i will scream my lungs out ’til it fills this room /
how much difference does it make?
– “indifference“, pearl jam
Category Archives: boy
following hamfest 2006 in the dusty brown, we drove back to the green(ish) city, and i promptly fried up a wok of noodles with four kinds of green vegetables, to accompany fat fillets of salmon crusted with sesame furikake. not two days later i was thinking about what to make for lunch, and most unexpectedly, the thought that popped into my head was: ham and tomato sandwich.
that time, i think i settled for sliced tomatoes on bread-and-butter — they might even have been yellow tomatoes. but a few days ago, as i ate a pretty good sandwich, i said to the boy, “d’you know what would go really well with this turkish bread, hommous, baba ghanouj, tomato and rocket?”
he only hesitated the slightest moment before replying, “what?”
“lamb!” i said.
“that would be good,” he said, before heading into the kitchen and rummaging around the fridge. “and here’s a piece of grilled lamb right here, from last night!”
it was even dusted in cumin.
minutes later he sat on the couch taking large boy-bites out of his sandwich, constructed exactly as i had described. mine was still good, but maybe not quite as good. “is it delicious?” i asked.
“yes.”
he was kind enough to buy a packet of lamb chops the evening before his road trip, and we had them on the balcony — salted and peppered before being thrown on the barbeque — with fried rice, because i hadn’t known that he was bringing home the meat. there was enough left over for a lamb sandwich encore the next night, with a side of swedish dillchips that kind deborah brought me from ikea weeks ago.
i had been saving them for a special occasion; and here it was, with boy and kid somewhere in newcastle, and me on my balcony on a cool summer evening with the peace, quiet and a copy of “the new yorker” for company.
passionflower, in chinatown, has a new set of menus. the clean white matt celloglazed foldouts are a sight to behold — quite the encyclopedia of exotic ice cream sundaes — but the hike in prices was a bit less pretty.
for example, i remember the eastern banana split that i had the last time cost around $12. it has been renamed eastern sunrise, and costs $13.50, which, fortunately, is about all that i’d want to pay for a waffle basket filled with green tea, taro and sticky rice ice cream, slices of banana and a lychee-orange compote. mmm…
as it was, the kid ate all but one of the banana slices, and then proceeded to dig into the big ice creamy mountain with her little plastic spoon that we had swiped earlier from the counter. (apparently if you ask the waitperson for an extra metal spoon, they charge you $1.25, so be warned.) i was torn between eating slowly to savour my $13.50 ice cream, and eating quickly so that i’d actually get any ice cream at all. in the end i was scooping great big spoonfulls, and then slowly devouring each one.
we were having sundaes on a sunday, because it was the boy’s birthday, and we’d gone out for early dimsum with a friend of the boy, whose birthday it was too. and now we know that early dimsum means not too many trolleys out, and an endless wait (in vain) for the stuffed, braised eggplant, and being back out on the street much earlier than planned with much less dumpling under the belt.
ah well, because just before 11.30 on a sunday morning is perhaps the best time to visit passionflower. no loud young people lolling about the booths, and no terrible young people’s music shouting out of the speakers. the only music we hear wafts down from the photo sticker machines upstairs. it is like a siren’s call, i tell you: we are halfway up the stairs before the table is cleared.
although we left the boys downstairs, of course. there’s something very stadler and waldorf about this, don’t you think?
the boy has a different relationship to food than i have. in that he seems not to need it. sort of. case in point: on any given schoolday, he will break fast with a large mug of sweet, milky coffee, all the sustenance required for a day of beating (metaphorically) classrooms-full of disinterested, grunting teenage boys into submission. in theory, there is recess, and lunch, but apparently there is playground duty to be done at recess, and like, detention or something, everything, to attend to at lunch, so he goes all day without eating. he arrives home in the mid-afternoon, grumpy and hungry, and growling, “i haven’t eaten anything since last night.” but still, wearing this hunger like a badge of pride.
can it be that all the other teachers are not eating all day either? what is the teachers’ federation doing to earn their annual membership dues? what are they striking for if not for recess and lunchtimes for all?
yesterday, there was an extended period of rustling, organisational noises upon his return, and then he lumbered downstairs to announce, “i just bought $170 worth of groceries.” part of it, at least, had gone towards the 6-pack of toilet paper under his arm. “i bought us lots of treats,” he said. “i think it was because i was starving when i got to the supermarket.”
and so, there is a tower of tinned sardines in the pantry. there is bacon in the chiller, and vanilla coke; ice cream in the freezer; just one packet of timtams on the counter, because the other is already open, and stashed away in the fridge.
maybe the teachers’ union isn’t doing such a bad job after all. (oh yes you are, slackers!)
as for the rest of the household… you must have already surmised that we are obsessed with food. we build playdough cakes during the day. “this is pretend food,” i stress, “so we just pretend to eat it.” she holds a sticky bun a half centimetre from her mouth, and says, “eat, eat, eat.”
last night while on the phone to my mother, after she had told me all about how she skipped the last day of her gardening society trip to the flower expo in thailand to go shopping instead, and found a really good blue and white jacket that she ended up not buying [hey, i know you think this is a great story, but i wrote it in one sentence, while she told it to me over ten heartbreakingly slow minutes], she said, like an afterthought, “oh, it’s your birthday tomorrow right? so, happy birthday!”
to which i replied, “i know! don’t you feel old?”
she said, “me? how old will you be? thirty four? actually, you know, you don’t look a day over twenty two.”
which is the same problem that momo had a couple of weeks ago, and which i figure is the way our mothers cope with having aging children.
this morning i awoke to no bread in the house, so i defrosted two krispy kreme doughnuts that had been hibernating in the freezer for, um, whenever it was that i cashed in my free dozen doughnuts card that kk sent me for my birthday last year.
and then me and the kid took a walk up the street to buy a loaf of bread, and a small selection of celebratory cakes. why buy one cake, when you can compile a little birthday cake buffet platter? $12 buys you a good representation of the classics: cupcake; lemon curd cheesecake; chocolate tart. barely out of the shop, maeve had wilted onto the sidewalk, begging for pink cake. when we got home, she ate all the dragees, and then all the pink frosting, and then most of the cake. it was a dense, buttery crumb.
twenty minutes later the aunts arrived, with a bunch of gerberas and a white chocolate mudcake, so we all had a sitdown with cups of tea. these days maeve can do a pretty convincing rendition of “happy birthday to you”, and if you’re not quick enough at the end, she will also blow out the candle. just so you know.
when the boy came home that afternoon, he said, “there’s a lot of cake in the house,” for you see, he had come home with a large nutmeg cheesecake. but after dinner at the old skool pizzeria up the street, where in a fit of genius he ordered the ‘touch of summer’ pizza: prawns, bacon and pineapple, i could only manage the wispiest little sliver of cheesecake.
the lemon curd cheesecake will just have to wait for breakfast. the chocolate tart… it’ll keep. i don’t say this too often, but i’m all caked out.
things i have learnt today:
1. there is a very nice waiter at the lindt cafe, who looks like orlando bloom. i’ve never had a thing for orlando bloom, but it worked really well for the waiter. the babycino at the lindt cafe is quite special: an espresso glass with a puddle of dark chocolate below, and then pure white milk and a pillowy crema, topped with a generous shaving of dark chocolate. a thing of beauty, and free. after the kid wiped half of the chocolate on her face onto my shirt, orlando bloom came by and said to her: “i don’t mean to embarrass you, but you have a little something on your face.” he gestured a circle around his mouth. then she threw her sippy cup on the floor so that he would have to retrieve it for her. this is how a two-year-old flirts, apparently. from next week, the lindt cafe is open sundays.
2. when we go out for a walk, the three of us, and i am holding maeve’s hand and walking at her pace, the boy’s long legs prevent him from keeping to this pace, and he has no choice but to walk about three metres in front of us. every now and again he will stop to wait for us to catch up, but then his legs get in the way again, and not a minute later we will have fallen behind. when called on this, he will claim that it is not his fault. after all, he is not expecting me to match his pace; i am free to walk as slowly as i like behind him. i just like to get angry at things, expecting that he walk alongside us. i have a very bad temper to throw a tantrum over nothing.
my computer shut itself down twice today. the first time, earlier in the afternoon, brought about a great sense of unease as repeated pressings of the startup key resulted in no start up. the guy on the apple helpline was quite helpful… but for the first few minutes didn’t seem to understand that i wasn’t using a laptop computer. “so you mean like, a desktop computer? with a separate screen?”
he then tried to figure out which model it was. “the 2003 model? with the mirror front?” i laughed darkly. “no, it’s 2000-ish.” i think my computer predated whatever he had handy on his system. but somehow we managed to locate the little (4mm square) silver square button with the black circle in the center, next to the battery, tucked away in the hinged door of the CPU. i pressed it, and nothing happened. i was already thinking about laying out the wound care manual again, from scratch, but then the second time i pressed it, it worked.
i backed up my work folder.
and then just ten minutes ago, my computer turned itself off again. apparently something is making it blow its own fuse. i’m thinking of checking into a hotel for a weekend; i think that might help.
the second time it blew though, i figured work was over for the night, and hopefully when i press the secret button tomorrow morning, it will deign to start up. i suppose i’ll have to think about procuring a new computer. this raises several unpleasant issues… like how it won’t be able to boot up in classic mode, and how i’ll have to update a bunch of murderously expensive design software… with the money i won’t have left over from buying the new computer.
it will also put a kink in my plans to buy organic meat. i’m almost all the way through “the ethics of what we eat”, and the current chapter is sort of pushing the “vegans are better for the environment” angle. i do not think that i will become vegan, so yesterday i bought an organic chicken. it was on special at the supermarket for just a whisper over $20. the whisper is the hushed tone in which you say the price. who knows what the normal retail price is?
i stuffed it with mushrooms, sage, garlic and butter and surrounded it with potatoes, pumpkin and carrots. i put it in the oven, and then maeve and i went to the playground. when we returned, dinner was almost ready. the mushrooms were especially tasty, having cooked in chicken juices. but was the bird itself more delicious and tender than its pitiful, debeaked cousin?
when the boy returned a few hours later from the prefects’ investiture, he said he couldn’t tell the difference. but then he’s hard to please.
the previous night i made what i’d considered a satisfying and well-considered meal of fettuccine pre-primavera: pumpkin, zucchini, mushrooms and chickpeas in a garlicky-tomato sauce. the boy peered closely into his bowl, then disappeared into the kitchen. he returned with a tin of tuna, which he tipped it into his bowl before stirring unceremoniously.
yeah, a weekend in a hotel — just me — would be nice. i wonder if there’ll be room service.
it’s all about time management innit? if you get it into your head that you might make something for a sunday picnic? the monday plan to meet up for a hot chocolate on sunday morning quickly snowballed, and suddenly, a sandwich and dessert picnic was only a handful of days away. not even a freak hailstorm could put us off. by friday, the sun was shining again.
friday morning
playground excursion, followed by supermarket excursion, to buy such exciting things as almond meal, cocoa and icing sugar. i’ve spent days convincing myself that i can make macarons, though i haven’t quite decided from which recipe.
friday afternoon
naptime for some, half an hour spent pushing almond meal through a sieve for others. have i made a horrible mistake? it’s not too late to just buy a packet of bisuits from the deli up the street. still, small circles are dutifully drawn on sheets of baking paper. when maeve awakens, the electric mixer goes on; the batter does not “flow like magma”. in fact, it’s a real bitch trying to pipe it through the unwieldy cookie press into 80 or so small discs.
when the boy gets home from work, i am still brandishing the cookie extruder like a pistol. a cup of tea later, boy takes kid to the park, i do some “real” work, the biscuit dough sits for a couple of hours to develop a skin.
friday evening
while the biscuits bake, i make a quick salmon congee for the kid. after the biscuits bake, i realise i can’t be bothered making a “real” dinner, so it’s salmon congee all ‘round, supplemented with a plate of frozen dimsims, steamed, for the boy. the biscuits look nothing like what they’re supposed to.
saturday morning
awake too early. playground excursion involves two parks — at the second one, a charming boy steps on maeve’s head as he asserts himself on a climbing thing. supermarket excursion for…
saturday afternoon
back home, i make lemon curd with the egg yolks left over from friday’s biscuit recipe. the boy goes out to watch a football game. make maeve a sandwich and sterilise a jar while she eats. activate some yeast in warm milk. sift flour and cocoa. let maeve pretend to mix the dough… pretend to let maeve mix the dough? knead the dough. the dough feels nothing like it’s supposed to. dough rests, maeve naps, i make chocolate ganache.
maeve wakes. dough is punched down. biscuits are sandwiched with ganache. they really do not look anything like what they’re supposed to. an apple does not appease maeve, so it’s off to park #3.
saturday evening
boy not home from football. just the two of us for dinner: panfried salmon with capers, mashed potatoes, steamed beans and corn. bread goes in the oven, bread comes out of the oven. it looks… only somewhat like how it’s supposed to, but it smells deep and chocolatey. whisk ricotta with a dusting of icing sugar, vanilla and lemon juice. for dessert we each lick one whisk bit clean.
boy not home from football. wash the kid. read to the kid. kid goes to bed. boy txts to say that he’s out drinking and will be home tomorrow. put some frozen raspberries in the fridge, to defrost.
sunday morning
while maeve breaks fast, i fold raspberries into ricotta. slice chocolate bread — why is it so dense? why is it so wet-doughy in the middle?? it’s not too late to dash up the street to buy a loaf of white bread for emergency plan B lemon curd sandwiches, is it? passable bits of chocolate bread are sandwiched with ricotta mixture. a jasmin tea bag is chucked into a bottle of iced water. we scrub up, we are out the door! the bus is coming! keep walking, maeve!
halfway to the bus, meet the boy driving home. he does the right thing and offers to drive us to the park.
a glorious time is had by all: after a civilised start across the road at toby’s estate, we traipse back to the park: helen, deborah, the kid and i, to find a shady sunny spot close to the playground. we unpack a picnic of sandwiches to find that everyone’s had cheese on their minds, and chocolate. helen’s sister arrives with husband, babies, and more cheese in the form of a whole greek ricotta cake.
this sort of fun, it could go on forever, except it’s way past naptime, and there’s a bus due, and a funky brown something wafting out of maeve’s nappy. we bid our farewells amongst hurried gifting of chocolate and cheesecake, and then it all collapses into a three-hour nap for the kid, and me? i eat my rare and precious mountain pepper truffle, from deb, (and i cunningly leave the single origin lindt, from helen, for later) and then collapse too, on the couch, to watch “the incredibles” supplementary behind-the-scenes dvd.
this behind-the-scenes stuff; always fascinating. like the way you get to see how half the recipes went a little bit awry, and somehow at the end — through the magic of springtime and cheese sandwiches — it all tasted just fine.
i was cooking dinner on saturday night…
– char siu and zucchini omelette
– steamed soft tofu with shitake mushrooms
– stirfried choisum in oyster sauce with dried scallops
…when the kid wandered in and started getting in the way of sharp knives and hot dripping liquids. she also has that trick where she opens the utensil drawer and picks this ladle or that pair of tongs, and scatters it to the four winds, um, corners of the room so that apart from the dishes and the pots and pans, i will also have these extra bits to wash up. you know that trick? argh!
i shooed her out. “how hard is it to keep a kid entertained while i make dinner?” i wondered aloud to the boy, who lay sprawled in front of the tv, nattering to his out-of-towner friend.
“i’m sorry?” said the boy, all indignance. “i’ve been entertaining her all day!”
at which point i laughed such black hiccups of laughter that i might’ve fallen over. because somehow, “all day” to the boy means the two hours between 9.30 and 11.30 that morning when he took her up the street to get the newspaper and some groceries. before which i had gotten up and made her breakfast while he lay in bed for a while longer. and after which he provided her a nutritous lunch of a finger bun covered in pink icing and coloured sprinkles. and then he read the paper while i read her stories and put her to bed. and then he had a nap.
after dinner, the out-of-towner said, “wow. that was certainly the healthiest meal i’ve had in a long time”… which i chose at that point to take as a compliment, and now i’m not so sure. and then the boys went off to see radio birdman and drink themselves into a stupor, while i did the dishes, bathed the kid and put her to bed, and then listened to the monstrous drunken snores wafting down from upstairs in the too-early hours of the morning. they were still snoring when i got up to make the kid breakfast at 7.30, and snoring still a couple of hours later when the kid and i left to go to the park so that we would not be in the way of one snoring boy on the sofa upstairs, and another snoring boy freshly transported to bed downstairs.
boys suck! boys who “mention” that they’ve bathed the kid three nights in a row, after conveniently forgetting the 30 or so nights over summer when i performed such duties while they tooled about in their country estates, and the casual throwaway “i’ll put her to bed for the next month” they utter on their return. boys who do… boys who don’t…
whatever.
i have found myself about to be in an exhibition, as part of sydney design 06. a friend of a friend this, designers dropping out that, and suddenly i’m scrambling to get an old illustration printed up to the size of a wall. you can see this wall at horus and deloris for a couple of weeks, from saturday.
the thing about having a list of things you might like to do when you go somewhere, even if it’s a very small list, is that you might end up not being able to do any of it. so that even though you might have eaten chocolate until it seeped out your pores, the fact that you didn’t eat any chocolate from the one place you really wanted to… well, it makes you feel like you’ve sort of failed, doesn’t it?
right now i would like to go to a nice hotel, just me, where there is room service, an in-house DVD library, and a cakeshop next door.
i need to recover from my week away:
—
by the time we get to melbourne, at 3pm on a friday afternoon, we have already been on the road for a couple of days. this means there have already been pies filled with lamb mince in rich brown gravy and pies filled with creme patisserie and syrupy raspberries. in fact, as a testament to the cake frenzy i found myself in on thursday afternoon, the recipt from the bakery reads: 1 beesting, 1 snickerdoodle, 1 raspberry harvest cake, 1 fruit eccle, 1 cup of tea. it wasn’t all for me! i like buying cake for other people!
our brand spankin’ new serviced apartment (complete with stainless steel galley kitchen and villeroy-boch china) is touted as being on the edge of carlton, so i kinda figured we’d be feasting italian every day. however, the reality is a billowy outpost quite a hike away. nevertheless, it is on the tram route straight to the city, so before too long we’re riding into the sunset and reacquainting ourselves with the monstrosity that is federation square
— it’s not as ugly as it used to be —
and having hot soupy noodles in chinatown.
and then what does one do in melbourne on a drizzly friday night, when holidaying with a toddler? one takes the kid back to the hotel, washes her and puts her to bed, puts the boy on babysitting duty before he can arrange to go out drinking with his friend, and then one catches the tram back into the city to see you am i at the forum.
i’d seen the poster as we walked along the twilit streets and thought i’d call up to see if there were still tickets. who knows? who knows if people still go out to see 90s aussie rock? maybe it would be sold out. but it wasn’t. when i rocked up (so to speak), the crowd was like the mid-to-late nineties; comforting, in a way, like so many plaid shirts. the theatre is a gorgeous old building, with a gilded foyer, and a hall full of banquet seating. there are classical sculptures perched over the bar, and the domed ceiling is blue like the evening. i found myself a spot inbetween the dancefloor and the seats, on a step, so i could see.
i last saw you am i, like, in 1998. so long ago. friday night, they sound the same (maybe louder). sound as ever, as it were. tim prefaces every second song with, “you think that’s a corker, wait till you hear this one!” (and it’s true!), and punctuates with windmills. it’s all fun and good until the stupid girls in two groups to my front and back start getting drunk and falling over. on me. repeatedly. and they think it’s funny, and their friends do too. and what the hell is wrong with people these days? well, what is wrong with girls then, because the boys in the group look over my way and smile, and say things like, “would you like to stand in front of me so you can see?” and “i have a spare beer, would you like it?”
even though i turn on my heels right after the final encore, and bypass the merch stand selling footy scarves with YOU AM I woven into various team colours, i miss the last tram and walk for a bit in the rain before a taxi comes by. it’s nice.
the next morning we walk past bakery lane…
…en route to the queen victoria markets, with its aisles upon aisles of fruit and veg, and its warren on delicatessenal delights such as picked octopus and festive sausages (you will see, if you squint, one of these starbusts says “wedding sausage”).
but i resist the lure of the salami, and even the hot kranski with sauerkraut. or any number of continental pastries; this morning the spinach and cheese borek calls to me. it all works out in the end though, because the boy goes back in after his sausage, and reappears with a wedge of kolace: a yeasty base topped with poppyseeds, sugary ground walnuts, sour cherry jam, and soft white cheese. thank you, boy.
come back later. i’ll tell ya all about it.
