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over the weekend, saturday, we had second breakfast —

oh no, wait. third breakfast. at two in the afternoon.

this was after first breakfast of tea and toast, and yoghurt and berries, at home.

and after second breakfast at the orange grove markets; i had been on a long-overdue mission to procure some gympie butter, and all of a sudden, there we were, watching the ponies, with a cherry danish for the kid, and a bacon, egg and chimichurri roll for me (the chorizo guy is capitalising on the extremely long queue in front of the honey-cured bacon and egg roll guy), and a raspberry-orange juice in-between.

yes. so, third breakfast was had, because we were barreling down oxford street after partaking of the giddy merry-go-round that is the hope street markets, and the kid wanted scrambled eggs. but where o where does one find scrambled eggs in that section of oxford street, between the uppity paddington end, and the trashy darlinghurst end? is there somewhere not too trendy, or too gay, or too derelict? no, really, i want to know!

well. because i saw the sign for the $13 vegetarian breakfast outside BD’s foodhall, i can at least recommend this place to you. even though BD is short for “body development”, and one of the guys behind the counter had very large muscles squeezed into a very small black t-shirt. i’d been in here once, a few years ago, to buy a bottle of water. it’s the shopfront for a catering outfit, and the counters are packed with large bowls of bright salads, and a vast array of baked things and sandwiches.

but we wanted breakfast. we split it, the kid and i — she had the eggs, and i had the mushrooms and hashbrown, and there was more than enough toast, avocado and baked beans to go around. and you know what? when you least expect it, possibly the best mushrooms ever show up on your plate. an enormous tumble of whole mushrooms, larger than your regular button ones, cooked dark and slightly caramelised, with crunchy bits and a hint of balsamic vinegar. they must have been roasted, they had such a rich, smoky flavour.

but my cup of tea, poured from a large teapot in which a single teabag floated forlornly, was no match for the rather wonderful ring i found at the candy hand stand at the hope street markets. look at it! wonderful!

possibly the best little plastic thing ever to be stuck onto a ring and sold for 10 bucks, my precioussss.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 May 2008 at 8:20 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, shoping

good morning.

a fine way to start the morning, and the week, is to break open a new box of tea and brew a pot. T2 have a shiny new boutique beneath the old gowings building in the city — perfect timing, really, for i was in the market for a new breakfast tea.

in the shop, there is english breakfast tea of course, and irish. but there is also sydney breakfast (scented with bergamot) and melbourne (vanilla). i was curious about the indian breakfast tea, and asked enough questions (fewer than you’d think necessary) that the countergirl packed a little sample — “enough for a small pot,” she said — in a baggie for me to take away. i love that!

in the end i came away with the morning tea, a hearty blend of broken leaf tea, according to the spiel on the box. and it’s true; it’s the kind of robust tea that tastes of the bush from which it was plucked.

it was the perfect foil for a wedge of coconut brioche, a light and chewy bun in a sturdy helmet of sugary desiccated coconut — reminiscent of something from a chinatown bakery — which i had procured on yesterday’s excursion to petersham.

we don’t really do mother’s day, but y’know, any excuse to have cake… so two mums and two kids and a sister and a brother descended upon honeymoon patisserie for second breakfast. i made it through the wall of people at the counter, only to be confronted with a second, more impressive obstacle: what to choose.

there were slices of a brown slab cake with pink icing and silver dragees, three layers sandwiched with cream and custard. i resisted. there were custard tarts in three sizes, and i had been thinking about them all morning, and yet… i sort of wanted bacon and eggs, so i picked their opposite: a rather ostentatious caramel tart. and a jam donut. and, because i don’t like playing favourites, the coconut brioche to go,

the donut was excellent. dense and chewy with a generous smear of sugary red jam. it wasn’t hot, but that was part of its charm. i should’ve gotten the big one. should’ve maybe not gotten the caramel tart, because after i ate that, i felt somewhat unbalanced. (it must be said that the caramel was lovely and soft, and very compelling. it compelled me to eat its entire self after all.)

afterwards, we ran around the park, and worked up an appetite for baked beans on buttered toast. normalcy returned.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 May 2008 at 9:55 am

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, cake

saturday, i accomplished the unprecedented: three rice-based meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. mmm… i like rice.

breakfast was a trio of sticky rice puddings from lucky thai sweets and video. i had not come this way in ages, but friday afternoon after a spectacular lunch at spice i am (they must have turned up the heat for us; me and singapore girl scraped clean our platters of green papaya salad and sweet and sour clear fish curry, with lips tingling and gullets raw), we floated down campbell street on a chili high and picked the last two boxes of the shelves.

black rice with egg custard; white rice with fried onions, prawns and sugar; yellow rice with salty-sweet shredded coconut — i think i figure out which one is my favourite, and then with the next mouthful i change my mind.

there were longans too, $7.50 for a moderate bunch at paddy’s markets. the price seemed shocking at the time [and yet, still no match for the half-pound of lychees in new york, eh, nellicent?] but no longer begrudged — all the fruit is unblemished, firm and juicy on the inside.

lunch was the biggest plate of rice in the world. the special broken rice, to be exact, from the vietnamese stall at the sussex street food centre, but you cannot see the rice for the meat. there is a large grilled pork chop, all perfumed and lemongrassy. there is a skewer of thinly-sliced pork, rolled up. there is a slice of meatloaf, although the dominant ingredient seems to be mung bean noodles. there are pickled carrots, and a modest salad of sliced tomato and cucumber. there is a small bowl of nuoc mam cham, and an only slightly larger bowl of msg soup.

dinner was unnecessary you understand, but i cooked up a pot of chicken and pumpkin congee for the kid. later, after she had gone to bed, i scraped the bottom of the pot for the brown crusty bits.

i guess this is what happens when you eat pasta all week.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 May 2008 at 9:09 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, dinner, lunch

a couple of days before i went away, i popped into the blood bank to donate 470mls of my finest, stickiest, type B+.

[ B positive! hah! ironic really, when you think about it ]

but so, after the bleeding, and the complimentary made-to-order strawberry milkshake, and the healthy snack pack from which i wolfed down two biscuits that must surely have contained a good dose of transfatty margarine they were so yellow… i wandered northward about two blocks, and finally made it to central baking depot.

i kept forgetting it was there, this bigger, fancier outpost of those bourke street bakers, in a part of the city i just never get to. but there it was, all good, honest, industrial chic, with little tables hewn out of big trees, and even littler faux milk crates fashioned out of… i dunno, galvanised steel fencing? in any case, it’s about eight more places where you can sit — and quite a bit more breathing room — than at the other two bourke street bakeries.

with more room comes more cake! there were trays of cake behind glass — slabs of flourless chocolate cake, and something hummingbirdy, and what i remember to be a caramelised banana cake sandwiched with a fat layer of cream, for which i must return, oh yes. in the window there were danishes and twists. on the counter there were bowls of chocolate meringues.

so i went the pizza route. this one, a pleasing crunchy base topped with roasted capsicum, pancetta and ricotta, with pesto, was that delicious amalgam of slurpy and squishy and salty. up front they were thin slabs arranged just so on a tray, but they arrived at the table sliced up and sandwiched. thoughtful, no?

i imagine it must get busy at lunchtime, but around 11, it was just me and the couple at the next table, the girl making the most orgiastic noises over her sausage roll. so i left them to it…

…and stumbled into the babycakes boutique right across the road, where the cupcakes are bite-sized and the variety boggling.

but that’s a story for another time.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 April 2008 at 3:32 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch

and after that circus (refer: previous post), there was the easter show. yay. the last (and first) time i attended this grand display of warm and fuzzy rural-urban relations was about ten years ago. now that the kid is three, and cognisant, and a year away from having to pay to get in, i thought it was the perfect time for a revisit.

i was most interested in the prize-winning cake displays of course, and maybe a cheese on a stick. and a cream tea at the country women’s association tearoom. the kid mentioned something about milking a cow.

we showed up early, the kid and i, because the bunny judging was on at 9.30. however, bunny judging turns out to be a somewhat unriveting cluster of studious types in lab coats standing ’round a rabbit, cupping it in their hands and holding it up to measuring tapes. huh.

so we wandered for a bit, stopping for a $5 ride on the mini ferris wheel (it went around so many times to make up $5 worth that the kid started heckling the lone carnie about when it would stop.) we played at being radio announcers at the abc caravan. and then when singapore girl finally showed up, we descended upon the woolworths fresh food dome, and that’s when things started to happen.

the kid wanted ice cream, but for the first time ever she did not want pink ice cream. “i want green tea,” she announced most decisively. as you wish. me, i stumbled upon the irrewarra homestead natural ice cream stand, selling organic ice cream made in southern victoria, without the use of chemicals, pesticides, artificial colours, flavours or preservatives. and truly, the banana ice cream was like eating creamy frozen bananas, and the blueberry was flecked with bits of fruit. it was delicious, but the taciturn dairy farmer type manning the booth said it was not available in sydney, and only in health food shops around melbourne.

we marveled at the regional produce displays with their giant animatronic frilled-neck lizards, and we marveled at the amazing decorated cakes in the arts pavilion next door. (at this point the kid tipped over her half-tub of sloppy green tea gelato, and the fun lurched off course for several sad minutes.) but distractions abound in the arts pavilion: just look at this clever champion cake in the shape of a selection of champion preserves. ha!

surprisingly, champion preserves were not a feature of the tea and scones at the CWA tearooms. what you do get with your two (out of a total 22,000 made throughout the show) fresh, still-warm scones are a little tub of whipped cream and two little packs of supermarket jam, strawberry and apricot. and a pot of hot water for your teabag. it was a moment of olde worlde calm before we headed back out into the blazing sunshine, straight into the clutches of the hot corn vendor.

and that is how the day progressed. in between the buttered corn and the yoghurt sample at the dairy farmers milking show, we fed the baby goats (and persistent, pushy sheep) in the nursery farm. in between watching an educational presentation of a pair of butchers cutting up half a carcass of beef and milking a real, live cow in the milking barn, we had a lamb pie and a sausage roll. just for milking the cow, we got some squeezy packets of purple berry yoghurt that you suck out through a nozzle, so we had that too, and by the end of the afternoon, when i finally tracked it down, there was just no space left in my stomach for the cheese on a stick.

because the kid doesn’t yet know about showbags, i bought her another ride at the kiddie carnival before coaxing her aboard the train back to the city. she continues to speak of the music video she will make next year in the abc caravan. a grand time will be had by all.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 April 2008 at 2:50 pm

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

fucken tired and shit.

this time last week… well, see now, i started off saying “last week”, and then it hit me that it was actually two weeks ago. crap. so this time two weeks ago, i was calling ’round likely candidates, trying to give away a spare ticket i had to the v festival.

which is harder than you’d think, even if it was two days out from the darned thing. in the end though, maybe i was just not meant to get rid of it. saturday, as i walked up to the gates, dressed in my best muji shirt, with an on-the-way bourke street bakery lamb-and-harissa sausage roll under my belt, and the scalper with the slimy, solicitous air muttered, “tickets? anyone got tickets to sell?”, i hesitated just a beat too long, and the moment was gone. me and my spare ticket and VIP wristband were sailing through the bagchecks, going it alone.

which, as it turns out, is not a bad way to go. i squeezed down the front of hot hot heat, i trudged to this, that and the other stage on a whim, and when whimsy got too much, i found a shady spot in the grass for myself, my “new yorker” and a quite delicious veggie sandwich which i’d thought to get at bourke street bakery some hours before to save me from having to eat the hodge-podge of stodge that is festival food.

(funny the way you have to go to a big rock show sometimes, to get a quiet moment to yourself.)

i was killing time until the main event, really. to me, that was queens of the stone age. as evening fell, along with a light drizzle, and the beast of a drummer kicked in… OH it was great! you know… when the crowd seizes up, and you feel it in the back of your neck. it was that kind of great, monstrous rock.

and maybe it’s a sign that i’m too old for outdoor rock festivals, but there were not too many moments of greatness that day, inbetween the trudging from stage to stage. duran duran were not great, but then again i was never a duranite back in the day. rosin murphy was pretty great, with her costume changes at each song and her funny, dramatic dance moves, and her funny, wonderful backing singers. smashing pumpkins started off great, with a lilting guitar anda wistful “today is the greatest day i’ve ever known…”, but then three songs in i remembered why i don’t listen at length to the pumpkins. the whining, the whining does not end.

and so (she whines), i left. i beat the mass exodus, and i caught a cab to my palatial bedroom at the vibe hotel in rushcutters bay, where i ordered copious amounts of room service and fell asleep in crisp white linens.

you are thinking, this is strange. why is she off to rock shows, and spending nights in hotels,and where is her kid? but i assure you, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. the kid had been deposited that morning with her doting aunties and smitten boy cousin for a day (and a night) of belated easter eggs, and vegemite sandwiches, and portuguese cakes, and as little as she could eat of a home-cooked corned beef and white sauce. and i, i had won a prize — the subscription prize, and who ever wins those? — from time out sydney magazine, of festival tickets, and VIP passes (read: clean toilets), and a night in a hotel, and a spankin’ new mobile phone, and spankin’ new phone credit.

(now there’s a moment of greatness right there. although the collective two hours that i spent on the phone with three or four of virgin mobile’s finest offshore call centre personnel, trying to convince them that i really had won a phone off virgin-sponsored competition, and that i hadn’t stolen someone else’s phone whose details were on file as the registered owner of the SIM card, and that they should please, please let me have goddamn access to my account, please… that was really not very great at all.)

but so, i was famished from seven hours of v fest on nothing more than a sausage roll and a veggie sandwich. and so, i ordered up big — so big, i thought, that i was surprised and a little bit embarrassed when the food showed up and they’d only included one set of cutlery.

i had chips, of course, because you must have room service chips, and these were pretty good chips, all crunchy and golden and fat. i ate many of these before i even tasted the duck salad, which i’d ordered out of curiosity, because the description on the menu read: seared duck with lychee, capsicum and watercress salad, with raspberry vinaigrette. the duck was not seasoned, except for the crisp skin, which was, aggressively. the salad was two bitey and mismatched flavours of watercress and capsicum — diced, and in three colours. the lychees strewn over the top seemed mismatched to that, and the raspberry vinaigrette was…um… sour?

fortunately, i got dessert too, because i was hungry at the time. but the vanilla bean ice cream was mostly melted by the time i got to it — it had been delivered sitting atop the warm duck — so i drank that with a spoon, and then i was much too full to have more than a taste of the belgian chocolate mousse.

so i had it for breakfast. rock!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 April 2008 at 9:52 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, grumble, lunch, soundtrack

good friday, i served up — somewhat sacrilegiously — a shepherd’s pie for dinner: lamb (of god) mince, cooked with a couple tins of tomatoes, most of a tin of chickpeas, diced carrot and sweet potato, and rather a lot of broccoli. the potato topping was mashed with the remaining chickpeas, and dotted — as prescribed by stephanie alexander — with butter. i do not know why i have not made a shepherd’s pie before this, but it’s a fine way to eat two large potatoes in one sitting.

i figured i’d walked it off earlier that afternoon. we walked from the heart of the city into chinatown for vietnamese — pho bo tai and some porky nem. good old chinatown, who else would be open to feed you when everyone else shuts down to commemorate the lord’s passing? after, we walked the length of the city to get to the botanic gardens. around the time jesus gave up the ghost, the skies above us grew dark and ominous, and the bats ever more shrieky. we caught a bus home then, before the heavens opened.

easter saturday, after a companionable lunch of pastrami bagels and ginger beer, i headed into kinko’s on broadway to rustle up some grunge on the photocopier. kinko’s — that bastion of 24-hour print self-servicery — was shut. the bastards! i hightailed it to the big kinko’s in the city, and it was a hive of activity. blowing up line drawings to 400% — now that was like coming home. but, ok, for actual homecoming, i stopped by BBQ king for a box of their finest, stickiest char siu.

easter sunday, the easter bunny — visiting from chiltern, victoria — presented me with a giant lindt easter egg casket, and the kid with a startling assortment of lesser chocolates. a good start to the day, which went on to include the circus festival at darling harbour, a BBQ pork bun picnic, the parisian toy boats exhibition at the maritime museum, and then a meandering walk through pyrmont, over the anzac bridge, up the back streets of balmain, and home to leftover shepherd’s pie.

we ate a lot of meat this weekend, and i was glad for the cleansing veggie wrap of easter monday. we walked a lot through the city this weekend — it’s both infuriating and a joy. in between i finished a drawing of what may become a CD cover, hopefully. it feels good to be working again.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 March 2008 at 12:55 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, kitchen

this is how the days go when a sister is in town.

you might wake up early on a sunday morning, breakfast in a flurry, catch a bus and then another bus to the sparkly blue edge of bondi. you will meander through the markets, spurring each other on: a sausage on a roll, a red pleather handbag. you will eat fish, and chips, and pineapple fritters, when all the while you really want to get to the gelato shop on the corner. you will meet with cousins. you will bury your hot feet in the cool sand, and build a colony of tiny sandcastles, fashioned from an empty gelato cup.

you might wake up at a respectable hour, breakfast leisurely, catch a bus and then a train out west, to auburn, just to eat a couple scoops of chewy turkish ice cream. you will step into one, then two, and maybe even three dollar discount stores, coming out with bags of cheap household treasures. a pink plastic basket for pegs, perhaps; a rubber anti-slip mat for the tub; some rolls of masking tape… all these things take on a desirable mystique when they are under $3. you will step into one, then two, then three bakeries, and come away with as many little paper bags of sticky sweet lebanese biscuitry. meat shaved off a large rotating torpedo will be eaten, as well as dips the colour of candy.

you might wake up just in time to be lazy, and sit in the park across the scout hall, while the kid takes a music class, and then you will catch a bus to the art gallery, to meet another cousin — the city is just full of them at the moment. you will look at bats — wooden ones at the gallery, and real, hanging-upside-down, screechy ones in the botanic gardens. on a whim you will catch a ferry to luna park, to arrive just in time for a ride on the carousel — it spins at a cracking pace, to the tune of “bonanza” — before the park closes. because you can, because it is the last day of your weekly travel pass, you will catch a train back across the bridge to marrickville, and walk a great distance to a restaurant you know will serve you excellent chilli-lemongrass squid (or tofu, you can’t decide), and when you get there, you will learn that said restaurant is closed mondays.

nights, after the kid has given up and gone to sleep, there might be a selection of truffles unearthed during the day’s outing, or a rose syrup and shaved chocolate sundae. there might be something from zumbo with the gilmore girls. or a whole season of “sex and the city” and the ensuing pangs of not being in new york. there are always cups of tea. jasmin, rose pu erh, chocolate spice.

days, well, they go by, and today, we followed the script we know by heart. someone takes someone to the airport. “see you real soon,” we say, although we don’t know if it will be one year, or two. we felt queasy, but we put it down to hunger. we felt queasy, and we put it down to the mcdonald’s we ate simply to quell the hunger, because the hot cross krispy kreme doughnut hadn’t quite done the job. and then she got on the plane and i got on a train and our lives returned — instantly — to normal.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 March 2008 at 11:34 pm

permalink | filed under around town, nellie, snacks

of course, we could not visit haberfield and only get food to go.

we had pizza, and it was fine pizza, but as soon as the seafood-stuffed calamari arrived at the next table, we felt the regret deeply. we had pizza, but not so much pizza that we could not then head across the street straight after for a selection of dolci at pasticceria papa.

i think, even so, that we were being hopelessly optimistic. there were three numbered plaques on the table, and in good time, two of those were replaced by twin plates of mini cannoli. i had my eye on larger things. my order was for a cup of gelato (two, if you count the kid’s mango ice), and a fat chocolate eclair.

there are those in our circle — a solitary frenchman, actually — who believe steadfastly that a chocolate eclair must be filled with chocolate creme. a strip of choux pastry with a slick of chocolate icing on top, filled with fresh whipped cream? a travesty! i should be very amused to see his reaction to an eclair of mock cream. i, for one, would not turn it down.

but. so. papa’s chocolate eclair is filled with both! i cut through the beastie to find a layer of dark chocolate custard beneath a layer of cream. bliss.

the gelato was equally sublime. firmly packed into every last facet of the cup, it made a pretty picture in red, white and green. viva italia! the amarena was a vein of red sour cherry running through light, milky gelato. the pistachio was almost savoury.

there were still biscuits left on the table when we reached the outer limits of our stomachs, but i’m sure you’ve figured out that in the end, i did get a couple of mini cannoli to go.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 March 2008 at 11:41 pm

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

so. burrata.

saturday, we barreled up to haberfield, which is always less than the expedition in my head. which is to say, it is a great adventure, but it takes only two buses to get there, and if you time the connections right, and if the buses run punctually, then you can be there in just over 30 minutes. deborah can walk across the highway to get there in 10 minutes, but let’s not hold that against her.

because i don’t actually get to haberfield that often (see: expedition in my head), i end up going a bit crazy with the procuring of comestibles. this time, i’d even brought my stripy esky.

it was exactly the right size. by the end of the afternoon, it was packed to the brim. from the italian deli, a modest package of freshly-sliced olive mortadella, and one of chilli salami, both wrapped neatly in luridly printed waxed paper. from peppe’s, two boxes of ravioli: veal, pancetta, sage and white wine; roasted duck, prosciutto and caramelised onion. and from paesanella, a small tub of ricotta and a large tub containing a voluptuous ball of cream-filled mozzarella. burrata.

according to my recent googling, burrata is “the current darling of cheese lovers” — around southern california in any case. i first had it a couple of years ago, and i think about it from time to time. it is a spongy white lump, formed by hand. essentially, it is a thick outer skin of freshly-pulled mozzarella, filled with shreds of leftover mozzarella and fresh cream, before being sealed up.

we brought it home and had it for lunch a couple days later. it’s true what they say: you slice it open and the cream runs out. it is mild and rich at the same time, and the innards have the texture of scraps of cheese sealed in a pouch.

it was wonderful with sliced tomatoes, pepper, salt and a drizzle of fruity olive oil.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 March 2008 at 11:06 pm

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

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