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Monthly Archives: May 2010

i’ve been juggling projects, and the fairground music (metaphoric) in the background is at a pace that is at the same time jaunty and unsettling, rather than frantic and horrifying. i have new spectacles, with a new — lower! — prescription, which has made it such that my left eye no longer feels like it’s being wrenched out of its socket after a not unreasonable amount of time in front of the computer. the constant rain has also been a help, keeping me inside, hunched beneath my mossy green poncho, with my trusty oil heater close by. really, i can’t complain; it’s all good.

it’s been raining for just over a week now. last sunday, we stepped into the grey and wet, and onto the slick deck of a sydney ferry bound for circular quay. we were there mostly to go to the MCA zine fair, and indeed we must’ve done four or five laps of the trestle table maze, because the kid has a girl crush on sonya gee and spent much of her time at the fair nestled in sonya’s lap behind her stand of ‘kind of like a party bag for the unwell’ — “zomg you’re sick”.

in between, we delved into the MCA proper and made a half-hearted attempt at appreciating the biennale, and headed out across the road for lunch and pastry in the drizzly courtyard at la renaissance patisserie.

we started off sharing a baguette filled with poached chicken and aioli, and it was pleasant and all, but we knew we were just passing the time until dessert. unfortunately, there were no rose cream macarons on offer that day (my number one favourite, you may remember from before), so we made do with a trio of jasmin (number two favourite), passionfruit-chocolate, and cassis. the la renaissance macaron is consistently perfect: i have never encountered a brittle hollow shell, and the plump, moist biscuits hold a good amount of well-flavoured filling.

at the counter, the kid had also requested this sunny dome of a gateau — the mango-jasmin mousse cake. beneath the golden jelly skin, it was lush and light, and the two separate mousses atop a thin sponge base burst with fruitiness. not quite halfway through though, the kid stopped, quite bewildered, and whispered urgently, “there are strange beans in here.” upon investigation, i uncovered an entire nest of pinenuts hidden in the mousse, which is all fine and good if you like pinenuts… but we don’t. here’s a fun rainy day activity: pick all the covert pinenuts out of your otherwise enjoyable mango-jasmin mousse cake.

the rainy day fun continued once i got home with my bundle of swag:

two issues of vanessa berry‘s “disposable camera”, each one a rambling little freeform narrative. one has an intriguing recipe for red rice involving a whole tomato, and i will surely give it a try. the other has an amazing fold-out thought map and a reference to the one bit of “microserfs” that i remember: where one of the characters has a meltdown and locks himself in his office, and his colleagues, concerned, slip flat foods like cheese slices under the door to him. i also got some sweet mini comics from miss helen, to whom we were recently formally introduced and with whom we shared pizza and table-top drawings of kawaii cupcakes.

a couple of aisles down, i got a tiny and adorable japan guide from dudley redhead, and the heartfelt memoirs of one girl’s relationship with tamagotchis. (the girl’s name is zombetty.)

from the table of georgia perry and my candy castle, i procured “nu yoik”, a dazzling technicolor tribute to new york, in photographs and hand-drawn type. the kid picked the hilarious “kitten club”, full of cheesy cat pictures improved through the power of collage.

from the same table, i got a two-pack of mini posters: “things to know”, containing such hand-lettered gems as fetes are fun, and absolutely everyone should own a yellow + white striped beach towel, and everyone has two stomachs. one is solely for dessert. so true.

and then, from, uh, the same table, i could not go past the little compendium of illustrated junk food, nor the “save room for cake” colouring book, whose page of macaroons (sic) you would have seen beneath the macarons i told you about earlier.

i found a bunch of typewritten stories from maddy phelan, of which “ladybeard” — about her physical and psychological struggles with, and eventual embracing of, her hirsuteness — was particularly engaging; i still don’t know quite what to do with my hair. i also really liked “POTATOES” (much the same way i like potatoes), with its quirky little drawings and its potted history of… potatoes:

back in my day, everything was made out of potatoes.

we had to walk 15 miles to buy a sack of potatoes and they only cost 5c. or perhaps it was 5 shillings. i can’t remember. and i’ll have you know, our shoes were made out of potatoes.

and so on.

the bumper zine of the collection is lee tran lam‘s sold-out “speak-easy #11: the french issue”, really a magazine of interviews and recollections interspersed with photographs stuck down using ribbon and decorative masking tape. i’m still savouring my way through it, but i especially liked the list of memorable food experiences over lee tran’s four visits to france. the aisle of decorative sugar in the bon marché food hall in paris holds a special place in my heart too!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 May 2010 at 2:17 am

permalink | filed under around town, art, bookshelf, cake, kid

i thought i was done with london posts, but no. i don’t know if it’s the sudden pocket of werk i find myself in, but these days i find myself thinking about –– yearning for –– chocolate. i eat too many squares of cheap supermarket lindt, or contemplate a second (or third) tim tam. and then i start reminiscing about the little paper cup of amazing i encountered down camden passage one afternoon.

paul a young makes the best salted caramel truffles ever, and in the winter, a fine hot chocolate. he makes brownies as well — thick black slabs of fudgy chocolate cake with pecans or caramel, but i find these rather too intimidating. as the weather warms up, the hot chocolate dispensary in the corner by the entrance becomes a little outpost for sorbet. there is regular chocolate sorbet, and then there is salted caramel chocolate sorbet, which is what we chose, me and my sister, as we waited for our mother to finish her rounds at the antique stores. the amiable shopgirl arranged a scoop in the pristine white paper cup, and then asked, would you like the toppings?

yes, please!

she poured a stream of liquid chocolate over the sorbet, and then sprinkled chocolate shavings, and cocoa nibs, and little chocolate balls over that. she popped two spoons in, and moments later outside the shop, as i tried to take a spoon of sorbet, i found that the molten chocolate had solidified into a sturdy chocolate helmet. ice magic!

yes, the baubles up top were enchanting and all — a real riot of texture — but the real magic lay below. the sorbet was impossibly smooth and light in texture, while the taste was serious and dark. at first i found myself searching hard for any caramel flavour, but a spoonful or two later, i hit an artery of thick sticky caramel. a jolly good idea to keep the two separated, mr young. it was sublime, and i’m glad we were sharing. i might otherwise have fallen over in the street, twitching and gurgling.

some days later, i bought myself a toffee chocolate bar from peyton and byrne — toffee-nosed chocolate, according to the pleasing white paper wrapper sensibly typeset in gill sans, and adorned with nothing more than a tiny toffee-coloured flower. but the spare aesthetics reveal a somewhat more spartan affair. this slim bar shatters under your teeth, and the rigid grid of crests yields a rather severe burnt sugar flavour within the dark chocolate. the sour aftertaste was definitely not delicious. perhaps it is an inbuilt mechanism to keep you (me) from eating it all in one go? i much prefer the caramel with sea salt bar that i found in singapore on the way back home.

(this is where my london post officially becomes a chocolate post.)

back in singapore, i stumbled upon chocolate research facility, just hours before i had to get on the plane back to sydney. i must admit, i was not overly excited about the chocolate — south-east-asian chocolate always seems a bit too floury, or claggy, or sweet — and my stance was not helped by my good mother, who popped a sample into her mouth, grimaced, and then called undiscreetly over her shoulder while rushing out of the shop, “don’t buy me any. that is really horrible — much too sweet!”

indeed, the first ingredient listed on the box is “sugar”. but what a box! in fact, a hundred different boxes — a unique design for each of as many flavours. i found myself with an armful of bars: last minute presents mostly, in flavours like almond, tiramisu, stout, black sesame and durian.

besides the caramel bar, i also picked for myself, “new york” from the spring/summer ’10 city series (the durian bar represents singapore), with a slick map graphic. this was a bar of milk chocolate with crunchy little pretzels — salt crystals and all — embedded whole. yum.

the caramel with seasalt, from the autumn/winter ’09 series, was adorned with lovely peranakan tiles, and was a moulded shell of milk chocolate with a runny caramel filling. double yum. the chocolate was smooth and mild, and no, not too sweet for these tastebuds.

these are small bars — only 70g, and even though you might find it easy to eat the whole thing in one go, the $12 price tag will probably slow you down. there is also the confounding configuration of the grooves along which to divide your chocolate bar: there is pretty much no fault line to engineer a clean break, unless you begin by snapping it lengthways right down the middle. maybe they do want you to eat it all at once, after all.

i arrived back in sydney to find a chocolate bar sent to me as part of an easter twitter giveaway by the kindly folk at third drawer down. offerings of chocolate really help keep the back-home blues at bay. the chocolate edition that i received was a special edition strawberry stripe bar, with fat, free-form stripes of dark chocolate and white chocolate with “natural strawberry ingredients”. indeed, the strawberry portion was not a lurid pink, and tasted mostly natural. its creamy sweetness was broken up by little bits of tart freeze-dried fruit. in contrast, the dark chocolate was noticeably less creamy, and infinitely less sweet, and had a slight blackened flavour like that of an oreo. it’s like two chocolate bars in one, definitely handy for sharing with a sugar-junkie kid due home from school any minute now.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 May 2010 at 4:14 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate, packaging, trip

back in sydney, i wasted no time in recapturing a little bit of european je ne sais quoi. a week after touching down i talked singapore girl into a spot of luncheon at le grand cafe. we have figured out by now, that the best time for lunch at le grande cafe is “early”. just before noon, there are no queues, several empty tables, and a glass case full of options.

all morning, i’d been thinking of the terrine and cornichons that i’d enjoyed on a previous occasion. i considered maybe branching out and trying the duck liver parfait with brioche. however, once i discovered that the baguette on offer that day was filled with duck confit, my choice was made.

they showed up at the table a little while later, one for each of us. the sandwich had been freshly toasted, and there was a satisfying crunch to the baguette before it gave way to succulence: i was pleased to find that the bread was generously buttered, and the filling dressed with mayonnaise, and of course, to start with, there was a good amount of naturally occurring duck fat. it all made for a very moist and tasty mouthful. the slices of crisp, sweet onion provided a good foil to the fat, as did a little dimpled bottle of orangina.

we had planned ahead and picked our desserts when we ordered our sandwiches at the counter, to save us from rejoining the queue when the lunch crowd eventually swept into the cafe around 1. the attentive waitstaff brought them to the table as soon as we were done with the baguettes.

for me: the caramel tart, which turned out to be more of a very nice pastry shell filled with a sort-of creme brulee. the surface of it lacked the crackly, sugary shell of a proper creme brulee, but the mild caramel flavour and light custardy texture was pleasing all the same. the jaunty little beret of a biscuit bore a striking resemblance to a cookie from famous amos.

singapore girl had the petit pot au chocolat, which turned out to be too much chocolat for a girl who had just eaten a baguette filled with three kinds of fat. beneath the nutty crumble topping was a deep expanse of rich, dark, chocolate. at the bottom of that, was a puddle of thick caramel. perhaps she should not have also ordered a hot chocolate as a postprandial bevvie; there was still a good amount of pudding left when the waitress came to clear the table. (by contrast, the caramel tart was completely gone.)

we rolled out the door then, and had barely gone ten metres when we came across gaffa, three floors of art space / shop / cafe housed in a handsome pink heritage building. downstairs it’s little rooms of covetable and affordable contemporary jewelry and objet d’art; upstairs it’s galleries (and studios) around a central sunlit airwell.

one of the exhibitions we perused most appreciatively was food&company, an unprecious curation of food-related stuff: photographs, drawings, tiny interactive installations, and some lovely crockery. here’s the flourishing, by gemma o’brien.

ahh… so nice to see the flourishing of unstuffy, inspiring art space in the heart of this grimy city.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 May 2010 at 12:21 am

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

so yeah, in case you thought i was still slumming it in london, i’m back at home, sinking slowly into a bunch of projects — none of them horrible, yay — and the mundanity of doing the dishes, and the absolute futility of vacuuming.

one thing i’m chuffed about though, is that any day now, well ok, maybe a month from now, and hopefully not two months from now, the inaugural issue of PAN magazine will hit the streets, and the food columnist will be me.

here’s how the magazine tells it:

PAN is a new independent magazine for makers, designers, writers, musicians, artists and thinkers. combining the best elements of a literary magazine with arts, culture, fashion, literature and music content PAN magazine aims to engage with culture in a way that’s meaningful, edgy and entertaining. we won’t be running features on how to pluck your eyebrows but we will be thinking about transhumanism, heteroflexibility, emerging artists, producers and musicians.

for now it’s out twice a year, and they’re currently seeking submissions of stories or essays or, yes, poetry for issue #2. interested?

maybe you might even pre-order a copy of issue #1.

it’s not quite like helen’s time out magazine coup, but you’ll get me telling you maudlin stories of my encounters with hot chips. and this drawing i made for it? it’s running so big that the chips are larger than life-sized. well, i’m excited.

meanwhile, a week and a half ago, the kid took out first prize in the school fete craft competition. nice job, kid!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 May 2010 at 11:15 am

permalink | filed under drawn, kid

it had become a habit towards the end. a couple of times a day, i’d summon the airline website, and click on the special link for updates on the volcano situation. wednesday, when we were due to fly, i clicked and read that airspace was gradually opening up but that our flight, already rebooked from the sunday past, was cancelled.

so i called the airline to change our flight once again, maybe for the coming weekend, and instead of the regular hold music, i heard a recorded announcement that the cancelled flight had in fact been reinstated. i was so stunned that i wasn’t even sure i’d heard right. i stayed on long enough to speak with a real person, who said that, yes, we’d be flying that night.

🙁

it was mid-morning, and my mother was out buying cuts of pork and chicken so that she could make dumplings and pies for the long days ahead. i sent her a txt. i also sent one to my sister, beavering away at her deskjob, and she wrote back shortly afterward: i see i do not deal well with change.

my mother showed up at the door a half hour later, with bags of meat. stoically, she began making a tray of chicken pies. i went downstairs and attempted to pack two weeks of accumulations and roughly four days of vague happy plans into my big black baggage.

the night before, we’d sat, the four of us exiles (and honorary exile) in volcanic ashland, at a not-too grimy laminate table at HK diner in chinatown. spread in front of us: a platter of peking duck, a saltfish and chicken hotpot, a large dish of noodles fried up with nothing but beansprouts. i gazed fondly at the expanse of shiny food, and said, “so this is what it feels like, to be a refugee”. oh how we laughed at our good fortune.

now, fate laughed at us. outside it was warm and sunny; inside, behind shutters, i wrapped jam jars in knits and nestled them tetris-like and fingers crossed in a cradle of folded tshirts.

but we still had to eat. a little past lunchtime, the kid and i left my mother rolling out puff pastry, and headed up the road towards euphorium bakery. it was late enough that most of the sandwich counter had been depleted — only a few lay forlorn amidst the crumbs of the empty cabinet. i was too sad to eat a regular sandwich, so i picked an alternative from the display: the whoopee.

back home, the others ate their sandwiches as i finished up my packing, while a disagreeable feeling gnawed at my stomach. when i was done, i made myself a cup of tea and ate half the whoopee. under different circumstances, i’m sure it would have been delicious: a couple of moist, cakey, dark chocolatey biscuits held together by a respectable amount of lightly sweetened cream. as it was, i ate it too quickly, all hungry and preoccupied, and it caught in my throat like a handful of dry crumbs.

the other half i left for my sister, and she ate it standing up in the kitchen when she returned that evening, while we waited for the taxi to show up to take us to the airport. i think she found it… bittersweet. the chicken pies were golden on the counter. the pork dumplings would just have to wait for another day.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 May 2010 at 10:40 am

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, nellie, trip

for ten days, i’d had it in the back of my head that i had to make a visit to peyton and byrne. there are four locations within a small area of central london, but all of them were just a little too out of the way on any given day. so when we were given three extra days of london, i took it as a sign, and made a special stop at the kings cross tube station on day number two, so that we could walk over to the st pancras train station, and lunch at P&B.

it’s like walking back in time, entering this large room with all the cakes and slices in the window. against the gleaming white-tiled walls, the wooden shelves are filled with colourful cartons of store brand tea, and jars of jam. and chocolate bars wrapped in plain white paper, in flavours such as orange marmalade, or caramel.

there are artisanal potato crisps and fruit juices and ready-made sandwiches in the back, and hot pies and sausage rolls behind the counter; the choice was quite overwhelming. but i was mindful of my sister’s observation that we had barely eaten any british cuisine in our time in london, and ended up with a cold pork pie from the refrigerated shelves. the kid gamely picked a sausage roll as big as her head.

it was a very pleasant lunch, sitting in the wire chairs outside the shop, within the sunlit atrium of the train station. the solid puck of a pie was filled with great meaty chunks and a herby bouquet. the pickle was bright yellow and bitey, and full of still-crunchy vegetables. i wish there’d been more of it.

when we were done, we went back into the shop and stocked up on a few comestibles: chocolate bars, a jar of chocolate-pear spread, and a cupcake. (back in sydney, i would submit the receipt to the travel insurance company, to be compensated for meals during our volcano-related delay. they would graciously accept it, and categorise the expenditure as “snacks”.)

and then we went back underground, and resurfaced at covent garden, where we spent not quite four hours at the excellent transport museum. interactive displays of centuries of public transport. some quite lovely historic posters advertising tubes and trains. lovingly restored vintage buses! stuff you could sit in! they really don’t make stuff like they used to… but the life-sized model of the contemporary bus was quite the win.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 May 2010 at 11:11 am

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

one of the other things that commandeered my attention at the japan centre on regent street was a humble plastic takeaway container fastened with a length of curling ribbon. the cookies within were a most enchanting shade of green.

i know, i know. they are just a simple maccha sablé, and i could google a bunch of recipes and make my own. well, fine. maybe i will, now that these are gone. they were rather pleasing: a good crunch on impact, and then a mass of buttery crumbs on my tongue. they were mild in taste to begin with, but after eating four or five in a row, the verdant bitterness of the maccha kicked in. really, a smart regulatory measure to keep me from eating the whole pack in one go.

i was actually more intrigued by the other box that i pulled from the shelf: the buckwheat cookies. they were nutty in flavour, almost savoury, and surprised me with the most satisfying little crackly bits, courtesy of the grains of toasted buckwheat scattered through each biscuit.

there were also black sesame cookies on the shelf, but i thought it best to leave them. these were very persuasive biscuits. you may be lulled safe by their spare decoration and their homely good looks, but take them home and they’ll have their wicked way with you.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 May 2010 at 10:51 pm

permalink | filed under packaging, snacks, trip

ten days into our london holiday, i found myself on hold on the phone, cup of tea going cold, waiting to speak to the airline about possibly resheduling our flight home. we were due to leave that night, but the airports were still closed due to ashy skies. three hours and forty-two minutes of hold music later, i had five minutes of pleasant chat with a helpful man in india, and hung up with a numb and sweaty ear, and a new departure date three days away.

with a whoop, we pulled some clothes on and burst out into the sunshine. the columbia road flower market would still be on for a good three hours or so. though of course, we weren’t there for the flowers, oh no.

i still had fond memories of my cupcake at treacle from four, count ’em, four years ago. where does the time go, i ask you. such worrisome concerns dissipated as we moseyed about the shop, which seems to have doubled in size since our last visit. there were some very covetable bits of crockery on display, as well as candles in such flavours as cucumber sandwiches.

and there were the cupcakes, in two sizes and several variations of chocolate and vanilla, displayed in large drawers behind the glass counter at the front. the smiley shopgirl was dressed up like the technicolor 50s, and gamely encouraged us to choose exactly which cupcake we wanted. mine was perfectly nice — the cake itself had a light chocolate taste and a fine, crumbly texture, and there was just enough of the not-too-sweet frosting — although much of my enjoyment came from standing in a doorway, trying to keep out of the way of the flower market crowd, by a window display of novelty puppy dog mugs.

i had also been looking forward to visiting rob ryan‘s shop, ryantown, which did not disappoint, filled as it was with his wonderfully schmaltzy papercuts. even the plate glass window was not spared, nor a very desirable umbrella with £45 price tag.

resisting the urge to buy stuff makes me hungry, so i was pleased when we made it to the end of the road, and my sister pointed out campania gastronomia, where lunch could be had. ’twas a homely sort of place, with rickety old tables and chairs, yellowing snapshots tacked to the wall, and a clatter of mismatched cutlery and vintage china. every torta and pudding on show looked hopelessly homemade too, in a good way, mostly.

but we wanted savoury. to share, a very pleasing antipasto board with three sorts of cheese in different degrees of stinky saltiness, and as many kinds of cold meat including great pink circles of pistachio mortadella. there were slippery strips of marinated capsicum, and olives, and hunks of bread drizzled in oil, and even after that, i still thought that i’d be able to tackle the sausage risotto.

i was wrong. it was a veritable lake of salty, buttery rice, with nuggets of meaty sausage all the way through. it was delicious, and i wished i could’ve eaten more of it. as it was, i couldn’t eat more of anything, not even the fat chocolate biscuits i’d seen on the way in, sandwiched with ricotta, and then wrapped up in a twist of greaseproof paper.

we were all smiles though. we felt like we’d won the grand prize, not having to get on the plane that night. the possibilities were endless.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 May 2010 at 12:51 am

permalink | filed under cake, kid, lunch, trip

what is that? gliding by — whoosh — so sleek?

one afternoon, after spending rather a lot of time in the harrods toy department, we crossed bromptom road to forage a luncheon at harrods 102, a bustling foodhall with such offerings as roast meat sandwiches, gelato, krispy kreme doughnuts and a yo! sushi train.

but we perched ourselves on the high stools at the other conveyor belt, the one loaded with fattoush, and skewers of meats, and lurid neon pickles. yes, ESH: eat•simply•healthy is a mezze train! well, i was excited. there was a swarthy man behind the grill, ready to make us hot food from the menu, but we chose to dine off the train.

the kid wanted some lamb sambousek, so we picked a plate of mixed fried things first up. unfortunately these were colder than room temperature, and hard, so we turned our attention to the grilled chicken skewers. served on a bed of couscous, these went down much better. after i pulled the saucy stewed beans off the conveyor belt, my tastebuds really came alive.

is there more than novelty value to this? i must say, i would have kept grabbing stuff off the train if i wasn’t constantly keeping an eye on the coloured rims of the plates, and referring to the price list, and converting what sounded like a reasonable price into australian dollars. and — perhaps more pertinently — if it didn’t seem like i’d have to eat everything on the counter, when the kid finished her meal too soon after the beans were set down. apart from the unfortunate appetisers, the food we had was tasty and well-presented, and the portion sizes more than satisfying.

i was sad to miss out on the plates of hommous and baba ghanouj that went by, artful swirls with tantalising puddles of olive oil in the centre, crowned with fat chickpeas. there was also a good selection of revolving desserts: variations on the theme of baklava, as well as semolina pastries and milky puddings. all this passed us by.

but you see, we had to play wisely: the laduree concession was just across the road.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 May 2010 at 11:16 pm

permalink | filed under lunch, trip

one friday afternoon, a kindly frenchman took maeve to the zoo. thusly unfettered, the rest of us took the long, meandering route to the imperial war museum, to see “the ministry of food” — a very engaging exhibition about what the british public ate (and didn’t) during the second world war.

it was quite a compact exhibition, but excellently curated with very convincing plastic food (how did they make that mug of solid milky tea?), vintage propoganda posters and film clips, sobering ration cards, an entire walk-in shoppe packed with “goods” in packaging of the era, and a real shop at the end with such covetable war food-related merchandise as pencils screenprinted with the ministry of food logo, felt brooches of peas-in-a-pod or sweetcorn, rubber eggs — they bounced in unpredictable directions, CD compilations of jaunty wartime tunes to cook or tend a garden by, and yes, even a cookbook, “the ministry of food: thrifty wartime ways to feed your family today“, written specially for the exhibition by jane fearnley-whittingstall (mother of hugh).

downstairs the museum cafe had been converted into “the kitchen front”, serving, for the duration of the exhibition, meals cooked from wartime recipes. unfortunately, we were there quite late in the day, and hot food was no longer on offer. however, i did see a small selection of old-fashioned cakes, and you could choose to have your scones with mock cream, rather than regular, for the authentic wartime afternoon tea experience.

in any case, we were in no mood to fill ourselves with snackage, for we were due not too long after for dinner at fifteen.

and so it was that we reunited with the kid at a table in jamie oliver’s do-good restaurant. the frenchman was there nursing a coke, but handover complete, he left in protest because 6pm is apparently too early to eat. huh. shame then, because he did not get to partake of the handsome italian waiters with their charming banter, nor the the festive antipasto platter, a veritable bounty of cured meats, marinated vegetables, bread, cheese, and the plumpest, juiciest green olives you ever did see.

pleased, i sipped at my rhubarb and vanilla lemonade (that sounds entirely possible doesn’t it? it has been some weeks since i sipped it, and so it could well be entirely possible as well that i am actually misremembering). i became even happier when my main course was placed before me.

slow-roasted pork belly: three wonderful fat slices, all at once salty, oily, tender-soft, topped with a golden arc of crunchy crackling. piled onto a mound of sauteed chickpeas and chard, it was a generous mound of food. i think i may have left a chickpea or four, at the end.

because i thought i should have dessert, y’know, for research. even though the dessert menu was somewhat uninspiring. perhaps if we’d been eating fancy downstairs, rather than casual upstairs the choice would have been more agreeable. as it was, we had a choice between a couple of heavy-sounding cakes and a brownie.

i picked the lemon cake, dense with semolina and moist with syrup, served with a good amount of thick vanilla cream and a tangle of candied rind. i must admit, it was quite delicious, and would have been lovely for afternoon tea. ultimately, it was the wrong dessert at the end of a large meaty dinner, and i was sad to leave more on the plate than i normally would (that is, ahem, nothing at all, normally).

i still think of this luscious food, hungrily. i might just have to pop in at fifteen melbourne the next time i’m down that way.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 9 May 2010 at 10:50 am

permalink | filed under dinner, trip

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