ragingyoghurt » 2007

Monthly Archives: April 2007

so, the second kid-free friday went according to plan. dropped her off at playschool just in time for morning tea. in the midst of quiet munching children, there was a place set at the table for her, a bowl containing a slice of apple and a slice of orange. she was hesitant and shy and nervous, but the magnetic pull of the fruit was too strong.

i walked into the city, and on to surry hills, to the ray hughes gallery, where the most amazing show by lucy culliton, “domestic science“, is on for another week or so, so hurry! hurry over to see it.

it’s a hundred and sixty-five paintings and drawings of the best cakes, preserves, decorated arrowroot biscuits, knitted dolls, coat hanger covers, stuff at a regional show, all painted with love and gusto, candy colours, dabs of paint so high off the board you want to lick it. well, i did anyway. i mean, i did want to. lucy culliton is probably my favourite contemporary australian painter, and not just because she paints glorious buckets of hot chips and sauce, or trays of fairy cakes; her series of cactuses is as gorgeous as the rest. i had come to the gallery with a secret mission: i wanted to buy one of the paintings for myself.

because how much higher will her star rise? and how affordable will a painting be at the next show? and how much do her paintings fill me with joy?

plenty. i walked through the exhibition once, and again, and i saw how many red spots were on the main wall already: the lamingtons had been sold, and the festive iced cake covered in sprinkles. i tried to imagine that one of the remaining cakes could be mine: a second-prize orange cake; a doily covered in pink-iced cupcakes; a cream-and-jam-filled victoria sponge (truly the most lickable of the lot). i paced the wall for half an hour. i had to leave, and i walked down the street to the bourke street bakery, where i sat on an orange milk crate on the sidewalk, and meditated over a pork and fennel sausage roll and a belgian hot chocolate. it fortified me.

when i returned to the ray hughes gallery, ray hughes — who had earlier seen me with my nose mere centimetres away from a chocolate cake — smiled and gestured at the woman in bluejeans and cowboy shirt sitting opposite him, beneath the wall of plenty. “this is lucy,” he said.

and what i said was, “i think that one of these paintings is mine, but i don’t know which one yet.” and then, because she looked quite mystified, i said, “i think that i am going to buy one; i just haven’t worked out which one.”

because she does not know me, she asked, “cake or knitting?”, and she was friendly and kind and above all, unprecious, and told me about the names she had written on the winners’ certificates — emmylou harris had won for the pink-iced cupcakes, and how she had visited a dozen or so regional shows and distilled the best into this fictional, best-of-the-best lithgow agricultural society show, (and how lithgow wasn’t actually the hotbed of homecraft that she’d conjured up), and how she’d been a graphic designer a long time ago and gotten tired of the routine and gone to art school and would never go back to moving type about a page…

and i paced back and forth some more, and at times she would take this piece or the other off the wall and bring it into the sunlight, so that i could see just how luminous the cream filling in the victoria sponge really was, and how supple the red jam. and i wandered into the back room for respite, this little room filled with lively and understanding portraits of barnyard animals and exotic parrots; lucy’s friend rachel fairfax had accompanied her to all the country shows, and had documented the animals as lucy studied the food and craft.

and when i slunk back to the wall for maybe the fourth or fifth time, she laughed, not unkindly. i told her i’d narrowed it down to two: the pink cupcakes on the doily, and the resplendant packet butter cake, which showed me something more to love every time i came back to it. she put them side-by-side on a bench, and then it was clear.

we shook on it, and she placed a red dot next to #81. my first piece of art! i felt pretty great.

and then i got home, and minutes later my print rep called to let me know that the proofs of the book were online for approval. we signed off on them just after 4pm. and then i felt extremely great.

i think though, that i will have to go back to the show, to see it all again without that spectre of needing to buy something gnawing a hole in my belly. bring on kid-free day the third!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 April 2007 at 10:28 pm

permalink | filed under around town, art, cake, shoping

how has a week gone by already? it’s like time travel i tells ya. last sunday morning we were a flurry of activity, pretzel-dipping. this time i roped in eager little hands: grabby fingers to break up a lindt bar, agile fingers to fish pretzels out of the chocolate bath, grubby fingers from samples along the way.

we packed a picnic then: buffalo mozzarella and pesto sandwich for me, tasty cheese and avocado sandwich for the kid, and a little box of sliced tomatoes for on-site insertion. a couple of mandarins in the basket, and a few chocolate-dipped pretzels for good measure. we were off to the acoustica festival, just up the hill and then down the hill from home.

from the crest we looked down into birchgrove oval, and it was like a quaint village through the clearing. an arc of little white tents lined the perimeter, some festooned with balloons, proferring all manner of festival foods, sunglasses and quick massages. there was a giant inflatable slide, and a swing-carousel, and something with a row of clowns’ heads that swiveled to and fro.

in the middle of it all there was a boy and his guitar. he was the first act of the day, and the front row was his friends from high school. there was no second row — it was very early in the proceedings — so we sat a couple metres back, on my $10 “burberry” picnic rug, and minutes later, as he played an elliott smith song, all the food was gone.

“can we go and buy some ice cream?” asked the kid. it was a reasonable request, even though the new zealand natural ice cream stand was charging an unreasonable $4 per scoop.

we returned to our rug to catch as many minutes of act number two as it took for the pink ice cream to be eaten, and then, “can we go to the face painting?”

we returned to our rug — one of us hopping all the way — to see the third act of the day, but it was perhaps too much to ask of the kid. she was already being pulled in the direction of the playground up the hill. we left in the middle of some pretty good 12-bar blues.

considering the last live music i saw was baby proms at the opera house, and the second last live music was a playschool concert, i was pretty happy.

this makes me happy too: the six-month expired box of royce nama chocolate in my fridge is still completely edible! these little bricks of fine chocolate, each one dusted in cocoa powder, pack a punch of dark chocolate flavour and melt away to nothing on my tongue. actually, the google translated page tells it better:

it is the raw chocolate of the sweetness moderate adult. …the elegant fragrance starts overflowing, V.S.O.P was blended in the bitter chocolate. tastefulness it is the raw chocolate of the adult taste where the elegant fragrance and the bitter impression of overflowing do not accumulate.

all true. it is made with fresh cream, and apparently has a shelf life of one month. but i have put it to the test, and six months past 27 october 2006, they are still perfect. now that’s time travel.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 April 2007 at 9:15 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, kid, kitchen, snacks

torn.

torn between sleep, or blogging, or watching brainless tv, or “reading” that 754-page edition on american vogue that i found at the library last week. 754!

the book project? yes, a mere 124 pages, but it still lingers, the way a cartoon character leaves a dust cloud in the shape of itself after it’s skedaddled. the book lingers as the final, last-minute sunday midnight change to the final last-minute friday 5pm change. it lurks as the too big postscript files that refuse to be distilled on my seven-year-old computer that has to run select programs in classic mode. it taunts as the limit on the client’s bank transfer which prohibits the upfront payment being made to the printer which prevents the printer from telling me if the files i sent through last week are ok.

as it turns out, hmm, not really, which is why 6GB worth of raw postscript files are right now being burned onto DVDs for a second time lucky.

so let’s think back to happier times. like last friday, when i finally returned to adriano zumbo pastissier, and casually asked the counter boy (not adriano this time), “what flavours are the macarons today?”

rose. olive oil and vanilla. gianduja.

i don’t know that i could really have considered choosing just one, so in the end i got just one of each.

these are great macarons. they are hefty with moist and crumbly almond body — not like the weird, dessicated hollow shells i have encountered in other, lesser macarons — and their ganache fillings unusually soft (“runny” sounds bad, but really, it is so good). the rose one, gorgeous pink and all heady perfume, had a filling with a sort of evaporated milky flavour. it reminded me of bandung, that lurid indonesian beverage of rose syrup and milk, which i am quite partial to. i’m guessing it’s actually a white chocolate-based concoction.

the olive oil registered, not unpleasantly, on the roof of my mouth. it was an intriguing sensation: the ripe flavour without the oiliness, coupled with the fact that it was actually a sweet biscuit. i didn’t detect a lot of vanilla flavour in the filling, but the texture of it was sublime. i had been curious about this particular macaron since reading about robyn's pierre herme specimen, so now, curiousity sated and fond memories remain.

the gianduja… i think i’d really rather have a piece of actual velvety gianduja, studded with whole hazelnuts. but in macaron form, it was a classy hazelnutty biscuit with a not overly chocolatey finish.

and what business did i have, traipsing into patisseries on a friday afternoon?

friday morning, i had dropped the kid off to her very first day of playschool. i was kid-free! she’d been talking about going to school for some months (though i think the fact that she’d get to carry a backpack was the main attraction), and when we went for the open day a few weeks ago, and she saw that the kids in possum room were in the midst of a ballet class, she lunged at the door making little clawing motions (much like a small marsupial, no?) and said, “can i go in? and do ballet?”

thursday morning, when we attended a brief orientation session, and she discovered the sandpit in the back, she threw herself belly down in the sand, and swam around in it for a good while. she painted a picture in yellow and purple on the classroom easel. she went headfirst down the play yard slide.

so. friday morning, when i dropped her off, she got all quiet, and concentrated on the toy acquarium table while i made myself scarce. when i called to check on her at 11, she was busy with playdough. when i returned to pick her up at 4.30, after a day of grocery shopping and errands, she was busy making a plastic vegetable dinner at the wooden stove, and the afternoon’s face painting was now a half-butterfly smeared away from cheeks down. she was giddy with excitement and smiling. she can’t wait to go back again. phew.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 April 2007 at 10:50 pm

permalink | filed under cake, kid, werk

mashed potatoes. truly the gift that keeps giving. a little over a week ago, i made mash out of four enormous golden delight potatoes. the portion we did get around to eating — with a crispy-skinned salmon fillet and a side of mixed asian mushrooms quickly sauteed in oil-butter-garlic — i mixed in the last few brussels sprouts in the crisper, thinly sliced and fried up with minced garlic. mmm… smooth, creamy mash with bitter green crunch.

the next evening, following too much lunch at a chinatown foodcourt, i made a light dinner of fishcakes! a tin of red salmon, a tin of sweetcorn kernels, a good grating of butternut pumpkin, a cursory beaten egg and the leftover mashed potato: squished up in-between my fingers and formed, most of it, into palm-sized patties. these i coated in an improvised dusting of flour, polenta, pepper and salt. and then i fried them up to golden crunchy brown and we had three helpings for dinner — that’s five or six fishcakes. huff.

but quite a bit of leftover mash, bulked out with salmon and corn and pumpkin, yields quite a lot of fishcake mix. so we had fishcakes for lunch sunday, and then the boy left for south america on tuesday morning, and then i fried up the remainder mix for fishcakes on tuesday night, and then, surely tempting the gods of food poisoning, had the very last two on wednesday afternoon for lunch, as a sandwich, with sliced tomatoes and dijonnaise. yum.

after i served up dinner tuesday night, and before i was quite ready to sit down and eat, the kid scrambled up onto my chair, and was reaching past my plate to get to the spoon in her bowl.

she said, “i want to eat some of your yellow thing. your yummy yellow thing.”

“you mean, the fishcakes?” i asked. she had previously been dissecting them with her bare hands, picking out all the corn first up, and then maybe eating a handful or two of the mushy innards.

“no,” she said. “your yummy creamy yellow thing.”

“oh,” i said. “um. that is mayonnaise mixed with mustard. i’m not sure that you will like it. but you can try.” so she did.

“was it yummy?” i asked.

“no.”

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 April 2007 at 9:47 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kid, kitchen

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!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 April 2007 at 2:35 pm

permalink | filed under packaging, something new

in the midst of one of those two-hour, long-distant calls to nellicent the other night, i asked, “um, where is your sainbury’s?”. i thought that i’d made it seem an innocent question, apropos of nothing, though my index finger was making random loop-de-loops on the magazine page.

she gave it serious thought. “oh. it’s in [name of suburb], on [name of street] and –,” she paused, before the shrieking began. “i know what you want!!”

“argh!” i shrieked back, “i want it! i want it!”

“i know what you want! i have already bought it for you, in my head!”

“well,” i said, “i hope that you are not talking about cheese.”

because i surely wasn’t. a week ago, i’d read a story on anya hindmarch, in “vogue“, that mentioned a shopping bag she’d designed for sainsbury’s in the UK, in one of those everybody-wins exercises to reduce plastic bag consumption. and what a bag. before it’s even gone on sale at the supermarkets, it’s already sold out its online pre-sale allotments, and gone on to appear on ebay at forty times its original cost.

we went on to discuss the logistics of obtaining one (or two!) of these bags — which sainsbury’s branches might sell them, and if she might have to rope in one of her friends in case there was a one-per-customer limit (there is!) — and now that i’ve read a bit more about the madness, it all seems just a bit too stella-at-target.
so perhaps i won’t be getting one after all.

but what better time to spruik the raging yoghurt shopping bag? ok, so it’s not designed by anya hindmarch, is not a limited edition, will cost you more than £5, and will make me a couple of bucks too… but you can hang it over your shoulder and carry all manner of groceries in it, just like the sainsbury’s one. anyway, don’t you just need another canvas shopping bag? i myself have a selection of eight or ten hanging from my laundry door.

and while we’re on the hindmarch comparisons, look what i made saturday morning: chocolate-covered pretzels.

after breakfast (sour cherry jam on buttered rye and caraway bagel, yum) i melted down a 100g bar of lindt dark chocolate in a large bowl over a pot of simmering water. i tipped in a bag of salted pretzels, and stirred until everyone was well-coated. i fished them out with a bamboo skewer and laid them out to set on a sheet of grease-proof paper. it’s an effortless and addictive snack, i tell you, with the bittersweet chocolate (just a thin enough coat to start melting in the warmth of your fingertips), and the sharp crunch of the pretzel, and the lingering surprise of a random salt chip.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 April 2007 at 1:42 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, chocolate, kitchen, nellie, shoping, snacks

there is an urgency to these posts, isn’t there? is it necessary to have four posts in a day? it’s just, they are back today.

after i considered bagels for breakfast, i briefly considered bagels for lunch. in the end, i took myself and my “new yorker” to circle cafe. because, when will i get another chance to sit in a nice cafe and drink iced tea with mint and lemon, and chew and swallow at a normal, leisurely pace, and not worry about little grabby (grubby) fingers reaching into my plate? despite my anticipation of lots (well, several at least) of quiet, quality meals out over the course of the week, this was the first such undertaking.

well. tuesday, having read about har mee in the city, i’d set out in search of these elusive noodles; apparently they are only made tuesday, friday and saturday. apparently. i joined the queue, inched forward slowly, placed my order at the counter, and then didn’t quite understand when the countergirl said, “there is no har mee today, because we did not work yesterday.”

she filled my silence with explanation, something about how the day before was the easter monday public holiday, so they were treating tuesday as regular monday, and the rest of the week would be a day out. (and the rest of the year, presumably. what the hell?) i asked her what the special for “monday” was, and she gestured towards a laminated poster on the wall that said “kueh teow soup”. ch. she was already looking over my shoulder, taking the order of the man behind me. i suppose my eyes had already told her that i wouldn’t be eating there that day, even before my mouth did.

so there was that attempt.

anyway.

they make a fine nicoise salad at circle. mesclun, lightly dressed, punctuated with strips of roasted red capsicum, pungent caperberries, chunks of good tinned tuna, and on top, a criss-cross of whole anchovy fillets. a hard-boiled egg and a roma tomato, quartered, radiate from the periphery. the last time i had this, there were whole olives hidden throughout, but this afternoon they seemed to have run out. nevermind. it is a large, flavoursome meal, even when you don’t count the little basket that comes with, holding a stump of house-baked baguette, and two pats of butter.

i stretched it out, my last solitary lunch hour: i had a hot belgian chocolate afterwards, drank it in sloooow sips. and then i waddled off and bought some dinner groceries, came home, put stuff away, cleaned out the puddle of sour, brown water at the bottom of the crisper drawer, and heard the key turn in the door. heard her squeaky little voice waft downstairs, “hello, mum!”

good thing i’d gotten that amazing, twinkly gingerbread heart at circle, to go.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 April 2007 at 10:04 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, lunch

for breakfast this morning i had a cup of black tea and six (eight?) daim candies. it didn’t have to be that way; i had considered walking up the street into rozelle, to the newly-opened bagel house cafe. when i rode the bus past yesterday the doors had finally been thrown open, and there was plenty of hot, steamy action in the back. but it would have been too indulgent, no? to go out for fresh bagels when there were still three from saturday in the freezer? probably not.

this week past, i’ve eaten my way through toasted fruit bread, blueberry bagels (twice), swiss cheese and tomatoes on toast (that was tuesday, when i thought i should eat something that wasn’t just sugarbread, in preparation for the afternoon’s bloodletting), and yesterday, delicious spelt crepes stuffed with spinach and fetta, and topped with sticky fig jam, at the fair trade coffee company (i had tea).

the day before, breakfast had been the last three profiteroles from the profiterole cake. backtrack: the thursday before good friday, the last day of term, the boy’s staffroom had given him a farewell cake: a dozen or so custard-filled puffs, arranged on a large shortbread biscuit base. the whole structure was covered in chocolate and sprinkled with tiny coloured sugar flowers. oh, and foil-wrapped chocolate eggs strategically positioned in the swirly chocolate border. he got through a couple of profiteroles that night, and then friday, he left it in the fridge when he drove off into the big brown. so there i was, alone in the house with most of a profiterole cake for company. what to do?

it was easier than i thought, a profiterole here, a couple there, throughout the week, though the chocolate was compound, mixed up to have that certain oily consistency that you don’t really object to until it’s too late. you know how it is: you eat two profiteroles, and feel fine about eating the third, and that’s when it wreaks its revenge.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 April 2007 at 4:33 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, cake, chocolate, drawn

i finally went to see the tezuka exhibition at the art gallery on wednesday night, after a good day of shifting bits of text around the page. balance, right?

all those tiny, perfect, original drawings — page after page, yellowed with age — of astroboy and kimba and the other creations of a forty year career. the brush marks of still-white paint, drawn over with corrections. it made me want to weep, or draw. either.

i was wilting and hungry halfway through, so i went down to the gallery cafe and ordered chai: no longer listed as “chai latte” on the menu, thank god, and no longer delivered in a picardie glass. it came in a fat little teapot; pretty good tea service for three bucks. the sun had gone by then, on late-opening wednesday, so i sat at the counter against the big window, feeling the evening chill come through the plate glass. and i had to draw it, this perfect teapot. the priapism, sadly, is all my fault.

at a home decor shop yesterday, as i flipped through my notebook for window measurements, the shopgirl pointed at my drawing. “that’s really good,” she said, “do you do art?”

“um, sort of,” i said. i told her about astroboy and how i was compelled to draw after.

“i used to do fine arts,” she said, “but then i realised that there’s no money in it, and i would prefer to do something for people who told me what to do, and then paid me. so now i’m studying design.”

“that is so weird,” i said, “because i studied design, and every now and again, i think that i should be doing art, like drawing or printmaking.”

we talked about art schools. she gave me a price on roller blinds. it’s always PMS368 on the other side.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 April 2007 at 10:53 am

permalink | filed under around town, drawn, drink, shoping, werk

my father called the other morning.

“what are you doing?”

“working…”

“oh, that’s good!”

“hmm. you say it’s good, but you don’t know that the work is stupid, and the pay could be better.”

“then you are undercharging. you need to charge more.”

“but when you work for a non-profit organisation, you can’t charge normal, commercial rates.”

“then you can’t always work for non-profit organisations. don’t you want to work for a real company?”

“wellll. if i worked in a commercial setup i wouldn’t be able to stay home and look after a kid all day.”

“ah. you have a point,” he said, then, “where is the kid?”

“she’s gone on holidays.”

“what!? so why aren’t you there with her?”

“um, because i have to work?”

“but don’t you miss her?”

“no.”

“what!? why not!?”

“because, when you spend 24 hours a day looking after someone…”

“ah. i see.”

“and i have so much work to do. i mean, it is tricky to balance the work, and the kid –”

“that’s what life is all about, finding the balance.”

hungh.

another ridiculous thing i encountered earlier this week are the all-round party spoons from jamie oliver’s “easy entertaining” range for royal worcester, marked down at the david jones easter sale from $30 to $15. for six “oriental spoons” in a box. the catalogue pictures shows nine, which means a box and a half. (why do people serve food in these soup spoons anyway? why don’t they stop??)

don’t they know you can go to any chinatown supermarket, walk down the kitchenware aisle, and avail yourself of as many of these spoons as you care to, for about 70c a piece? maybe a dollar for one with a finer finish. the trendy homeware stores do the same trick with bamboo steamers: $30 for something that will cost you $5 at a neighbourhood “ethnic” shop. what has multiculturalism achieved, if not to bring affordable cooking utensils to the general populace?

ri.di.culo.us.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 April 2007 at 7:24 am

permalink | filed under grumble, werk

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