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it was the evening my sister returned from a day at the blue mountains. she had been perched on a grubby metal step — hell, let’s call it the floor of the train — for the duration of the journey back to the city, and been kicked by a rat-faced little boy with a filthy mouth to match. after which there was another lackluster ride on another train — a sushi train — for dinner; it was the second last day of the old year, after all.

and so she and the frenchman tumbled back to the house, and frenchie took his place on the blue couch with the red controller and earned himself another five mario stars, and my sister handed me a little package wrapped in a purple paper bag.

i shook it, as i asked, “can i eat it?”

“well…” she said.

“oh! is it matches?” i ventured.

i felt the exhalation more than i heard it.

“but wait ’til you see them,” she said.

“are they pink?”

but she had no chance to answer, because i had slid the box open, and there they were.

it was exactly as it had been a couple of weeks earlier, when my aunt brought my grandmother ’round for a little birthday morning tea. after the sour cream fruit loaf which my aunt had made — un-iced, though solemnly adorned with whole pecans — my grandmother was presented with a few wrapped-up parcels, and as she ran her hands over each one, she pronounced decisively, and uncannily, “purse,” or “cookbook”. clearly, i have inherited her gift.

i immediately jumped up, struck a match, and lit my new oolong-flavoured candle. everything was nice.

and now, two weeks into the new year, things are still nice, though rather a lot hotter than i’d like, especially today when the trains running through western sydney were not air-conditioned, and i thought i might just vapourise on my way home from facilitating an image-making workshop with some young, especially giggly muslim girls in granville.

things are nice, with the intensive swimming classes, and the lemonade icy poles, and the giant red megaphones in the shadow of the opera house, and between it all, i find i haven’t the time — or, alas, the inclination — to blog anymore. shame, i cannot tell you about the salty peanut butter cup taste test, or the wonderful lunch before the crazy-ass thunderstorm, at gastronomia pelagio. what about the cabbage salad at pompei, which turned out to be a great mound of shredded cabbage, dressed simply with a truffled olive oil and garnished with a few planes of parmesan? almost as delicious as the prosciutto and fig pizza one plate over. (let’s not even talk about dessert — a scoop of peach sorbet nudging a scoop of pistachio, both as creamy lush as they were intense.)

it’s not that i would not like to keep telling you stories. but i think that i must step away for a moment, just a quickstep in the vast scheme of things you understand, until the sky is less burny, and my time management improves, and i figure out the terrible minotaur’s labyrinth that is customising a wordpress template.

and when i return, i will drag an rss feed out with me! yes!

in the meantime, other wordy girls will tell you many a fine story, and point you in the direction of a good feed too.

and because i am never far from the innernet (as much a blessing as it is a curse, i tells ya), i might post an update or two on my brand spankin’ new ragingyoghurt facebook page. ok, just for you, a photograph of the cabbage salad goes up as we speak.

and yeah, what the matchbox said: thanks, for coming by. it pleases me that you do.

normal transmission will resume… some day.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 January 2009 at 11:54 pm

permalink | filed under around town, blog, cake, nellie

xmas came early — just — when nellie arrived in town.

shortly after 7am, xmas eve, with wandering airport carolers to the right of me, and — surprise — the little matchgirl to the left, and a dark cherry mocha frappucino in my hand, my sister and the frenchman trundled down the ramp, with three suitcases of red, pink and silver.

shortly after that, after the ride back to my very tidy house in the taxi of a very grumpy chinese man (“you are already very happy,” he said almost resentfully, amidst the backseat jollity, “to be on holiday.”), but before the tea had properly brewed, the little red suitcase was disgorged onto my very tidy dining table.

behold: a copy of the new jamie oliver magazine, “jamie magazine“; a dark chocolate and morello cherry fruitcake from fortnum and mason; and a crate of laduree macarons, because pierre herme was not yet open when it was time to board the eurostar a day and a half earlier.

i keep good company, i do.

i ate half the salted butter caramel one, the filling yielding and sweet, then salty, and then half the mango and jasmin, like something made in another world, and then we hustled ourselves to haberfield and waited patiently (though twitchy) in line for cannoli and cold meats.

our christmas day played out in a most agreeable manner: ferry rides, james bond, banana choctops, popiah dinner in the suburbs.

our boxing day began with bread, and mortadella, and smoked salmon. there was raspberry jam and apricot nectar with soda water. my appropriately festive-themed macaron — pistachio, and rose — if you must know, were both divine.

merry ho ho.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 December 2008 at 11:43 am

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, cake, nellie

it became apparent as we approached the chocolate shop, that it was housed in the old digs of oh calcutta!. i’d never been inside oh calcutta!, and i’m sure it was nice and all, but i can assume that it looked nothing like boon (the chocolate experience), which looked very nice indeed with its glass-enclosed, marble-topped jewelry shop counter and blond wood panelling.

in fact it was deborah who initially alerted me to this store’s existence — “they have a tea room! and chocolate ornaments!” is essentially what the email said — and then i read some in-depth reporting over at the unbearable lightness of being hungry, and as the plans for our day fell into place, it became clear that boon would be a stop along the way.

and so. we stepped up to the door, and opened it, and the smell of chocolate that engulfed us was really quite exhilarating. because we had come from sopra, and gelato, we were in no condition to climb the narrow stairway up to the tearoom. but there was enough downstairs to keep us entertained.

behold — indeed — xmas baubles rendered in chocolate. dainty bags of nibbly things. smart canisters of biscuits. across the way, laid out just so in the long counter, exquisite little squares of handmade filled chocolates, with pretty names to match.

alas, my note-taking is wanting, and i have no recollection of what any of the names are. but in my box of five ($10), i had a quite savoury one of peach and cardamon, one of jasmin tea in a dark ganache, one of rose in a white ganache, one of anise and vanilla (it wasn’t too liquoricey, as the shopboy had said, but the air of aniseed hung around my mouth for somewhat longer than i’d like), and…

…something. told you my note-taking was poor.

the chocolates, on the other hand, were wonderful. crafted by a belgian-trained chocolatier, their fillings were lush and smooth, their flavours subtle and sophisticated.

five chocolates go by too quickly (six even, if you count the sample the countergirl offered me after i’d made my selection), so i’m hoping that the bizarre weather continues, and throws me a summer’s day cold enough for hot chocolates and belgian waffles upstairs.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 December 2008 at 10:54 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate

an innocent email on monday morning about the possibility of lunch snowballed, and by the time saturday rolled round, there we were — deborah and i — in our best walking shoes, primed and hungry for whatever the afternoon might bring us.

well. we did have a plan.

i’d been curious to try the new sopra outpost in potts point, and that is where we began. it is much swisher than the original waterloo warehouse: banquette seating, shiny red mosaic walls, an unsubtle soundtrack that made us feel like we were in a 60s italian movie (a slapstick comedy, at that), and — the deal-breaker, were there deals to be broken — fancy, custom printed, evocatively illustrated place mats on very nice textured paper.

they had them arranged just so on the bar, but we spirited a couple over to our table top with not too much recrimination from the waiter. (very efficiently, he showed us a particularly fetching one with a big plate of pasta emblazoned with “fratelli fresh”, and then he replaced the ones we had pilfered.)

much less efficiently, we made our choices for lunch; everything sounded so delicious. and then of course, it was.

there was an antipasto platter to start — four little mounds of: mushrooms and cumin; spicy caponata with surprise crunchy almonds; arancini with aioli; simply dressed green beans.

there was a risotto ala milanese, rich with the colour and tang of saffron, with tiny nuggets of meat folded in. there was a salad of lettuce and tomatoes in salad cream. and then…

there was a roasted bit of organic pork. i’d asked the waiter what it came with, and he said, “nothing. it’s just the meat.” and he added, as an afterthought, “there is a bit of cress on top”. it was just as he said.

and it was amazing. tender, flavoursome meat, fatty where it counted, crowned with a great arc of salty, crunchy crackling. sigh. even shared between two, it was more meat than i’d normally eat in a day. maybe even two or three days.

we ate, and ate, and at some point deborah said, “this is one of the best lunches ever,” and i could not disagree.

and you might think that after a meal such as this, there would be no room for dessert. and you might be right, to a point: no dessert was had where we sat, or even down the road at yellow, but once we had roused ourselves and propelled ourselves back towards the city through darlinghurst, and made the requisite stops for a meringue duckling (croissant d’or) and loaf of walnut sourdough (infinity bakery), we could not resist the lure of the mountains of gelato at messina.

just look at that chocolate sorbet — so glossy and dark (how would you choose between that and the chocolate orange sorbet?). and what about the crisp and bracing lemon sorbet? the pear gelato was much less peary than i’d anticipated, but the fig delivered everything it promised. we sat for a while, in the cool and dark, and watched as streams of lithe girls in long dresses sashayed in for scoops of this and that. we watched a child demand vanilla.

we finished up, wistfully, and made our way one block south, to the chocolate shop.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 December 2008 at 9:58 pm

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, lunch

around the time a rumble of food bloggers descended upon zumbo yesterday — oh! the rapturous prose! the continuing mythology! — i was escorting the kid to her first real birthday party… at mcdonalds! in four years, we have been to mcdonalds three times: twice for little squeezy bottles of water, and once for fries, because we somehow could not find alternative chips in the city on a sunday afternoon.

so it was quite a foray beneath the golden arches with her three-piece chicken mcnugget happy meal, and the shiny lurid furniture in the purpose-built backroom, and the playground made of plastic tubes that amplify the shrieking.

me, i had my own treats to organise. settled into a table out front in the restaurant, with a copy of “the new yorker” in dire need of being read, i concentrated on dipping my fries into my caramel sundae. it wasn’t quite a masterpiece created by a french-trained chef, but it certainly had its merits. the fries were crisp and hot (though a few seemed almost liquid inside — water or oil, i couldn’t tell), and the salt crystals played off the caramel quite well (take that caramel beurre salé). the soft-serve was a cool, creamy foil… though you’d think that ice cream should be colder… shouldn’t it?

no matter. i finished it all, scraped the plastic cup clean, and headed back into the maelstrom just as lolly bags were being distributed. the screaming went up a notch. “where have you been?” asked one of the mothers, “in the cafe? that was a good idea.”

indeed, it was.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 December 2008 at 9:55 pm

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

it was my mum’s last day in sydney, and i asked what she would like to do. “would you like to go into the city to buy shoes?” i asked. “no,” she replied, “it is my last day, and i will do anything you like.”

so we caught a bus and a train, and not too much later, arrived in auburn just in time for lunch. the kid, having had the presence of mind to assemble a backpack of train snacks — jellybeans, raisins and dried pineapple, a previously decapitated gingerbread man (thank you, biscuit tree!), a pink lady apple (my addition) — wasn’t too hungry, but was happy to play along.

we claimed a table at sofra, and spent too long by the rotisserie deciding which shish kebabs we wanted. minced lamb? or chunks? chicken?? the salads were much easier: clean and crunchy red cabbage, a pool of creamy hommos, and tumble of fried (and charred) potato, eggplant, cauliflower and broccoli. oh, it was a pleasing feast.

and left room — just barely, after a postprandial meander through the bargain emporiums for a bout of scumbag shopping — for a good few scoops of dondurma down the road at mado. we bought turkish delights and sweet sticky cakes, and just before catching the express train back to the city, my mum bought shoes.

– – –

this morning at the airport, my grandmother, my aunt and i collectively gasped in horror, when my mother unzipped her carry-on to reveal her newly purchased, still-in-its-box electric carving knife.

“why have you put that in that bag?” asked my grandmother. at 88, she is still pretty sharp.

“ma, my suitcase was too full,” replied my mum, who on a good day is still not quite as quick. she rummaged for a pen, or something.

they repeated the exchange a couple more times before we spelled it out for my mum: y.o.u. c.a.n.t. b.r.i.n.g. k.n.i.v.e.s. o.n. t.he. p.l.a.n.e. she glanced over at the check-in counter; her suitcase had trundled down the conveyor belt not five minutes before. insert: chortle chortle guffaw.

i left my mum at the the airport with the glinting blade in my backpack, and the emasculated motor packed snug in her case. they will be reunited one day, when we are.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 November 2008 at 10:46 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch

somehow, my mother being in town led to me immersed elbow deep in hot, soapy water on a hot, soupy morning, handwashing three days worth of dishes retrieved from my cockroach den of a dishwasher, covered in bits of eviscerated cockroaches. thanks, mum!

let us think back to happier times — last monday, say — when we sat in the shady courtyard of la renaissance patisserie at the rocks, eating a brie baguette and drinking perrier with peach syrup. afterwards i bought a handful of macaron to go:

one each of chocolate, chocolate-passionfruit, jasmin, and two of rose because i knew i wouldn’t want to share.

they were all five plonked unceremoniously into a paper bag, and after a sweltering afternoon walk through the botanic gardens, they were not quite the fine, plump specimens they had been, sitting pretty in their plastic display cases back at the cafe. the fresh cream filling of the rose ones had surely come within millimetres of turning into butter.

but look! even with the beating they’d taken, they are still plump, their shells still crisp. the biscuits are moist and chewy on the inside, and the fillings generous. the rose macaron, despite losing half its height in transit, was delicate and wonderful — i always prefer a cream filling rather than a flavoured white chocolate ganache — and heady with perfume.

the chocolate one was impossibly rich and dark. the chocolate-passionfruit one was tangy and intensely fruity up front, before relaxing into a smooth and comforting milk chocolatey finish.

the jasmin one was… somewhat disappointing. it had a familiar clean and airy taste, but i imagine it could’ve had THIS MUCH more jasmin flavour. engh. three out of four ain’t bad.

in fact, they were great!

– – –

we also battled the gale force coastal winds at sculpture by the sea.

– – –

and — thursday afternoon, with the kid safely ensconced in playschool — we dallied with hot chillis at spice i am. moving between the brutal som tum — you can’t see the chillis in this green papaya salad, but they are there, oh yes, alongside crunchy dried prawns and many roasted peanuts, and green beans, cherry tomatoes and a wedge of raw cabbage (unwashed, my mother pointed out) — and the unrelenting kaeng som pla, a watery curry of fried river fish and watercress, it was like dousing our tongues in fire water. hot, sour, fire, water.

sweet respite came only from a tall glass of iced tea which tasted of candy.

you would not think it, but this particular meal from this particular restaurant, is perhaps the one that i pine for most often, in those long months between finding a suitable dining companion on a day that the kid is otherwise occupied. sigh.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 October 2008 at 11:22 pm

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

childfree days are precious ’round these parts, so errands are carefully scheduled and executed with military precision (that is, the precision of an army of flying monkeys).

for example: last friday morning, in the three hours after peeling the kid off my arm at playschool — “hold my hand,” she cried to me as miss sarah carried her off to the playground, “very tightly.” — i bought a package of large envelopes from kmart, then hustled over to my accountant in surry hills to deliver a year’s worth of receipts and bank statements stuffed into one of these envelopes; i just made the train to the blood bank, where i deposited 470ml of my finest red; afterwards, there was exactly enough time to try (and fail) to find a refill of shichimi togarashi at the japanese minimart on clarence street, before crossing the street to bécasse.

the last of which, i suppose, wasn’t really an errand at all. hurrah!

deborah and i were doing lunch as part of good food month, and there was a lot of lunching going on when we arrived. it was close to 2, but most tables were still occupied. we were led up the stairs at the back of the main dining room, to a table right at the very back corner of the mezzanine. it’s a very strange space, is becasse: a beige (gold, if you’re being kind) curtain runs the entire length of the restaurant, for acoustic reasons i guess; there is interesting feature lighting down front, but up where we were, it was recessed downlights and vents galore in the low, white ceiling; the wall alongside our table was white too, with a disconcertingly drippy sort of stain beneath the airconditioning vent; the carpet was beige. it all lent an air of function-room-in-an-office-building to the proceedings.

fortunately, instead of annoying paper salesmen, there were efficient waiters gliding across the floor, and it wasn’t long before one of them brought a small platter of amuse bouche to our table. small bites served in chinese soup spoons usually irk me, but the fleeting and delicious mouthful of shaved fennel and smoked trout more than made up for it.

we’d been presented with the special let’s do lunch menu, and it contained a number of extras with which to supplement the $35 main course price tag. we eschewed the two entrees (a scallop risotto and a wagyu beef salad), made a note of the dessert (a praline parfait for $15 — regular desserts are around $20), and boldly asked for a serve of bread. “one each?” asked the waiter.

alright then.

we were each served two adorable little rolls — poppyseed and sourdough — and a wonderful and aromatic rosemary… um, vine, with a block of olive oil emulsion. which was a cold mass that held its shape until it hit your tongue and liquified into a rich, fruity taste. pretty good for $5.

the main course of slow roast provencal lamb with spring vegetables, olive and herb vinaigrette arrived. oh! so pink and tender! so casually adorned with broad beans. so buttery and herbalicious the quenelle of potato. and, most importantly, so appropriate a size as to allow ample room for dessert.

the room had mostly emptied by the time we’d finished eating our meat, and our waiter had grown ever more personable. we hesitated only the briefest moment when he asked about dessert, and he read the situation correctly, and offered to bring us the regular dessert menu because it was “more exciting”.

and this is how we ended up with a surprise pre-dessert course: a tiny, delicate panna cotta with wine-poached pears, wearing a fine, tasty biscuit at a jaunty angle.

pre-dessert!

oh yes, we did chortle at our good fortune, and were somehow still overcome with wonder when dessert proper was brought to the table.

my chocolate and caramel cadeau was just as the waiter had described — a dome of chocolate mousse with a caramel heart, encased in chocolate, and then more chocolate “to make it shiny” — only better. just look how it shines! the mousse was icy cold and dense, almost solid really, and a burst of intense chocolatiness. the milk sorbet was perfect respite.

deb’s strawberry trifle with cinnamon donuts was an impossibly pretty dish. all the key ingredients were there: sponge cake at the very bottom, vanilla-flecked custard, a pure and genius layer of strawberry jelly over the lot that served as a bright canvas for the donut artistry. they were chewy delight, still hot from the fryer, with the cinnamon flavour echoed in the cinnamon ice cream.

by the time we were done, our $35 booking had just about doubled. my wallet was empty, but my heart and stomach were joyously full.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 October 2008 at 11:30 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, lunch

the best part is that it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. i had just come from the medicare office with a $65 refund still warm and glowing in my wallet. it was lunchtime, and after i exhausted the list in my head of cheap and acceptable city eateries where i might find sustenance, it struck me that i could (should!) take myself to the lindt cafe while the kid was off bonding with her grandmother somewhere in the hills district, being plied with crayons and sketchbooks and fairy wings, and forcefed pink cupcakes.

it was all in the name of comprehensive research of course, but after the travesty of the guylian cafe “chocolate” milkshake, i thought i should give the one at lindt a go.

it was extremely busy, but the friendly waitress was happy to answer such questions as, “between the iced chocolate and the chocolate milkshake, which is milkier?” and, “and which is chocolatier?”. no, her bright smile never once faltered, as she replied that the milkshake is milkier, and that they were both chocolatey and decadent, and the main difference between the two was that the iced chocolate contained ice.

and it was just as a chocolate milkshake should be. a $7 chocolate milkshake even! rich, dark chocolatey flavour. just thick enough that your cheeks let you know you were making an effort sucking. served in a tall, weighty glass. topped with a mound of dark and white chocolate shavings.

bliss! and nicely tempered by a perfectly toasted (and corrugated) schiacciata filled with delicate slices of roast lamb, grilled eggplant, baby spinach and ricotta.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 October 2008 at 9:17 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, lunch

as we walked that stretch of circular quay between the lego blocks and the cardboard cartons yesterday, we were stunned to see that a chocolate cafe had materialised in the toaster, right next to the dendy cinemas. mid-afternoon, after the rain had cleared, and a modest skyscraper had been constructed out of five cardboard boxes, we popped into the brand-spankin’-new guylian belgian chocolate cafe.

it was an impulsive move: we had eaten lunch not too long ago, and the kid was in that precarious mid-afternoon mood. but what do you do when 1. you stumble upon a new chocolate cafe and 2. you decide on a whim to enter said cafe? you can’t really have just a cup of tea and a biscuit.

can you?

well. we certainly couldn’t. as i read down the list in the menu (which took rather longer than necessary to be presented), the kid expressed her interest in certain items by repeating them back at me.

“cheesecake!” she said at one point. and then, “milkshake!”.

all right then. the dark chocolate buche filled with raspberry cream would just have to wait.

the dark chocolate raspberry cheesecake, though, appeared soon enough, a squat slice cut from a fat, round cake. it was surrounded by swirls and puddles — raspberry coulis and white chocolate sauce — and the kid went straight for the heart-shaped pool of red. the cake itself was dense and chocolatey, sitting on a base of slightly soggy, lemon-scented biscuit crumb, and there were clearly bits of real raspberries in it: we crunched on the seeds. although it seemed like a modest serve when it arrived, in the end it remained unvanquished. would this have been different if we had been less laden with lunch? or if the cake had been that bit more delicious?

perhaps it was the milkshake’s fault. though for something called “chocolate shake”, it wasn’t overly chocolatey. in fact, i wouldn’t even say it was chocolatish. what it was mostly, was a glass of cold milk, with a small, partially intact scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, and the inside of the glass had been zigzagged with molten chocolate, which, by virtue of sitting in a volume of cold milk, had solidified completely. how very strange to have to scrape these trails of hard chocolate off the surface of the glass.

i guess if it had been an actual chocolatey chocolate shake, we might have died. as it is, we didn’t even get to the bottom of the glass. there were a lot of milkshakes going round that afternoon, and trade in general seemed brisk. when i asked the guy behind the counter when they’d opened, he said, only a little agitatedly, “two days ago”.

i really must work on getting my tolerance for rich chocolate desserts back up to the levels they were five years ago. you must know by now, the adriano zumbo chocolate cafe opens at the end of the week.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 October 2008 at 10:45 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, chocolate, kid

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