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hui(2) niang(2) jia(1). traditionally, the second day of the chinese new year is when those daughters who’ve been married out return to their old family homes, bearing gifts for the parents they left behind. and so, my good mother bought us all bus tickets to KL, and we rode into town with a box of mandarins, a box of persimmons, a box of belgian chocolate truffles, and half a tub of plant fertiliser.

there is quite a range of buses to choose from doing the singapore-KL route; some have toilets in the back and karaoke lounges downstairs. some have a hostess who serves you a satisfying meal of dry-fried beehoon with nothing more than a few bean sprouts and a couple strips of thin egg omelette. based on the bargain price of $50 for the return trip, we rode the one which is known for nothing more than its on-board oreo snack. and it’s true, behind the check-in counter at the depot office was a wall of cartons: classic oreo, and a new-fangled variant filled with an unholy (though strangely compelling) union of peanut butter and chocolate creme. krim kacang dan krim coklat!

at the pagoh reststop, i bought a beefburger and a bag of fries, solely on the basis that on the bus, it would be easier to eat than soupy noodles… and then many hours later, during the night, in the royale bintang damansara hotel, i had four dreams about vomitting before getting out of bed at 6am to make my dreams come true. twice.

the rest of the day was spent in bed, in the darkened room, while everyone else went about paying their respects and exploring the hot and dusty hellhole that is KL. nellicent was kind enough to bring me a $14 (ringgit) green tea frappucino, of which i only dared to drink half because i wasn’t up to experimenting with verdant vomit… but it really is my favourite starbucks beverage.

the next morning i was healed enough to savour teh tarik and roti bakar from the greasy, greasy place next door. it turned out to be honey toast, with a bright yellow slick of what i’m sure could only have been planta margarine. mmm.

we ate at aunts’ houses, and at indian eateries. at ikea (it was across the road from the hotel, really), we bought a packet of mild, milky cheese to supplement the pitiful hotel buffet breakfast. at the indian vegetarian place, the kid was plied with free pappadums. at my grandmother’s, we feasted on such things as stuffed crabs (in which the crabmeat and minced pork and other things are put into the crabshells, and deepfried) and salted vegetable and duck soup, which we will never know how to make, and perhaps soon, will never have to chance to eat again.

sigh.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 February 2007 at 2:38 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, dinner, lunch, nellie, snacks, trip

the peace and quiet continues…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 January 2007 at 7:22 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast

you know that episode of “friends”, where joey is halfway through reading “little women”, and it’s not looking too good for beth, so to spare joey any trauma, rachel puts the book in the freezer? i wish someone had taken the copy of “oscar and lucinda” i was reading, and shoved it deep, deep in the frosty depths of one of the three freezers in the old house at the rock.

but, no. and now, trauma. i’d thought it would be a good chronological following on from “the secret river”. how can a man, peter carey, invent such a story within the confines of an average-sized human head? my head tries to blog a lucky last entry for the year, and i get distracted on some other page, pondering the second chance to avail myself of the complete “sex and the city” boxset, with portable pink dvd player, now only $269.83… and an hour (and one fireworks display) later, i’m finishing paragraph number two.

tops.

i looked out the balcony earlier this afternoon, and saw the barge moored a little way off, and it struck me like a kick in the guts, that it had been a whole year since i posted pictures of the amazing fireworks display i’d seen, just me perched on the balcony railing, and i remembered it so clearly, like it was maybe just a couple of weeks ago. not fifty-two.

but so. a week in the parched country heart of new south wales, with not too much to do but read about new south wales a hundred and fifty years ago. midway through, i asked the boy, “i wonder, if all the migrants ever left tomorrow, would the aborigines go back to their dreamtime existence, or would they…” i wasn’t sure exactly how to continue: would they successfully take over the lifestyle shaped by this many years of white settlement? would they keep sniffing glue and petrol? would they embark on a crazy spree of looting and pillaging?

but the boy, being quick, seemed to pick up where i had trailed off. “well, the centrelink cheques would dry up pretty quickly, wouldn’t they?” which, i guess, still leaves the question unanswered. thinking, on the outside, is most unproductive.

but for the most part, in the last week, we sat around, moving from one room to another, trying to find the cool room on the hot days, and the warm room on the strange freezing ones. we ate ham, ham, ham over days and days, and then for a change we headed up (twice!) to the chinee restaurant at the rock bowling club, the only restaurant in town, and the only eating establishment (out of two) open over xmas.

short soup, honey king prawns, sizzling beef, prawn crackers, fried rice (with ham), vegetable omelette, combination chow mein, satay chicken, steamed dimsims, garlic king prawns, mongolian lamb, sizzling black pepper steak, deluxe combination. and a plate of hot chips, thanks.

we cut slabs out of the tray of baklava from the hellenic bakery, warmed them in the microwave and topped them with blue ribbon vanilla ice cream. we went through tins of beetroot. we sliced more ham off the bone. we devoured a festive pavlova, green in the base and crowned in a cloud of pink whipped cream. there were two birthdays, and four birthday cakes. there were boxes (and boxes) of lindt chocolates. on the last night, there was a magnificent sausage sizzle with fifty or so assorted snags, a large glass bowl holding two tins worth of whole baby beetroots, a small melanine bowl of buttered, salted corn. a pity, the salad from a couple nights before did not make a re-appearance: sliced hard boiled eggs and sliced celery, in mayonnaise. yum.

two hours now to the big fireworks display. the nine o’clock one — family fireworks — which this year could be seen from our balcony, and which must have cost an extra billion or so dollars, only succeeded in perplexing the kid. head buried in the boy’s shoulder while we two gasped and wowed, and really meant it! they can make pink fireworks which explode into the outline of lovehearts! and this new one, which quietly puffs out into clusters of golddust, just lovely.

happy new year. see you ’round.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 31 December 2006 at 8:36 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, breakfast, cake, chocolate, dinner, lunch, snacks, trip

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.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 November 2006 at 8:58 pm

permalink | filed under boy, breakfast, cake, dinner, kid

earlier in the week, we were on our way to starbucks to try the new signature hot chocolate, when we stopped by the menu posted outside circle cafe. top of the hand-chalked specials list was turnip and chesnut soup!

it was so unexpected, interesting and enticing, that i immediately pulled the plug on the starbucks idea. maeve didn’t seem to mind; “this one?” she said, “climb stairs?” and up she went.

the soup was a lovely shade of camel, sweet and smooth — a potage, if you will. even maeve liked it, although she had her own plate of sourdough toast with grilled mushrooms and roma tomatoes to contend with. but the trouble with soup is that it leaves no room for belgian hot chocolate, to say nothing of the chocolate brownies doing laps in the revolving dessert case up front.

so when carla gypsygirl came to visit us friday lunchtime, bearing gifts of ice-cream hairclips and rainbow beaded bracelets, we went back to circle. you must know by now that my favourite lunch is breakfast, and that is what i had. the all-day big veggie breakfast is similar to the all-day big breakfast: eggs, mushrooms, hashbrown, tomatoes, and sourdough toast, with a mountain of sauteed spinach replacing the tangle of bacon and sausages (which is what carla had to counter the effects of a dodgy chicken dinner. props!).

half the big veggie breakfast though, is not quite enough to fill a belly; after maeve polished off all the tomatoes and half the mushies and an unexpected amount of toast, i was back at the front counter ordering my belgian hot chocolate and the lucky last brownie on the tray. the brownie is studded through with big chunks of chocolate, and is served warm so that all those chunks go moist and runny.

i had ordered it to share, three ways, but i think that the kid won that battle. of course.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 September 2006 at 9:50 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, chocolate, kid, lunch

i read somewhere that the ricotta you buy from the deli section of a supermarket has a higher water content than the ricotta you buy from an actual deli. this means that supermarket ricotta will give you a mushier result to your recipe. that aside, there is also the risk that the server will scoop your ricotta with the same ladle he previously used for someone else’s olive tapenade order. eaten straight, your ricotta will have an particular savoury edge.

you can fix this by beating the ricotta until it goes creamy, and then adding vanilla and icing sugar to taste, and beating some more. fold in some raspberries, frozen ones even, thawed overnight.

i’d been thinking about this raspberrry ricotta since the sandwich picnic the other sunday, and made a small batch midweek. it takes just minutes to whip up, and you don’t even need chocolate bread; it’s just as delicious on a toasted blueberry bagel. perfect for an early weekday breakfast while watching atomic betty with the kid.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 September 2006 at 9:47 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

permalink | filed under around town, bookshelf, breakfast

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

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

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

what a fool!

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

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast

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

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

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

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

hurray!

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

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

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

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

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

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, shoping

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.