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sometimes (though not often!), you may not want an inventive maccha-infused, bean-studded bun from a shiny modern asian bakery. sometimes, the exercise of walking the edge of chinatown in search of a printer capable of spewing out a two-metre wide poster will put you in the vicinity of the grimy little chinese bakery perched above the burlington supermarket.

you may have already bribed the child to get back in her pram again, after the half-hour wait for the bus, and the half-hour busride, and the half-hour spent looking at polypropylene samples in the backroom of said printer, with the promise of a bunshop.

so there you have it.

where the newer bakeries may have 20 or so cases filled with all manner of bundom and flossy bread, this one — and i have no idea what its name is; i just call it “the chinese bakery on top of burlington supermarket” — has a small wall of nine. but the nine cases hold more than what we need. it is always difficult to choose just one, from the bank of old-skool classics: pork with pickled mustard bun, ham bun, curry bun, taro bun, pineapple bun, pineapple custard bun, pineapple red bean bun, chocolate bun (filled with solid slabs of chocolate in lieu of the chocolate creme patisserie you might be expecting), those tall spongy cupcakes…

but here is an empty case, containing none of the bun i really want: the best ever baked charsiu bun, with a sweet sticky glaze and a sweet sticky filling containing actual bits of meat (rather than bits of fat and gristle). i looked around, panicked, those minutes passing all too slowly until a cheerful girl emerged from the inner sanctum with a fresh tray.

they were still warm.

i tonged one, and then two, and then a pineapple red bean bun, and then an afterthought, this ethreal “sticky rice with custard”. a soft, moist mochi (even a day later) in a coconut coat, with a pale yellow centre. it was sweet and delicate, and why have i never bought one before??

we ate the pork buns on a park bench, before a steadily advancing arc of seagulls, pigeons and ibises. at the end, maeve wore a joker smile of red and sticky.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 August 2006 at 2:28 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, snacks

there has been some discussion of late, about organic fruit and veg boxes… seems like something’s in the air; everybody wants one.

last week, instead of buying a fancy cookbook by a cute chef, i got “the ethics of what we eat” (peter singer and jim mason). by page 30 i had an unsettled feeling in my stomach that i feared might only be quelled by vowing to eat just freetrade, organic, amazonian chocolate for the rest of my life. but of course, it will all come down to drawing lines. i’m only midway through the book now, and i don’t know where those lines will be drawn. however, i have decided to buy organic/free-range meat for now.

i was buying free range eggs already, but the weekend paper brought news that “the big buggers in the cage industry have been passing off barn eggs as free-range for years“. this was swiftly refuted by the egg corporation, so who knows what i’ll find in my carton next week.

lunchtime today though, after an hour in the playground, the kid and i shared a big vege breakfast up the street. the scrambled eggs tasted of salty butter, as did the four bits of turkish bread toast and the sauteed mushrooms and baby spinach. there was also a grilled roma tomato and a veggie patty, made up of corn, chopped-up green beans and grated pumpkin, held together with more egg. the breakfast included a small pot of tea and a large glass of orange juice, pretty awright for $15. it fed the two of us, and there was egg to spare.

hopefully a chicken didn’t sit, beakless and bald, in a cage, in vain.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 August 2006 at 3:38 pm

permalink | filed under around town, bookshelf, breakfast

a surprise midweek jaunt into the city put me once again outside the plexiglass lockers at breadtop, looking in. the buns sat there, glowing a faint green… and then i bought them, finally.

a single hefty green tea melon bun, and a bag of six little green tea buns, filled with red bean paste.

the green tea melon bun — where the melon refers not to a flavour, but the crisscross pattern on the surface of the bun — has all its flavour concentrated in the crust. you crunch through this sturdy green armour to get to a plain yeasty sweet bun beneath. it’s like kogepan’s friend, melon-pan, come to life! a life that sadly came to an end after dinner wednesday night, washed down with a pot of jasmin green tea. mmm…

the next morning, a green tea-red bean bun fulfilled its destiny. this bun had green tea flavour (and colour) all through the soft dough, and contained just the right amount of sweet red bean mash.

the next morning, the kid and i, and another kid and her mum, trundled down the street in the rain, to about life, again! clearly i am deluded about the amount of money i’m earning with my high-flying, stay-at-home mothering, extremely-part-time graphic designer job (except, i’m not, because i just calculated my entire year’s earnings for my tax return, and even though i thought i was doing more paid work than last year, i actually ended up with less money! sucks when that happens!)

but my $9 bowl of mushroom soup made it all better. up on the chalkboard it said “cream of mushroom soup”, but after interrogating the countergirl to find out if there were actual mushroom bits in it, i was delighted to receive an enormous bowl of pureed brown mushrooms, with mushroom bits, slices even, all the way through.

maeve ended up eating most of the oversized inside-out unagi maki that i’d thought we’d share. it was a splendid vision in the glass case, its outer layer made up of artfully sliced avocado and seaweed sprinkles. it came with a salad of lightly dressed rocket leaves, and a little receptacle of wasabi and soy sauce fish.

we are thinking of moving in.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 July 2006 at 5:10 pm

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

back when i worked on a pop magazine, deadline morning would see stuart the subeditor hunched over my desk, cutting back stories with one hand while the other clutched a glistening bacon and egg roll for sustenance. this was at least eight or nine years ago, and between then and now, i have intermittently thought about acquiring a bacon and egg roll, usually when i walk past one of those greasy-spoon hole-in-the-walls about the gritty city. it’s never actually happened though, either because i’ve somehow convinced myself that it won’t be as good as i’m anticipating, or because i think that i can taste it in my head and that’s what it will be and that is good enough, or because i fear the bacon will be too fatty, or because i’d rather, at that particular moment, have a goat cheese and basil omelette, or mushrooms on toast, or pancakes with berries, or whatever.

this morning, we met the boy’s family for breakfast, at an old skool italian coffee shop on the very edge of leichhardt. the breakfast menu consisted five items, three of which were: bacon and egg roll ($5), bacon and eggs on toast ($7), and bacon and eggs on turkish bread($9). the other two were bacon, eggs, tomatoes and mushrooms on toast, and toasted focaccia — i really do not like focaccia. but because i really do like turkish bread, that is what i had.

it was amazing! i should have given in years ago!

what a fool!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 July 2006 at 8:58 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast

i’d thought that posting my $70 grocery receipt was an invitation for admonishment or ridicule, but no. well, perhaps there was some eye-rolling at your screens, or mutters of “why don’t you give that money to me instead?” that i don’t know about. still, i was touched by the outward show of support and understanding of my spendthriftiness. which is how i found myself back at the very same emporium, with deborah, attending a short presentation on how to increase our energy.

it amounted to the instore nutritionist sitting at a small table reading a short essay off a sheet of paper, while showing us a variety of grains, legumes and other healthy things that would help with the necessary nutrients. there was a brief and awkward pause while a girl’s baby choked on a mouthful of apple, and then there was question time, during which another girl asked what effect on her blood sugar it would have, to put four or five spoons of sugar in her cup of tea.

but of course, the food tour was just an excuse (for me anyway) to trawl the aisles of wonder once again. it was enough fun just to look, and think about buying the box of inca red quinoa, or the carton of italian chocolate cornflakes — it had a lovely illustration of a monkey on it. in a fit of restraint, i bought just a loaf of bread (sprouted rye and spelt, with a whiff of caraway), and a piece of cheese (organic parmesan).

that morning, it had rained until just before the kid and i left the house, paused for the ten minutes it took for us to walk up the hill, and then resumed. and then it stopped again. and started again, harder. it was all right for maeve, under plastic, but i was quite sodden when we pulled up outside the store. and so after the morning lesson and the circuit round the shop, when we looked out the windows to see that it was pelting down again, we thought it was best that we sit down to something to eat.

hurray!

before too long we were all perched on the shiny white stools at the counter. “babycino!” yelled the kid, as the miniature paper cup approached. and then coffee and hot chocolate and deb’s enormous stack of brown flour pancakes with marscarpone, maple syrup and strawberries — how’s that for healthy and decadent — and a great platter of smoked salmon, brie and dill omelette with thick slices of wholegrain sourdough for maeve and me. we tried our hardest to eat everything, and then we surrendered and went across the road to the common ground bakery.

“ah,” deb had said earlier, as we stood in the bread aisle, debating, “that is the bakery where the men all have beards [an anagram of ‘breads’!] and all the girls have long hair.”

it is true. the girls also wear long skirts, and blouses of flower print. such a girl, behind the counter, talked up the maté latte, and sold me a loaf of mountain berry bread. the same bread is sold back across the road at about life, but when you buy it at the bakery, it comes with a festive sprinkle of flaked almonds.

contrary to its name, it is packed with plump raisins, dates apricots and walnuts. it has a sugary glaze and an aura of brandy. these bearded men and long-haired lasses, they sure know how to have a good time.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 July 2006 at 12:50 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, shoping

meanwhile in the western suburbs, someone goes healthy.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 June 2006 at 3:26 pm

permalink | filed under around town, shoping

according to the internet, uludag is the highest mountain in western anatolia. its name translates as “big mountain”, and from its peaks is where the gods watched the trojan war. we didn’t make it as far (or as high) as uludag last saturday; instead we went to auburn.

i had checked the street directory before i set out that morning, and so it was with only slightly wavering conviction that i pointed helen, sue and sarah in the direction of the RT Delight factory. [nellie, it will please you no end to discover that the RT on the logo stands for Real Turkish] as it turns out, getting off the train and walking down the station stairs had confused me such that we found ourselves in the exact polar opposite location from where we were meant to be. fortunately, deb arrived not long after and saved us from…

well. there was the first lebanese bakehouse, full of baklava and biscuits and a quite fierce baker who ordered us out as soon as he saw the cameras. (he was easily placated by some of us buying biscuits. yummy sugar-dusted, lemon-iced biscuits filled with crushed pistachios or walnuts.) there was the second lebanese bakehouse, next door, where helen sensibly thought to buy real food in the form of a za’atar pizza. there was a grocery shop, and this is where deb showed up and turned us around in the right direction.

there was a vietnamese bakery, and suddenly every one else had real food too: pork banh mi with chillies, not too shabby for almost eleven on a saturday morning.

’round the other side of the station, we found ourselves finally in the turkish delight factory, which is less a hot and heaving kitchen with vats of sugary paste and rosewater being stirred by sweaty turks, than a gleaming white showroom manned by a stern woman overlooking trays of chocolate truffles in glass cases. but where? the turkish delight? it is all pre-wrapped, sealed in plastic bags, or cardboard boxes or foil packaging, or combinations thereof. ch.

the chocolate was mediocre: my chocolate indulgence truffle tasted like an uneasy union of milo and nutella, coated in a hard shell of milk chocolate, dusted with cocoa powder. the turkish delight — with almonds, and covered in milk chocolate — was no better than any other turkish delight i’ve had here, and certainly no match for those individual little cakes of the stuff dipped in thick dark or white chocolate, studded with a single pistachio or almond and retailing at nigh on $80/kilo (just over $4 a piece!). mmm… but that’s another story.

deb led the way to arzum market on rawson street, which truly was the aladdin’s cave of shiny treasures. just look at this:

– smiling strawberry jelly biscuit, from eti

– multi-coloured, sprinkled, marshmallow biscuits, also eti

[ when i was in turkey a few years ago, i bought a packet of oreo-like biscuits, called “negro”, which is one of the eti stable. i considered bringing it to my sister in new york, but i thought maybe the customs officials at JFK would be somewhat less amused. ]

– a tube of special hazelnut cocoa cream from ülker… ah ülker, we share fond memories, don’t we? i know it’s just nutella, but a tube!

– bananko! from the croatian confectioner, kras. i haven’t tried it yet (or any of the others actually), but the company website assures me that “a fluffy banana-flavored filling and rich chocolate coating make bananko a delicious treat.”

– also from kras, a somewhat familiar trapezoid-shaped milk chocolate bar with hazelnuts and honey.

– a roll of turkish cherry candy

– the beautiful bottle of turkish fizzy you see at the top of this post

– and in case you think i just blew my budget on candy, a jar of honey.

if you read deb’s account of the adventure, you will see that we were both torn between the honey with whole nuts, or this one with the intricate pattern of crushed nuts (and cumin and coconut and raisins and apricot stones). when we asked the jolly shopkeeper if he recommended the honey, he opened up a jar of his favourite — the plain one, put it down on the counter with a fresh loaf of turkish bread, and invited us to try. it tasted of flowers. mine tastes of peanuts. i think they reversed the order of the ingredients on the label, so that groundnut, which appears last after pistachio, almond, hazelnut, and walnut, is actually the predominent nut. in fact the impressive tiling you see here, it is only a couple of millimetres thick. the rest of the bottle is a sludge of indistinguishable chopped nuts. nuts. i think you got the better honey, deborah.

back on auburn road, we stopped outside mado, where we only briefly considered what flavours of ice creams to get… before we found ourselves at a handsomely appointed table in the depths of the restaurant (not quite the inner sanctum though; that was a child’s birthday party waiting to happen, with a pointy paper hat on every plate). it is warm and glowing in mado. the walls are festooned with brass treasures and leather booties and satin turbans. the booths are plush and comfortable. the waitress is patient.

if you were silly earlier and ate a whole pork roll, forcing you to choose something light off the menu because of course you have to leave room for dessert, what you will have is a bowl of hot soup. a surprisingly light and creamy red lentil soup served with a lemon wedge and chilli sprinkles and two great slabs of bread. and then as the others feast on the salad with walnuts and (allegedly) pomegranate syrup, and beans in tomato sauce, and charred lamb cubes, you will sink into the plush and comfortable seat, under the warm, golden lights, and feel sleep come upon you. only the promise of dondurma will keep you in the realm of the awake.

but just dondurma? it’s just that, on the way in, helen and i had spied platters of oozy puddings on the dessert counter. it was labelled “caramelised pudding” in the display, and “charred pudding” on the menu, but what had really attracted me was the pale, plump pudding innards, oozing from beneath the golden brown crust. there was a half-hearted dicsussion on whether or not dessert would be a takeaway affair, but then cups of turkish tea and salep milk were ordered, as well as ice cream and pudding. we were in for the long haul.

the raspberry dondurma was bright red with an intense, tart flavour. the date was mellow with datey bits all the way through. the plain white salep was extra chewy and quite comforting. but the pudding! soft, oozy pudding, with the caramelly crust, with the sprinkle of cinnamon, with a lingering aftertaste of toasted marshmallows. you could sit around eating bowls of this pudding, and then one day your belly would peek out from your waistband, looking like pale oozy pudding too.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 June 2006 at 8:53 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, ice cream, lunch, packaging, shoping, snacks

you know how it is: step out to buy a butter dish, and suddenly you have a butter dish, and two little glass tubs for storage, and a pretty pink mixing bowl, and some ocean trout for dinner.

i recently found a recipe for lemon curd sponge pudding in a magazine, and it became clear to me that i would have to acquire a pudding bowl. (you see how it is? if you have already read the previous entry, you will shake you head sadly and agree: it’s an affliction!)

but it was half price!

monday lunchtime, the bowl was sitting clean and fresh on the drying rack as my bucatini came to a boil, and before i realised what was happening, i had grabbed it and filled it with a tangle of spicy coriander pesto noodles with peas and broccoli.

ah lovely and versatile pink mixing/pudding/pasta bowl.

maeve was ambling down the street the other day in a pair of pink trousers and her black and white stripy t-shirt. she looked like a giant licorice allsort. we went to starbucks, and the girl behind the counter said, “is that your, um, sister?”

“UM… no, my, um, daughter.”

“it’s just,” she said, “you look so young… and my sister and i, we have eight years between us, so…”

“ah,” i said, “there are 32 years between us.”

and then she offered maeve a chocolate muffin sample and a baby-cino. note: starbucks balmain does baby-cini for free. me, i had noticed the scrawl on the blackboard that said, “hot white chocolate”, and instantly i had to have some, with raspberry syrup.

i had some, and it was way too sweet, and thick, and white. i mean, of course, but i was surprised. like that time in sainsburys, nellie, when we gazed up in awe at the shelf of brown-bagged gourmet chocolate chip cookies, and picked the one labelled “white chocolate and raspberry” because you said they were amazing, and we took the bag home and broke it open and ate a cookie and thought, hmmm. because it was a regular chocolate chip cookie, and standing flummoxed in the kitchen we could even see through the cellophane window in the bag that they were clearly brown chocolate chips, and how had we not made the connection, standing at the end of that aisle in sainsburys, that the “white chocolate” label did not compute with the brown chocolate within? we did not compute.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 June 2006 at 4:02 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, drink, kid, nellie, shoping

you think this is crazy? how ’bout if i told you i paid just over $5 for three bananas this morning?

because on sunday afternoon, as we stood just clear of chinatown pedestrian traffic, enjoying a post-yumcha gelato (of course), i grumbled a little about the price of bananas.

the friend up from hobart mentioned that her organic grocer was still selling them for $4.95/kilo, quite a bit below the $12/kilo all around town, even if you did expect that the standard of living in tasmania would be more affordable than in glamorous sydney. the kid and i were sharing a cup of banana and mango gelato, because since the banana supply dried up, maeve has been banana-less. well, maybe just one banana every couple of weeks, as a treat. one $1.48 banana.

but then i got to thinkin’, that that $1.48 was actually less than the $2.48 or so that i’d just handed over for the scoop of banana gelato. what crazy economic theories had i been prey to, depriving the kid of one of her eight favourite fruits? and really, have i not paid like, $4 for a fancy, but tiny, chocolate bar?

so this morning, after the library, we marched into the fruitshop, and plonked the three bananas down on the counter, and there you have it. she was already waving her arms and keening “na-naaaa. NA-NAAAA.” as we walked back in the front door.

but what of this psychedelic purple bread? on the way home on sunday, we stopped for takeaway meats in the belly of world square, and i decided that i would finally buy something at breadtop.

my relationship with breadtop has been somewhat uneasy. of course, i’d been wanting and wanting to go since i saw someone walking about town carrying a filmy bag embellished with the voluptuous chinese calligraphy that said “bun shop”. but were they affiliated with, or “paying tribute to”, the singaporean breadtalk?

[ does a cursory google; no one out there seems to know either ]

aside from the similar, somewhat meaningless asian-english names, the two brands also share the same grey-orange-white aesthetic. they both have a wide variety of meat floss-covered bun products, and green tea-red bean cakes. and as i write this now, and try to specify what my misgivings are, i have nothing beyond: well, they may be a rip-off of breadtalk. and i mean, just look at this:

sigh, beautiful. on previous wistful visits, i always thought i would get some sort of green tea bun — the green tea or taro swiss roll really requires some sort of special occasion — but then on sunday i saw the shiny little loaf on the end of the exotic bread shelf, the last of its kind: purple sticky rice loaf!

you open the bag and inhale: it smells of sweet, yeasty chinese bread. you take a bite: it is soft and sweet and has a creamy, nutty flavour from ground up sticky rice (no whole chewy rice grains in it like passionflower’s sticky rice ice cream). in fact, it would make a terrific ice cream sandwich.

omigod! i have ice cream in the freezer!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 June 2006 at 2:08 pm

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

oh this rain it will continue through the morning…

it paused briefly today — blue sky! sunshine!! — to allow us to stroll boldly up the hill splashing in puddles, before laughing in our faces and raining on our heads. still, we made it to bakers delight, as directed by the kid.

“bun shop? ok. bun shop!”

and then the supermarket, where everything was on special, and where maeve sat in the pram, docile, ok, content, gnawing on her bun while i walked the aisles thinking of all the possibilities. at the checkout, an elderly european woman said to her, “oh you are very selective, picking out all the chocolate and raisins.”

but they were actually olives.

i recently learned, via tomatom.com, that raging yoghurt is one of the top 20 food blogs in australia: i scraped in at 19, woop. ed succintly summed up the blog in one word: “cakes”. so i unleash unto you, the ragingyoghurt cupcake tshirt, featuring a drawing you may recall from the other month.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 June 2006 at 10:59 pm

permalink | filed under around town, blog, kid

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