ragingyoghurt » 2004

Monthly Archives: June 2004

if yer walking through the scrum that is the underground passageway between town hall station and the queen victoria building (and beyond), and you inadvertantly look backward towards the space beneath the escalators that used to be a flower shop, you will be surprised (or not, seeing as this has been the current growth sector of the small portable food industry for the last couple of years, following sushi roll holes-in-the-walls and those goddamn city convenience stores) to find that it has become a gelato stand called, i think, “mondo”.

it’s one of those places where the gelato is piled high above the stainless steel tubs, with specimens of the raw product that is the main flavour base perched on the crest. in the front corner of the glass case is a milky white mountain studded through with red. it looks like alpine springtime, snow thinning to reveal new blossoms beneath. this is the flavour: white chocolate and raspberry. i want some.

i should be blogging more regularly, no? maybe you really want to know about the leftover fish congee that i had for dinner last night while watching last week’s “ER” on videotape, or the picnic embarked on, solo, last friday at cremorne point (cheese and tomato with seeded mustard and mayonnaise sandwich, a mandarin and two spicy fruit roll biscuits, on a rock, under a tree, watching the spirit of tasmania sail into the harbour).

you might think that being in the family way, as i am, would result in adventures in more and better eating, what with the crazy food cravings and the eating for two and all, but it’s all been very normal: no weird food has been desired, no extra portions dished out. i can’t even provide pitiful stories of throwing up and having to eat nothing but dry crackers and flat gingerbeer. i could blog about pregnancy in general, but really, everything is so… normal, and other people do it so well already.

slowly, though, i’m outgrowing all my clothes, and the speed at which my intestines fill up with gas is most alarming. a bit past halfway, if there’s one effect on good eating that being knocked up has had, it’s that i can’t fit as much food in my stomach at one go as i once could. here is last night’s conversation with my sister:

nellie: how’s the baboo?
bowb: good. umm. it’s growing. it’s taking up too much space in my belly.
nellie: hah! no space for food!
bowb: yah!
nellie: heh! resentful…

lordy, is that the time? i must go make some mushrooms on toast.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 June 2004 at 11:48 am

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

argh. my life seems to be happening faster than i can blog it. the thing is, i don’t seem to have anything to show for it and i suspect this may have to do with the number of naps being taken.

yesterday, though, no naps were had, and as a result i was able to make pizza (with flour and yeast and tepid water, and kneading and rising!), one with pumpkin, tomato, red onion, chili salami and fetta, and one with a hoisin sauce base topped with slivered ginger and spring onion, sesame oil-drizzled broccoli and some incredible, sweet and tender char siu, the best hostess gift ever, from ben.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 June 2004 at 10:39 am

permalink | filed under dinner, kid

so, i think that you must go see the film “control room“, a very non-propoganda documentary about behind the scenes of the media covering the um… war? in iraq. it’s full of charming, articulate, smart people — which you rarely get to see once the evening news goes to air with the rubble and people firing guns into the air and boiled-down soundbites — and then some really squirmy clips of misters bush and rumsfeld. mrngh.

if you see it at the valhalla, you can walk back up glebe point road after and pop into badde manors for a double scoop of pistachio gelato and sour cherry sorbet. or instead (and this necessitates a special trip back to glebe on my part) you can walk over to chinatown for yumcha. either way, it will be an excellent way to spend a sunny winter morning, packed with education, exercise, tasty treats and fun.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 June 2004 at 8:14 am

permalink | filed under around town, at the movies, snacks

hurray for the queen; if not for her royal highness, there would be no public holiday to celebrate her birthday, in a land sorely lacking in public holidays. monday, given the choice between filing photocopies into a stack of new folders, and going for an excursion to cabramatta, the boy wisely chose not to file. that’s why he’s the school teacher. not too soon, we were on a good train — an express service with no stupid, reasonless stops inbetween stations, and airconditioned — whizzing our way out west.

a very short walk from cabramatta station, we fell into a small dimsum factory and found ourselves in possession of a small paper bag each of assorted dumplings. not ten minutes later, i was perched at a bakery counter, handing over $1.20 for a wedge of pandan chiffon cake. we decided we had to put a stop to this disgraceful behaviour by sitting down to lunch.

egg noodles, glisteny with garlicky oil, and an assortment of roast duck and porks.

something happens to the boy, where having eaten his fill, he is rendered incapable of thinking about and preparing for subsequent meals. fortunately i am free of this sad affliction, and despite our post-lunch activity being primarily the quest for a bamboo steamer (so much harder to find than you would expect in such an intense asian community), my cloth bag slowly (quickly) filled up with these:

an assortment from lawrence cake shop: green and red jelly cakes, a pandan slice and — oh happy nostalgia — a cream horn; and this:

the label says “sticky rice cake”, but in fact it is black sticky rice, and pandan flavour sticky rice, and sandwiched inbetween, mung bean paste and shredded coconut and ground-up peanuts, wrapped in a pancake. surprisingly, the rice is sweet, the mung bean salty, and it is all extremely flavoursome;

and a tub of ginger flavour tofu pudding, and bag of dried longans from thailand.

we were there only for two and a half hours, but it was freakishly warm for winter, and we were wilting. later that night, a dinner made up of a selection of exotic cakes revived us.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 June 2004 at 1:08 pm

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

at the deli counter in david jones food hall, it is possible to get ham in a variety of serving portions. sure, there will always be a certain elegance to “sliced”, and a manic joy to “shredded”, but what i did end up with was “chunks”.

saturday afternoon, still a bit spacey from yoga and too many squatting exercises, i simmered half a bag of frozen peas with a potato and three chunks of ham. the fourth chunk had, minutes earlier, been finely chopped and sauteed with an onion. after a bit, everything but the chunks was blended into a mass of the most soothing pink-flecked green, and then there was this bowl of pea and ham soup, eaten maybe too quickly with pieces of sourdough.

mmm… soup… next i think it will be cauliflower and bacon.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 June 2004 at 9:56 am

permalink | filed under lunch

after that last cherry-flavoured entry, i stumbled into the warehouse of wonder that is fratelli fresh, and emerged quite some time later with a sourdough loaf, a bunch of radishes, four little blocks of hazelnut chocolate that must have been made by little magic people, a jar of cherry jam, and a jar of cherries in syrup. “someone likes cherries,” opined the checkout girl. but, i mean, what a jar.

so far the jar has remained unmolested, but i have a feeling that if i were to rub it a little, a genie might pop out and grant me a lifetime of cherries and/or cherry-related treats. at the very least, he would expand on the label pasted on the lid, helpful with its instructions to “serve with ice cream, gateaux, whipped cream, desserts.”

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 June 2004 at 9:16 pm

permalink | filed under around town, packaging

these days i am quite enamoured of my new nivea cherry lipbalm — “daily care with a Cherry flavour” (their proper noun).

i was walking through priceline the other week, trying to ignore the aisle of discounted lindt chocolate bars, when it crossed my mind that my existing raspberry and vanilla lipbalm felt quite out of date. literally so, for when i put it on, my lips get a bit itchy. moments later i fronted up at the counter with a fresh supply of iron supplements, new lipbalm… and five lindt bars.

the lipbalm now sits by my keyboard, and throughout the day, even when my lips aren’t too crusty with sticky-out bits of dried winter skin, i can unscrew the cap just to inhale that sweet sweet cherry aroma.

ps. it was only after i bought my cherry lipbalm that i remembered i will soon be getting my hands on one of these, via new york, norway, stockholm, paris and singapore, on the wings of a nellie.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 June 2004 at 8:51 am

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, misc, nellie, shoping

have i become someone’s browser’s default homepage? the viewing pattern logged by my stats application seems to indicate so. who are you, mysterious denizen of IP address 211.31.1.x?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 June 2004 at 4:46 pm

permalink | filed under misc

the next best thing to being unemployed is being a freelancer at the end of a bunch of projects, where you can take half a day off and sit in the bastion of tranquility in the middle of the city — the tea centre [specialists in tea of fine quality] — sipping iced tea and nibbling on one of those dipped-in-chocolate, shortbread-and-jam sandwich biscuits, in the company of …mmm… jake gyllenhaal. alas, it is only 2D jake on the cover of glossy airfreight GQ, so it turns out that the biscuit is much more enticing company.

when you buy loose leaf tea at the tea centre, the always smiley girls behind the counter measure it out of very large tins off the wall-to-wall shelving. if you are unsure, or confused, they are happy to shake the tin before lifting the lid just in front of your nose. inhale. if it is the stockholm blend, which is black tea with orange peel, vanilla pieces, apricot flavour, safflowers, calendula blossoms and rose petals, you will be overcome by the need to buy a packet. the shop girl will scoop the desired quantity into a blue or red cellophane-covered foil bag, sealed with one of those bendy wire thingys so that you can open it easily for another smell on the bus home.

i don’t normally like fruity or flowery teas (and tisanes? pah!) but the vanilla (i guess) makes this smell like magic cake. magic! cake!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 June 2004 at 4:14 pm

permalink | filed under around town, drink, snacks, werk

oh it’s winter. the sky is clear blue and there are birds chirping outside. if my washing machine wasn’t broken i could be putting a load on and then spending the rest of the day smelling clean laundry ripening in the sun. the repairman is coming today “after twelve”, which i got the friendly service desk lady to narrow down to “anywhere between twelve and three”. sigh.

yesterday i queued for half an hour at medicare to claim $100, and then queued again (20 minutes) at medibank for another $100. i was just down the street from krispy kreme, but when i walked past all casual-like, the line was out the door and onto the street, and i just didn’;t think i could queue anymore, not even for donuts.

instead a brisk stroll brought me to il gianfornaio, where a slice of mushroom pizza was had, and two sicilian canoli packaged up to go: one with a dark chocolate custard and the other with fruit-and-chocolate-studded sweet ricotta. there was also a bottle of fanta, the remains of which i have just realised are still sitting in my mr friendly backpack next to my foot, instead of in the fridge for later.

[ puts fanta in fridge ]

so, the new fanta label says “now with 5% fruit”. mysteriously there is not too discernable a difference in the taste of fruitless fanta and what is now described as a “fruit drink”. i suppose it’s 5%… what? healthier? i definitely didn’t feel as ill as i normally do after drinking a bottle of fanta, but i suspect that has more to do with me just drinking a quarter of it.

i am rambling. why am i rambling? sleep deprivation?; maybe i need some juice. or fanta.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 June 2004 at 8:32 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, drink, kid, packaging

Monthly Archives: June 2004

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