sporadic beeping noises, just like that smoke alarm whose battery is running low. then at 5.40, when the boy decided that he’d had enough, child was unceremoniusly plonked back in the cot, and the boy appeared downstairs with a frown and a blanket. oh, unhappy baby! so. back upstairs, fed the child, who seemed to go back to sleep up until the point she was put back in her cot, when she decided to be awake for the day. it was 6am, there were birds chirping, fair enough. so. back downstairs, where the next two hours were spent entertaining the baby, washing the dishes and baking a batch of ginger ale scones. before i knew it it was time to put the baby back to bed and get dressed for yoga.

yoga makes it all better.

and so do instant noodles! it was all i could fathom “cooking” tonight following a post-yoga afternoon of a couple of not-quite naps inbetween laundry and the baby and dishes and the baby and the internet and the baby. the alternative was an old christmas pudding and cream — i would only have felt a little bit guilty, and it would have been tasty i’m sure.

but in the end the noodles won. i resisted the temptation to follow the instructions on the pack —
“place the rice vermicelli, soup base and seasoning oil into a bowl. pour in 400cc of boiling water. cover up the bowl for 3 minutes. and now soft and appetizing rice vermicelli is ready for serving.” — yum. and instead put a pot on the stove. it only extends the cooking time to ten minutes, to add such things as pork dumplings, pumpkin, chinese broccoli, lotus root, bamboo shoots and a sprinkle of japanese chili pepper, and makes it a bowl of nourishment and comfort.

my preferred brand is a relic of my childhood: chu qian yi ding. tonight i had the artificial beef flavoured rice vermicelli, but look at all the flavours the normal wheat noodles come in. it’s rather amazing what comes out of a little silver foil packet.

and maybe there is room for pudding and cream after all.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 May 2005 at 7:50 pm

permalink | filed under boy, dinner, grumble, kid

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.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 May 2005 at 8:36 am

permalink | filed under breakfast, nellie, packaging, something new

on a day when there happens to be a block of feta in the fridge, as well as eggs and milk, it may pop into your head that a feta omelette needs to be had. and if you were also reading a particular foodblog that morning, it might spur you on to ensure that such an omelette would be had for lunch.

and so such and such were placed in a pan, and topped with a couple handfuls of incidental rocket (sadly, supermarket rocket, which seemed to have no taste of rocket, or anything), and then folded over and plopped onto some soy-linseed sourdough. and a forgotten jar of pickled beetroot at the bottom-back of the fridge was happy to oblige.

but why so lucky as to have feta in the fridge? it’s just that when my mother was here the other month, one of the things she left me was two slimy mackerel in the freezer. bet that mackerel thought that calling itself “slimy” would be some sort of deterrent, a survival tactic. HAHA fishy, the joke’s on you! we will eat you nonetheless, for you are not only not slimy, but quite meaty and tasty, with that feeling between my molars, of oily fish.

“just brush them with olive oil and season with salt and pepper,” said my mother before she boarded that plane home, and so i did. while the boy cooked them up on the balcony barbeque, i roasted some thick slices of desiree potato and threw together a greekish-nicoiseish salad of cucumber, green beans, the afore-mentioned rocket, some oven-roasted grape tomatoes and smooth creamy feta. mmm…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 May 2005 at 8:10 am

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen, lunch

hmmm. does it seem like i haven’t posted in a week, and all of a sudden there is a deluge of four? well, maybe to you, not now. but it will when you’re done reading this and the next three down.

it’s just that i had an extremely tasty second breakfast of mushrooms on toast this morning, and i had to share it with you. regular readers probably already know that breakfast is my favourite meal of the day (such a favourite meal that it is not uncommon for me to have two, three or even four of them in the span of a morning), and that mushrooms on toast is my favourite favourite. today i was even lucky enough to have an avocado handy as well as a second loaf of bread.

two loaves of bread? i bought a loaf for 89c at the supermarket on “fresh friday”, and on saturday the boy decided that supermarket bread was objectionable enough not to mention supermarket bread that had been bought yesterday, and procured himself a whole new loaf from the mall bakery. please note that this is the same boy who has, in the past, returned from the supermarket proudly bearing a 50c reduced-for-quick-sale-before-it-expires ham and cheese pizza roll. the bread i bought was baked fresh on “fresh friday”, and um… it was 89c. but see, it wasn’t like he got a fancy artisan loaf. it was just plain old cottonwoolly white bread; it couldn’t have been that much better than the supermarket vienna, could it?

as it turns out, yes, his bread was much better because when i went to cut a slice of mine for the toast component of breakfast, i noticed with horreur that there were tiny little cockroaches crawing all over it. they had infiltrated the bag, which was sealed with one of those bread clippy things and were crawling all over it!

i don’t know that there is a moral to this story. i mean, the moral could be “always have a spare loaf of bread in the house in case of unexpected cockroaches” but that would just be silly.

do you ♥ breakfast? do you flickr? perhaps you are a breakfast fiend.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 May 2005 at 3:18 pm

permalink | filed under boy, breakfast, grumble

i have just been listening to “daisies of the galaxy” by eels, the first time in over a year. it is lovely and amazing, and i really should listen to my CDs more instead of having, like, dr phil on in the background during the day.

yesterday, i finally went back to yoga class. it has taken almost this long to get the kid to the stage where she might not have to eat for the duration of a yoga class and the walk to and fro.

there was a sense of trepidation: does nigh on seven months of no yoga render me all unpliable? could i muddle through a general class, or would i have to go back to beginners all over again?

as it turned out, joy, i could keep up with the generals, and all those months of pregnancy yoga meant that i could still squat like a chinaman during squatting pose. by the end of the class i was feeling rather good — muscles all warm and wobbly, like.

the best part about yoga is that it is just down the street from cafe banchetto, on devonshire, where some days you can get a takeaway sandwich with a large grilled mushroom in it.

there were other roasted vegetables thrown in as well, some salad greens and ricotta — see how the giant mushroom has left a fossilised imprint of itself in the creamy white. oh how it glistens!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 May 2005 at 1:57 pm

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

what is better — and more efficient — than ice cream after lunch? i think you will agree that the answer is, “ice cream for lunch”.

when i met ana at passionflower at lunchtime, as planned, it transpired that she, feeling peckish a little earlier, had already eaten a crepe uptown. huh. it only briefly crossed my mind that i should maybe order something savoury and nutritious before having ice cream for dessert, but then i came to my senses: anything other than ice cream would take up too much ice cream space in my stomach.

the passionflower menu is the kind with pictures in it, which may or may not make things harder. when the waitress came ’round the third time to take our orders, i asked for the black and white seduction, but by the time anna had made her choice, i had already changed my mind. an eastern banana split, please!

see? it is a scoop of maccha ice cream, a scoop of taro ice cream, a scoop of sticky rice ice cream, a banana, lychee-orange compote and a waffle bowl. so that’s what a $12.50 dish of ice cream looks like.

passionflower went through a stage where it was like something had gone wrong in their freezer and made the ice cream less creamy and more icy, but now everything is well and good. they also have a flavour which wasn’t there the last time i visited — a while ago — lychee and rose petal. it is pink and creamy with bits of actual lychee mixed through. you can see a scoop of it there, across the table, in front of ana. it was yummy, and made me smile.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 May 2005 at 12:40 pm

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, lunch

and so a week goes by…

anyway. thursday, i received an email from the baker’s wife, so to speak. a girl who had googled “bourke street bakery” as you do (or, as i do from time to time to see if they finally have a website up, with pictures of chocolate tarts), found an earlier posting i made about said bakery, and being the ladyfriend of the bourke street baker, wrote to say she was pleased i like the bakery.

i was quite a little bit thrilled to get this email. it was as though a celebrity, say eric stoltz, had responded to something i had said about him without knowing he was behind me all the while, listening.

the eric stoltz story is that a friend of a friend was in new york once, in a cinema, and before the film began, one of those ads with trivia questions had the answer “eric stoltz”, which prompted a conversation between this girl and her companion, along the lines of “whatever happened to eric stoltz?”. a discussion of eric stoltz ensued, and they noticed that every now and again the guy seated behind them would laugh a quiet little laugh in response to something they had said.

do i need to to continue this story? you already know that the film kicked in, and then it was over, and as they exited the cinema, they came face to face with eric stoltz, who nodded in greeting and smiled and said “hello ladies”.

mmm… eric stoltz. oh wait! i mean, mmm… chocolate tarts.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 May 2005 at 11:42 am

permalink | filed under blog, misc

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