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Category Archives: dinner

the new and unexpected thing i discovered about my sister the other day, while i was telling her on the phone about how i had panfried ocean trout fillets with crispy salted skin, and made an enormous amount of buttery mash to go with, out of three mole-sized golden delight potatoes, and put together a large bowl of buttered and lightly salted steamed greens (broccoli, zucchini, peas and cabbage) to round it off… is that she does not care for buttered vegetables.

huh.

“but, green vegetables,” i explained, “with butter.”

“yeeeaaah… eh,” she confirmed.

tchk.

but the other thing i know she doesn’t so much care for, because she told me so maybe last year, is leftover pasta. like, not sauced or anything. just that extra tangle of noodles you find in the strainer at the end of dinner, because you can never judge how much dry pasta to put in the pot, because who knows how much a handful of dry pasta will expand in a body of rapidly boiling water.

well. probably jamie oliver knows.

do you like jamie oliver? i am still not sure. his food always looks delicious, but his tv persona is so tiresome. and even then, just that smartarse, jumping-about-the-kitchen, slightly spluttery cooking show persona, mind. the other jamie, the reality tv jamie, to whom bad things happen, is altogether much more likeable. i could not not watch “jamie’s kitchen”, or “school dinners” or, most recently, “jamie’s kichen australia”… which didn’t have so much jamie in it actually, and certainly not quite enough tobie.

i do not own any jamie oliver cookbooks, but when i recently came into possession of a 50% off voucher…

[ if you subscribe the the borders email newsletter, they send you discount vouchers every week. ]

…i was convinced i would have to finally buy “jamie’s dinners“, which i look at every now and again in a bookshop. apart from being a lively collection of fun typography and intensely colourful pictures, it is also full of the sort of food i make / would make. but standing in front of the wall of cookbooks, it occurred to me that since i already make this sort of food, i didn’t need to get a whole book on the subject. nevermind. perhaps i would get “jamie’s italy” instead. it was right there on the shelf, and i had not been able to not watch the tv show, and i really like italian food.

and then i remembered that i could not get any more cookbooks ever, least of all an italian one, because nellie had only the other week sent me, via amazon.de, “made in italy“, a weighty tome by giorgio locatelli. it is an engrossing read, this one, not just a stack of recipes, but a mix of history and culture and photographs of noble butchers and their meats.

so instead, the kid got that maisy book that folds out to become a 3D paper playhouse with a cut-out maisy doll and a closet full of paper clothes.

i tell you lots of stories! but there is a point, see. in the fridge, i had a box of leftover fettucine, which i had oiled to keep from clumping before i stored it. yesterday, lunchtime, the cold noodles separated agreeably to be tossed with a beaten egg, some finely-grated cheese, pepper and salt. i put oil in a frypan; i fried three rounds of noodle fritters. golden crunchy carbs, with salty cheesy bits and peppery bits, and brown crunchy bits where a stray noodle sat too long in a bit of oil. fried up cold pasta, who’d’ve thought. i saw this, in a jamie oliver cookbook.

and the locatelli? it has a whole chapter on gelato, but chapter risotto came in very handy last night, when i finally decided that i could probably omit the wine in the recipe to not so much detriment. (giorgio locatelli would probably disagree because every one of his risotto recipes called for a glass, but.) plus, i really needed to use up that expired arborio rice in the pantry, two huge tubs out of the many that my uncle swiped from his job at the rice company, more rice than he knew what to do with.

and i had sausages — chicken, rocket and tomato sausages. so sausage and pea risotto, from the book. it was a lot of stirring in a hot kitchen on a hot evening, longer than the recipe hinted at, but for the first risotto, after years of being intimidated, it was awright.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 December 2006 at 2:49 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, dinner, kitchen

such is the lot of a vegetarian, that if you were attending the soya awards at the after hours art gallery tuesday night, you would have been waiting, waiting for one of the few circulating platters to come by with maybe a stuffed mushroom or a scrap of artichoke atop a cracker. alas, time and again you would have been confronted with a disc of duck sausage on a melba toast, or a grilled scallop nestled in a cauliflower puree, or a minced prawn satay conconction, or an artfully crafted block of layered sliced potato with a knot of mystery meat, possible airdried, perched on top.

fortunately i am not vegetarian, so i ate them all. apparently there was a platter of salt and pepper squid, but it never made it this far. understandably.

but because amber is vegetarian, and krissie semi-vegetarian, and i, someone who needs more than five bite-sized bits of dinner, we thought it best that we sneak out in search of real food.

i suspect that amber was a little doubtful as i led the way to BBQ king, with the meats still hanging in the window after 9pm, and the lurid photo montages of a thousand roast ducks. but listen, you vegetable lovers, it is possible to share a three-course vegetarian meal at this most meaty bastion. a mountain of salt and pepper tofu, with its dense covering of coriander and sliced chillis, will be completely demolished, the most delicious thing in the world tonight. virtuous mixed vegetables topped with cashews, mostly conquered. buddha’s vegetables chow mein, all crispy-edged and drenched in brown gravy… only the smallest tangle of noodles remain.

my friends, they have gone back up the mountain, but we will always have the tofu.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 November 2006 at 3:32 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, snacks

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

the time, she goes quickly.

i was early for the early train, but just before it pulled up an announcement came through overhead that the next train to arrive would be held at the platform indefinitely because someone had been injured on its platform at the next station. rush hour, everyone got on anyway.

onboard, the driver’s announcement was more informative: we would not be moving because a person had been hit by a train, and we had to wait until the person had been removed. how long does it take to move a person who’s been hit by a train? a bruised person? a person with limbs torn off? (you would have to find and remove the limbs too.) a person puree? i figured i had up to an hour. and i was armed with a book, two nori rolls and a tube of fruit fizzers. but not ten minutes later, we were on our way.

so a bus and two trains later, i had a twilight picnic on a stone bench outside the olympic stadium. murakami open in my lap, beef yakiniku maki followed by one filled with a bright yellow pickle. i still don’t know quite how i feel about murakami. “norwegian wood” reads better than “the wind-up bird chronicles”, but sometimes i think i’m losing something in the translation.

and then it was time. well, almost time. a walk up to the acer arena in the drizzle, to queues and bag searches (unexpectedly, the one thing they ask about is chewing gum), through the turnstyles, into the dark belly where kings of leon is rocking like the seventies.

i started this blog in 2003, after a pearl jam show. given the recent inactivity on this page, it crossed my mind that maybe i’d be ending it after a pearl jam show too. i don’t know. perhaps i’ll feel differently after i get my computer fixed, or maybe a whole new machine — macbook vs mac mini: discuss.

last night. pearl jam. eddie. so good.

tonight, another go.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 November 2006 at 5:09 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, soundtrack

“would it be inappropriate,” i asked deborah, “to have a choc top during the film?” i bit into a whole tempura’d shiitake, and slurped some cold soba.

thursday night, rather than go late night shoping, rather than stay at home and watch “jamie’s kitchen australia”, we were off to see the al gore global warming movie. because we are thinking girls! thinking about issues such as: what would be not too frivolous a snack to have during a serious and important documentary?

turns out, a chocolate choc top, and a blended icy-biscuity-chocolatey drink, topped with chocolate cream and chocolate syrup from gloria jeans downstairs. go us!

who woulda thought people would pay money to go see a film about how the world is doomed? i mean, one without bruce willis in it. and if bruce didn’t end up saving the world, would the audience take that responsibility home with them? and the people who choose to see this film, they’d be sort of that way inclined anyway, wouldn’t they? what of the rest?

we are already living in one of those made-for-tv movies, about when the weather went crazy.

a couple days ago, a nice man from the electric company came ‘round our place and changed all our regular light bulbs to low-energy ones, gratis. everything’s a much lower wattage, but burns twice as brightly. monday, i’m switching to green energy.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 October 2006 at 4:36 pm

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

sometimes you know the solution to a problem. that is, you know of its existence, independent to the relevant problem, but you haven’t quite put the two together.

for example, i’d known about the orange grove organic market since shortly after i moved into the area. i’d also known that the 445 bus sort of headed in that direction. but to me, the market was always just a little bit too much of a walk. i’d say it would have taken over half an hour to hoof it. it was only recently that it clicked that i could take a bus there, and that the bus actually stopped right outside the market. brains — what would we do without them?

saturday morning, we walked to the bus stop with a spring in our step, and not too long later, we were on the bus with three other families with young ‘uns. off the bus, there were kids, and dogs, and sunshine, and bouncy castles. it was spring!

we did a couple of laps around the market, with no particular plan, just to see what was available (which was lots). i take a little while to warm up at markets, but then once the first purchase is out of the way, it always spirals out of control.

as it happened, that first crucial purchase involved standing in front of the artisanal lemonade stall for longer than you might expect. there wasn’t actually a queue, mind, it was just me trying to decide if i wanted the pineapple lemonade — a great beehive of glass filled with sunny yellow, with small chunks of fresh pineapple floating inside — or the raspberry lemonade — deep red, and copiously seeded. there was also a rather complex looking ginger ale with bits of chopped up chillis and other vegetation, but i thought that i’d save it for when i didn’t have to share with the kid. the lemonade guy recommended the pineapple… and it was nice and all, but i was too busy trying to drink my share of it, before maeve guzzled it all. the last i saw, her grimy little paw was sloshing about in the dregs, fishing for the fruit.

but so. now the purse strings had been freed! there was interesting bread, but we already had two loaves at home. there were two stalls with pink lady apple pies, but it was too soon after breakfast. there was some lovely rose geranium soap, but it was $5.50 a bar. we worked our way through the maze, accepting samples of nougat and oranges and raspberry ricotta cake. the south american food was inviting, and the calabrian too. the g–zleme ladies were there too, with variations i hadn’t yet encountered: organic chocolate and banana (must have been $15 g–zleme).

i bought: a brown bag of pink ladies; a packet of eumundi smokehouse double smoked bacon and a red wine and garlic salami; a small tub of gympie farm butter; a tomato and olive pastry, for sustenance; and some mushrooms.

ah the mushrooms. they were spread out in boxes across the counter: button, swiss brown, oyster, king brown, shitake, enoki, chesnut. i wanted them all. “can i buy a mixed selection?” i asked the mushroom man, and “how much are they?”

“they all cost the same,” he replied, “$4.50 for a hundred grams.” he even measured out 100g of oyster mushrooms, so i could see what 100g of mushrooms looked like. and then i asked for a 400g mix of the five more exotic funghi.

there were so many, he packed them into two of his sturdy brown bags. “$18,” he said.

see, i know that four times $4.50 is $18, but somehow i didn’t do that calculation in my head when i put my order in. and so when we caught the bus home, i had just under a dollar left in my wallet. but a bounty! of tasties! in my shoping bag.

dinner was fettucine with a myriad of mushrooms, fried with bacon and garlic in gympie butter. all together now: mmmMMMmmm.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 September 2006 at 9:05 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, drink, kid, lunch, shoping, snacks

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.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 24 August 2006 at 9:05 pm

permalink | filed under boy, dinner, werk

perhaps you’ve stumbled across “ready steady cook” in the pandora’s box that is afternoon tv, a sort of cooking gameshow which pairs everyday people and their bag of random groceries with actual chefs (think darren simpson rather than huey or aristos). maybe your favourite chef on the show is tobie puttock, because of the way he curls his lip with scorn at the showoff host, or because he seems irritated at the contestant he’s been dealt, if she is more inclined to chat vacuously to the host than to chop the spring onions. because he’s, like, sort of cute.

you may then already know that he will be heading the melbourne franchise of jamie oliver’s fifteen restaurant, and that he has a cookbook just out, “daily italian“. from this book came the recipe for friday’s potatoes.

sliced potatoes baked in milk with rosemary and garlic. it comes out with a curdly-crunchy crust. the perfect accompaniment for salmon panfried with capers, and a melange of green beans, broccoli and peas cooked up in a tin of tomatoes.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 July 2006 at 3:03 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen, tv

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.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 July 2006 at 11:25 am

permalink | filed under boy, breakfast, cake, dinner, lunch, soundtrack, trip

your trusty correspondent on the isle of wight, circa 1974, already cultivating a sneer of disdain for anything less than artisanal gelato (though still happy to guzzle whatever you might stick in front of her).

just as it was thirty years ago, it was my father’s idea to make a trip to the isle of wight this time ’round. what i thought was, eh, it’s in a beatles’ song; can’t be bad. we even rented a cottage.

in two days on the isle of wight, in-between car ferries, it is theoretically possible to have six, maybe eight, cream teas. this would depend on whether or not you’d have a cream tea at teatime, after substituting cream teas for all other main meals. the number of cream teas we actually ended up having is: two. hngh. but don’t hand-lettered signs like this make you want to go the extra mile?

no? what about this one?

the sign outside the first tea shoppe we tumbled into, late in the afternoon after a rainy morning spent in a flamingo park, which served up their clotted cream in hygienically sealed plastic tubs:

mmm… appetising… but after the lid was removed and the crusty yellow cream scum scraped off the top, all went according to plan.

the next day we had much more luck with cinammon scones and already-decanted cream.

but it’s not all about cream teas is it? what of the other regional british delights one may encounter on this wee island off the main island? amidst warning noises emitted by those who’d already seen behind the counter, my father ordered a cappuccino in a sandwich shoppe in an olde village. how they make it is, the guy behind the counter tears open a little sachet with the word “cappuccino” printed gaily on it, empties it into a cup, adds hot water and stirs. it’s even pre-sweetened. when it arrives at the table, it will be accompanied by a little square of good dark chocolate. if you ordered a normal coffee instead, you might whiten it with this:

“a blend of glucose syrup and vegetable fat”

i’m not saying the food on the isle of wight is not tasty. there was the first meal off the boat, in a greasy diner on the main street of ryde, where a mother sat fagging into her son’s chips, and the friendly counter woman warned me against the king-sized breakfast on the basis of it being really quite big (and also containing black pudding); the delicious and authentic indian takeaway later that night: curry, biryani and chapati eaten in the toasty warm kitchen of our cottage; and then dinner at the crab the following evening: a brie, mushroom and cranberry wellington, in which everything was wrapped in puff pastry and served with potatoes, vegetables and a jug of mustard-watercress sauce.

but it’s not all about gorging oneself on rich food is it? what of your father’s longing to rekindle the magic of your childhood, when no-one had disappointed anyone else, and years of recrimination and regret had yet to become an insurmountable heap? see, now he has a fresh baby with whom to begin anew.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 May 2006 at 2:18 pm

permalink | filed under cake, dinner, lunch, trip

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