ragingyoghurt » 2007

Monthly Archives: September 2007

ah friday, the day i throw off the fluffy pink shackles of parentdom and walk the city streets as quickly and carefree as i once did. this past friday, i walked the arts of islam exhibition at the art gallery, which closes next sunday, so quick! go! if you haven’t already.

i had been warned by a friend that one might be brought to tears by the beauty of some of the works on display, and it’s true, walking through the middle rooms filled with four-hundred-year-old qurans and illuminated manuscripts, one gets an idea of how insignificant it is to be moving text boxes around on a computer screen, when such amazing feats of publishing could be achieved with a very small paintbrush and a tub of gold paint. i didn’t cry, but i may have stifled such sacrilegious utterances as “holy fffffff” a half dozen times.

if you like drawing, as i do (or more accurately, if you like looking at drawings and getting that knot in your stomach from guilt that you are not drawing, as i do) then you might also like to see the dobell prize for drawing, where amongst other scribbly things you will see a rather arresting portrait of a boxer, a sympathetic rendering of a bull, and a luscious red still life of a pomegranate.

and then you might feel a bit peckish, and think to avail yourself of the tasty treats at the cafe downstairs. it is bordering on overpriced, but it is mostly good and fresh, and if you beat the lunchtime crowd, you can sit in a booth looking towards the room, with the deep red carpet and the gleaming white chairs, eating a well-dressed greek salad, and another with potatoes and slices of chorizo (though only two slices of chorizo for your $9.50, ch.).

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 September 2007 at 4:18 pm

permalink | filed under around town, art, lunch

last friday, international opec day, i looked out the window and it was raining. ten minutes later, the sun was out… until the rain kicked in again. and so it continued through the morning, until it was time to go meet deborah. we packed our picnic rug just in case, and small forks, a flask of hot tea, and some pretty teacups, because we had a spring picnic in mind.

it’s good to have a plan, isn’t it? we already knew that one of the things we’d be eating was adriano zumbo’s chorizo and olive baguette. the other, as-yet-unkown entity was to be any lovely thing (or things — we had not planned to be restrained if the situation allowed) on the new season’s menu.

we met across the road from zumbo, and hurtled across darling street to the happiest place on earth. but, where o where were the delicate morsels of pink and green and yellow? everything in the cake display was chocolate!

(i know i say it like it’s a bad thing, and it’s not. just, the plan in our heads was in colours other than brown.)

so we pressed up against the wall as other people came and went, and eventually we worked out a suitably diverse collection of cakery for our morning tea. it had stopped raining by the time we emerged from the shop, and emboldened, we strode with purpose to the park. amidst other optimistic picnickers, we spread out our blanket. it had barely touched the ground when we felt the drizzle on our heads. after deborah pointed out a low ceiling of blackness blowing in from down the hill, we folded up the blanket and raced the raindrops home.

the kid, for whom the picnic torch burns bright, spread our faux burberry across the balcony floor, and then the parade of baked goods, and the pouring of tea. deborah unpacked a tidy box of cucumber sandwiches and a brand-spankin’-new ikea catalog. i was immensely pleased with both: the sandwiches had been made with soft white bread, and butter that the clever girl had salted herself, with pink flakes from the murray river; the ikea catalog holds the promise of things to come. we tried the chicken, mushroom and almond sausage roll, which tasted salty and peppery above all else, and, alas, doesn’t quite hit the heights of the lamb and harissa at bourke street bakery. and you already know the chorizo and olive baguette: lovely, chewy bread filled with a choice selection of salty things.

but we could hardly wait for the sweet things: deborah’s maxiadz was a great brown wheel on a stick — two bits of chocolatey dacquoise sandwiching luscious chocolate mousse and divine raspberry brulee. the whole contraption was coated in chocolate and then sprinkled with cocoa and rolled in chopped hazelnuts, and even between the three of us, chocolate freaks all, we could not quite finish it. (ok, i finished that last crumb of dacquoise later that night.)

and this, the one i’d been hanging out to try for aaaaaages. sugar lips: a brioche donut filled with lemon creme. look how it sparkles with sugar and cinnamon! see how pillowy soft it is when you slice it! just watch that glorious pale yellow ooze forth! if the man would just bottle his lemon creme, i would buy it and grow fat on it alone.

we poured the last cup of muji spicy orange and pepper tea, and then brewed a new pot of T2 monk pear. a splendid time was had by all.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 September 2007 at 3:51 pm

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, lunch

the house is very still. it is early, true, but perhaps he has already left; he likes to head off before sunrise, when he has a long way to go.

the boy’s grandmother died yesterday. she was just short of 93, went into hospital for something to do with her leg, and never made it out again. the boy is driving some six hours south and west to go say goodbye.

except, i don’t think i should call him “the boy” anymore. i write about him less and less because i no longer know how to fit him into my stories; since january, he has been the man sleeping upstairs on the red couch, who’s off to work each morning by 7.30, who comes home and takes his turn making dinner, giving the kid a bath, and reading her bedtime stories if she lets him, who sits out on the balcony with his beer and his cigar before turning out the light.

me? i sit down here and blog. and i don’t feel a thing as i write this (which, in turn, makes me a little bit sad). earlier on, i’d occasionally feel like a nothing piece of shit. but eight months is a long time to get used to something, and the stuff that got said a few weeks ago — that uppercase moment — made it easier to just shut a part of myself off.

by coincidence, he had spent the last couple of days packing a selection of his things into boxes. the plan was that come the school holidays, he’d be down at his house in the country, fixing it up. this is the house he bought a couple of years ago, just like that, in a small brown town with one main street, where the bakery doesn’t even bake its bread daily and ships it in three days a week, these springy loaves wrapped in plastic. during school holidays, the goth kids hang out on the dusty sidewalk, and the main attraction is the largest grape vine in the southern hemisphere, around which a pub has been built.

— ah. a cough from upstairs. he is still here —

this house, in this town, is close to where his grandmother lived, and so he will be able to drop these boxed-up things off along the way, and take another load in october. it is good, in a way, this gradual emptying of feelings and things; instead of a sudden gash, it is slowly trickling down to nothing. (it is also crap, of course.)

the original plan, i guess, was that we would all move to the country and play happy families, and i don’t know… put down that eyebrow! yes, me in the dusty brown! it might have been possible? with a kinder, gentler boy? a less angry boy anyway.

but this is no longer a blame game. the recriminations, and expectations fallen short, the pointing of fingers — literally, sometimes — i don’t think of them so much anymore, though they are always there.

for the next six days, it’ll be just me and the kid. which is ok too, because she is always up for an adventure in good eating, and because we’ve had lots of practice: that summer he took off to go fix up his house, the six weeks he went walkabout in south america, those early days of parenthood when he’d spend friday nights at a friend’s place so he could drink in peace and get some sleep. the bitterness goes right to the core, kids, which is probably why i eat so much damn sugar.

bear with me, normal transmission will continue shortly. there is a picnic i need to write about.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 September 2007 at 6:44 am

permalink | filed under boy

what is this beastie?

several years ago — could it have been seven years ago? argh! — my sister and i went to coney island, in brooklyn, in the springtime. the beach was windswept and deserted, and after we ate our obligatory nathan’s hotdogs, we sauntered down the boardwalk and came upon a softserve icecream stand. it was like, the softserve stand of your (my) dreams, with unexpected flavours like banana! and pistachio! and you could get a twister with the two combined! so i did. see, the banana would have been good, or the pistachio, on their own, but the fact that you could get the two so gloriously entwined in each other, that made it at least three times better.

so when i walked into zumbo on the weekend, with the intention to not buy anything, and the first thing i saw was this chocolate-pistachio croissant… well, you can guess the rest.

what you may not guess is that the pistachio frangipane is not just a lush, velvety cushion on the inside, but also an extra layer slathered onto the top of the pastry so it bakes golden brown and crunchy, like a sweet nutty biscuit. i was so enamoured of the fallen-off bit i ate right at the start, that by the time i cut the croissant in half and discovered the dark chocolate nestled within, i had forgotten it was a pistachio and chocolate croissant, and was thus pleasantly surprised.

oh this is a rich bastard of a croissant; i could only manage half with the blackest of teas, before we headed off to see the kites.

the bondi festival of the winds was not the hellish entanglement of kite strings that i may have been expecting, thanks, probably, to the weather, or perhaps, the apec luncheon. after an hour or so of bus-train-bus, we skipped merrily down the grassy hill towards the pavilion, straight into a cluster of kite stalls.

“i want a kite,” said the child, “i want a kite. i want a kite.”

so we bought a windsock in the shape of a fish, and signed up for a kite workshop on the front steps. for a dollar, you got a piece of waverley council’s best scrap paper — the back of ours was printed with the schedule for some library event — which you drew on, handed back to the facilitator, and watched in awe as she deftly folded and stickytaped it into an actual kite! we took it down to the beach later, and it flew, dammit, alongside all the other grownup kites.

which meant nothing to the kid. nothing. after all the kite talk, what she really wanted to do was fill her fish with sand. and then her boots.

we ate beach festival food of course: corn on a stick, fairy floss and gelato. the gelato came at the end of the afternoon, and we walked back up the hill to pompei to get it. the kid picked the boldest of three pinks: raspberry sorbet with a sharp burst of fruitiness. i got a scoop of dark chocolate, which was delicious, and a scoop of tiramisu, which had a wonderful texture, smooth and milky, and punctuated by whole slabs of almost adequately coffee-soaked biscuit.

here’s the funny thing: i don’t drink alcohol or coffee, but i really like a good tiramisu. the zumbo tiramisu is called “throw me down”, which sounds sexy as fuck, and is totally next on my list.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 September 2007 at 10:09 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, ice cream, kid

i’m all worded out.

these days the kid says, “tell me a story, from your mouth.” and sometimes the story that emerges sucks, and she kind of breaks eye contact for a second as if to spare me any embarrassment, and then asks for another. sometimes, the story is a tale of a bunny who goes up to the moon in a paper box rocket, and the moon is made of red jelly, and the bunny scoops some into a bowl and has it with the ice cream from the freezer on his rocketship, and the man in the moon comes out from behind his moon mountain and says that if everyone came and scooped up bowls of moon there would be no moon left, and the bunny feels bad and fetches a tub of pink yoghurt from his fridge and fills in the hole, and the moon man spends the rest of his days sitting in his comfy deck chair looking out at his little pink puddle, and the bunny decides he has had enough of an adventure and rockets back to earth to see his mum. and when the story is a success, i get to tell it maybe three or four times a day, two days in a row so far.

by two-thirty this afternoon, naptime, the quiet refuge i sought was at circle cafe. on a saturday. in the rain. so, silly me, circle was packed with a raucous late lunch crowd, which i mostly managed to tune out by reading david sedaris in the new yorker food issue — three great things rolled into one, no?

i had really wanted a bowl of soup, for the rain, and circle tends to do interesting soup, like chestnut, or french onion, instead of pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin. however, the interesting thing today was that there was no soup on the menu. so i had a mushroom, spinach and gruyere crepe, which arrived covering half the plate, a fat pillow with a lovely, frilly golden edge. the filling was different to what i expected, which was sharp, salty gruyere. instead, it was tempered by rather a lot of bechamel sauce, which, when you think about it, is exactly the kind of mushroom-riddled stodge you want on a cold, rainy day. so yay. on the other half of the plate lay a salad of leaves, tomato, onion and olives, so perfectly dressed that it must have been tossed by hand, with love.

as i ate, the room gradually emptied, and by the time i was done, i was finally surrounded by silence.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 September 2007 at 10:44 pm

permalink | filed under kid, lunch

honestly, i just don’t know how to begin telling you about this one. houdini. at first incredulous glance, it might appear to be only the biggest macaron you ever did see. take the glistening strawberry for comparison: it is a normal-sized berry, admitedly, but still.

i’d had my eye on this, at adriano zumbo patissier, like, forever, and it was the threat of it forever disappearing off the menu that finally brought us together, on tuesday. what it is, is two enormous macaron biscuits, lime and basil creme, strawberries, raspberries.

it’s weird: on their own, the pastry creme is beyond limey, and the biscuits don’t particularly taste of anything except sugar and almonds. but eaten all together in a big mouthful of crunchy-creamy, the flavours soften into each other, mingling to create an almost savoury —

gah! i can’t even write a cohesive sentence. clearly, it’s some kind of genius alchemy at work, and the complexity is beyond my grasp. it was lush though, and now i wish i had a little more on hand, just to see.

i had half to begin with, and i thought i would wrap my head around the other half in a quiet moment of the evening. but the kid, who was with me when i bought it, and whom i was hoping might not have taken too much notice of the shiny pink and black cakebox, awoke from her afternoon nap to utter the words: “shall we share the cake? the pretty cake, with the berries and cream?”. so we did and she licked her plate clean.

i took the first photograph, and then right after i cut it, and prepared to document the inside — because truly, you have to see the biscuit-to-filling ratio — the sky went dark and it began to rain, and the shift in ambient light really changed the colour of the cake, and — what’s that? you want to see it anyway?

well, ok then.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 September 2007 at 10:30 pm

permalink | filed under cake

goshdarned sonuva bush rained on our parade. well, ok, so it rained (and rained and rained) of its own accord, and we weren’t really parading. but we’d been planning to see the jellyfish exhibition at the maritime museum for weeks, and whoulda thunk the leader of the “free” world would choose this very morning to hang out at said museum too?

fortunately apec hadn’t quite locked down the mobile network, and a quick on-the-run phonecall later, me and the kid rocked up to the australian museum, where, beneath the enormous suspended skeleton of a blue whale, we got reacquainted with amber, ellaberry and arkyjoe.

in between the hallfull of skeletons (including a homely tableau of a human skeleton sitting in a comfy chair reading a book, with a faithful doggy skeleton by his side) and the kids area upstairs (more inventive handpuppets of wild — and scary — animals than you have ever seen) and the other kids area upstairs (way too many stuffed marsupials to be petted and kissed, and a live, deformed, green tree frog that looked as if it were melting), we shared a really good bowl of nicely-seasoned hot chips and a round of strawberry milkshakes, babycino, hot chocolate, and milky coffee. it was all fun and games, no-one lost an eye, and two little girls negotiated with grace and long-suffering diplomacy, the gentle art of hand-holding.

so there, mr president. why can’t we all just get along?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 September 2007 at 8:47 pm

permalink | filed under around town, drawn, kid, snacks

i know it reads like i don’t eat normal food anymore — even to me — but of course this is not true. no, really. it’s just that in the light of lovely shiny cakes, mushroom blogging might seem a little boring. however. since i did learn from someone today that “boring” does not mean it is not good, i shall tell you what became of the mushrooms i bought this afternoon at harris farm.

i think you know the ones: a tray of enoki, shiitake, shimeji and oyster mushrooms, a tidy harvest for just under $6, and a perfect serving for two. i sauteed them with minced ginger and garlic, in sesame oil with a little salt. i tossed them through some pre-cooked soba noodles with a glug of soba dipping sauce and a good sprinkle of sesame seed furikake; just a few minutes of warm mushroom contact infused the noodles with a lovely, earthy aroma. i served it up with panfried salmon and grilled baby bokchoy. if, before cooking, you are generous with the grinding of salt and pepper on the salmon skin, you will be rewarded with a crunchy sheet of saltiness to nibble at in-between all the other stuff.

the kid, when she found out it was salmon for dinner, began asking for “some salmon, in my hand, please” on the way home from school. she ate it all, before deftly and fastidiously removing every single strand of enoki hiding out amongst the soba, and placing them in a tidy tangle by her bowl.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 September 2007 at 11:07 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kid, kitchen

i really never order a croissant. it’s just, you hear these french people talk about how nothing french outside of france tastes like it’s supposed to. and i know, the people who are not french roll their eyes and maybe make a rude gesture with their loosely-clasped fists. and i haven’t effectively been to france and eaten a real, live french croissant, so i have nothing with which to make a comparison. but i have eaten the odd croissant or two outside of france, and all they did was make me hope that the french ones were nothing like them.

outside of france i’ve had: pale, flaccid croissants; overly-browned croissants with a sugary glaze; flaky-mouthfuls-of-air croissants that leave your lips covered in bits; soggy almond croissants that taste of flour; and once, in a health ‘n’ golf spa resort high in the hills of east malaysia, a basket of mini croissants that weren’t flaky or buttery or puffy or whatever it is you think of when you think of croissants, plus they tasted strongly of freezer. which is a bit of a minus, really.

so i surprised myself at zumbo when i pointed out the chocolate croissant. i figured, if the pastry was lacking, at least i knew the chocolate would be good. but of course, the pastry wasn’t lacking at all. it was bold and crunchy on the outside, and just chewy enough on the inside. and the little slabs of dark chocolate tucked into its folds? just the right number. it made for a most enjoyable lull in springcleaning, with a cup of vanilla tea.

i don’t want to play favourites or anything, but i will eat this over and over again.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 September 2007 at 11:37 am

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, snacks

“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

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