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at lunchtime, armed with visiting olds, the kid and i trundled across the M5, the park and another horrible main road to the growers’ market at fox studios, only to find, having thought about hot bacon and sauerkraut all morning, that — oh tragedy! the pierogi man no longer holds a stall there. hmph.

luckily, the disappointment was quickly tempered by an assortment of free samples from the chevre man, a tasting plum from the plum man, some nibblets of nougat from the nougat lady, and a tiny sliver of ice cream sandwich from the ice cream sandwich guy.

there was no free anything at the pie shop, however having bought a duck pie for me and a lamb pie for my father, and then having asked the pie lady which was which, she replied, “the duck pie has a little duck on it.” and indeed it did:

it was very salty, and contained bits of peas, carrot and corn too uniform in size to be anything other than a frozen variety. or maybe they are just perfectionists back at the pie-ranch. indeed, the pastry crust was perfect. whatever. what i really want to tell you about is the ice cream sandwich guy, but i am really quite sleepy and too full of turkish banquet dinner to go any further, and will have to revisit this pressing issue sometime in the morning.

so to end my lunch post, i shall direct you to this dollop of investigative journalism on school lunches around the world (via da*xiang)

posted by ragingyoghurt on 9 March 2005 at 10:10 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch, snacks

in the longstanding tradition of homemade bittersweet sundaes in the last hours before she gets on a plane, we put on a modest display of ice cream, chocolate sauce, crushed walnuts, raspberries and a cherry on top. the photo was taken by nellie, because i was quivering with so much anticipation that my pictures were all out of focus.

at the airport, in defiance, we flaunted our frosty starbucks beverages before the boy, whose opinion is of the “damn american multinationals who think they can show the world how to make coffee” variety. “that’s why we’re not getting the coffee,” we had retorted, before flouncing off in the direction of the neon mermaid via the krispy kreme stall. so now we had a grande green tea frappacino, and a tall strawberries and cream frappacino — in fact nellie had ordered the new neopolitan frap, but the exhuberantly gay counter boy was far too busy being camp to put the chocolate and vanilla in, feh — and a small box of sour cream doughnuts and pumpkin spice doughnuts, for later.

two weeks ago when i made the doughnut dash while waiting for nellie to come through immigration, the featured-doughnut tray was bare, and i had been waiting weeks to try the special festive offering. “you don’t have the pumpkin spice doughnuts?” i asked. “um, not today,” said the counter girl. i was so surprised and disappointed that i could not get my question out: “why would you not have the featured doughnut!?” and then she said, “we usually have them, but somehow they didn’t show up today.” i was so surprised and disappointed that i could not get my question out: “what!? you don’t bake them here!?” and then she said, “oh, you like them?” and i had to express my disappointment at never having tried them, and my surprise that they hadn’t shown up today, and my disappointment at not getting to try them once again.

anyway.

we sat and watched some planes and then nellie held the baby for one last time, bopped her on the head and called out “babboo-babboo” before disappearing past the sliding doors with the last of the strawberries and cream frappacino. there was no extended bowing and waving today; there was a hungry baby to feed.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 January 2005 at 11:50 am

permalink | filed under around town, boy, drink, kid, nellie, snacks

is this normal behaviour? yesterday at marrickville metro, accompanying the boy to do his desperate and ultimately unsuccessful burst of christmas shoping for the year, i popped into the rather good metro grocer for a tub of yoghurt.

not ten minutes later, we stood at the cashier and i was signing a credit card receipt for $62 worth of yoghurt, halloumi, chocolate mousse, calabrian chili-marinated sardines, artichokes, plums, a vanilla pod, a marzipan stollen and a $20 panettone.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 December 2004 at 6:35 pm

permalink | filed under around town, shoping

some days, once a week, say, it is good in clement weather, to strap the kid in the baby bjorn, get on the bus and head into the city. timing it just right, directly after a feed and a nappy change, will buy us a two-hour excursion, plenty of time for a stroll through the aisles of department stores looking at what i like to call “things”, and then a quick whirl through the david jones food hall for lunch and/or a treat. maevis would have fallen asleep sometime during the bus trip or the subsequent wandering, and on the bus home is when the first gruntings of awakening emerge. perfect.

a week ago, such an excursion resulted in a turkey and brie baquette, three nudie smoothies, a tub of chocolate mousse, and a $20 box of the special christmas assortment of lindt gingerbread truffles. today was a much more modest affair, yielding a small tub of roasted tomato couscous and turtle bean salad from the salad bar. en route to the bus though, i did stop by starbucks, the one which opened up in the space where half the commonwealth bank’s counters used to be. remember, nellie, when we walked across the brooklyn bridge in the windchill, and my face broke out in hives, and on reaching manhattan we had to take shelter in a starbucks for gingerbread lattes? today there was no such need, even though i really wanted to, for christmas. instead i went the maccha frappacino, in a lovely shade of green. in a very non-christmassy display of meanness, starbucks now charges 30c extra if you say “yes” when they ask, “and do you want whipped cream on that?”.

humph.

ah these heady days of carefree consumption of pregnancy danger foods. i was hardly strict about it over the gestation — a couple bits of sushi here, a runny egg yolk there, with no ill effect except mild worry if my stomach flip-flopped after the fact — but in the last couple of weeks i’ve gleefully eaten two brie sandwiches, two chocolate mousses (with a newly acquired third in the fridge), an enormous amount of sashimi at one sitting, and today’s whipped cream on my frappacino. all i have to tackle now is soft serve ice cream.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 December 2004 at 6:05 pm

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

last year, maybe the year before, i bought a wire-bound notebook: dusty pink, with a faint houndstooth-checkered pattern running through it, like the material of a suit a granny might wear. in the top right corner, under a magenta foil-stamped row of six olde worlde milke bottles, is the slogan, “dairymen are the cream of the crop!”. in the bottom left corner, under a tiny silhouette still life of a pitcher, a milk glass, milk carton and a wheel of cheese with a wedge cut out of it, is the poem…

“Love is like more than an emotion, / it’s the substance of our being / Each morning as I awaken your (sic) the reason / I smilke, Your (sic) the reason I love / A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you whe you have forgotten the words.”

[edit: what i meant to type was “your the reason i smile”. evidently the milk, which is all i think about (and smell of) these days, is more pervasive than i realised.]

i thought that this notebook, after languishing a year, maybe two, in my amusing notebook box, would be a most appropriate logbook for my breastfeeding diary (date, time, duration, side).

yesterday at 3.45 in the afternoon, maeve drank for twenty-eight minutes, eight minutes on the left and twenty on the right. then she had a vomit, which although moderate in volume, was nowhere near the torrent of the day before, which came up in four great gushes and took even the child by surprise, judging by the look on her face. this time she seemed unfazed so we loaded her into the stroller and walked into chinatown.

we caught the lift up to happy chef, and ordered bowls of soupy noodles (me: wonton and mushroom with rice noodles; the boy: spicy beef and wonton with egg noodles), and then after, we stopped by the bubble tea place and got bubble teas to go (me: jasmin milk tea with pearls; the boy: taiwanese style lychee milkshake). we walked home the long way, and then split up at the last set of traffic lights, the boy to get some DVDs, me, maeve and the stroller to get another bumper packet of nappies. maeve was still asleep when we got home. we felt like very normal people.

there have been eight feeds since, all varying in length, but generally a punctual two hours apart. in the notebook, on the top right corner of each page, next to the six olde worlde milke bottles, “You look brilliant like morning sunshine”.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 November 2004 at 9:48 am

permalink | filed under around town, boy, dinner, drink, kid

it’s good to have a plan, because then you can be quietly pleased when everything falls into place. in this case, tuesday, the nori rolls were a perfect balance of salty and sour and sweet and umami (there is no place for bitterness in my life), “donnie darko” (apart from the arty digi-montages) was still good, and the coco loco mocha freezer (while too damn watery and ice chippy in texture) was a powerful chocolatey force. for about ten minutes into the film, the number of people in the cinema was one — me, and then sadly four teenagers arrived and took out the back row, and giggled when cherita chen gets told “go back to china, bitch”, and received phone calls on their mobiles, and giggled some more.

teenagers. feh.

having a plan with a bit of leeway on either side is especially good, because then you can duck into kmart before for a pair of new underwear, and pop into harris farm after for beans and asparagus and a tub of raspberry yoghurt.

—

completely unplanned was the sudden waking at 2.30 this morning, the lying awake for an hour before rolling out of bed and the resigned heading downstairs with a handful of pillows and “the new yorker” food issue. having over the last couple of days already read about the struggles to develop a superior ketchup and some guy’s obsession with pasta, 3am seemed a perfectly alright time to learn about the commercial production of salad greens.

here, look:

it took … until 1989 … to mass produce the first retail bagged salads. salad spinners were perfected, shredding knives sharpened, battalions of chemists subcontracted to create the perfect polymers. today’s bags are a triumph of practical ingenuity. their plastic is made up of five to ten layers, each with a different function. some are designed to make the package shiny or crinkly, others to carry print well. together, they have to be just permeable enough to keepthe bag’s artificial atmosphere in balance — the wrong ink alone can suffocate a salad. as the lettuce sits on the shelf, the gases in the bag are constantly consumed, released and replaced. oxygen, nitrogen and carbon-dioxide molecules bond with the polymers on one side of the plastic and are released on the other, diffusing from high concentrations to low. every type of salad requires a different type of bag, tailored to its respiration rate by gas chromatography and computer analysis. every bag is a miniature biosphere.

from salad days: how a lowly leaf became a high-end delicacy
by burkhard bilger

yesterday, at a luncheon in which everyone at the table turned out to be with child (way to go, my fertile friends!), what i ordered off the specials board was a grilled haloumi salad. it wasn’t just slabs of grilled salty cheese; there were lightly dressed baby rocket and mint leaves, cucumber ribbons, fresh beetroot, roasted eggplant, and on top, a dollop of herby yoghurt. there were also two bits of bread which in the end were used to wipe the plate clean.

oh cook + archie’s, i am privileged to be fed by you.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 September 2004 at 12:10 pm

permalink | filed under around town, at the movies, bookshelf, drink, kid, lunch, snacks

ok, shhhh, don’t tell anyone, but in two hours i’m gonna skive off werk, and walk out into the blue and sunshine down to broadway, where i will procure two nori rolls — one beef teriyaki (or maybe eel) and the other most likely some sort of vegetarian option (the one with the pickles and shredded inari tofu is pretty tasty) — and perhaps a raspberry mocha frappucino, and settle myself into the cool and dark of “donnie darko: the director’s cut”. yeah.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 September 2004 at 9:39 am

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

the first day of spring brought such bad things as:

1. the lovely and amazing cafe zoe up the road having black bean and spinach soup on the menu, but no longer in the kitchen, because although the winter menu had changed to the spring menu, they hadn’t printed them up yet. in truth, this was only a bit sad for a little while because the ensuing second breakfast of a spinach and poached egg english muffin with grilled-in-butter mushrooms and a mesclun salad more than redeemed the situation.

2. nellie flying back to new york, which was such a sad bad thing that we began saying “ok… well…” and “goodbye” yesterday afternoon so that we’d be used to it by the time today came around. in addition we had to have first breakfasts (actually the second course of first breakfast) of ice cream sundaes to cheer ourselves up.

the sundaes were composed of a perfunctory layer of tim tam ice cream, strawberries, vanilla ice cream, strawberries, more vanilla ice cream and strawberries, crushed lebanese date biscuits, vanilla ice cream, shaved chocolate and strawberries.

3. coming out of two and a half hours of birth class to discover that it is raining, and arriving home to find all the laundry that was oh so close to sundried is now close to sopping wet. at least now i know how to swaddle a baby.

4. my sister not being here.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 September 2004 at 10:03 pm

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, kid, lunch, nellie, snacks

oh nellie. stop this insane notion that you must leave tomorrow. what can we do but have a last hurrah.

a last hurrah at happy chef. a last hurrah with the fancy french pastries. a last hurrah folding up the sofabed, way too early in the morning. a last hurrah of a salty, vinegary potato scallop. a last hurrah singing call-and-answer showtunes. a last hurrah on a ferry, in the last (hurrah) winter sun.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 31 August 2004 at 7:57 am

permalink | filed under around town, nellie

after yoga, after a long walk up to the main road, after a slow ride on the 380, after a time spent deciding what fish would be best battered and fried, and how many potato scallops to get, we finally sat down at a picnic bench facing the sea. it was just short of 4pm, lunchtime this saturday. between us and the view of sparkling bondi, a hefty blue eyed cod and a pile of chips, and two potato scallops.

something happens when chips are served up with anything. the anything is momentarily forgotten as you try to cram fat, hot, salty potato into your mouth. will you be so lucky (or restrained) this time that the delicate skin behind your front teeth will not end up scalded and hanging in painful little ribbons from the roof of your mouth?

and what of the batter? what of that last piece of crunchy brown that fell off the fish sometime during the eating?

“what shall i do with this batter?” i asked.

“leave it,” said nellie.

“i know.” i said this only because i thought she’d said “eat it”.

i’m not sure how the misunderstanding was cleared up, but there were still chips on the greaseproof paper, and i knew what fate would befall me, and them, if i didn’t throw them to the gulls.

my overarm was unstoppable, hurling chips one after the other at the horrible, beady-eyed things. the air was filled with birds and squawking and chips, and finally, that last piece of batter. my eyes were still filled with fire. i never felt so alive.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 August 2004 at 6:29 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch, nellie

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