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the official birthday celebrations kicked off the night before, with the drama of a thunderstorm beating against the plate glass windows of ocean room. two cousins, the kid and i, presided over by my good father, sat down and ate some really good sashimi, some anchovies topped with tomato sorbet, some soft-shelled crab tacos (not quite enough soft-shelled crab tacos, if you ask me), some shoe-string fries topped with a tantalising sprinkle of shichimi pepper — and here’s the thing, you think japanese, and you think delicate little bits of food, but we also had a whole wing of of a yellow fin tuna, so large that it came with a map to guide us.

there were three zones marked out, and the meat — slow roasted over 40 minutes — tasted different from each part. milder white meat up top, slightly dry, and more intensely fishy flavour, from the moist and dark underside. all even more delicious with the crushed cucumber ponzu dipping sauce.

friday morning, i marked the turning of 37 with a tall paper cup of rich hot chocolate, and a short plastic one of central baking depot‘s house granola. it’s oats and sesame seeds, and sunflower seeds, and whole hazelnuts, and dried dates, and a bunch of other stuff too i’m sure, baked golden brown, broken into crunchy chunks, and topped in plain yoghurt and tart stewed fruit.

is it healthy? i don’t know, but it was packed with enough hidden oils and sugar to keep me fortified for a terrible hour-long busride out to bondi for sculptures by the sea.

it’s true, what all those bondi locals have been grumbling about. the coastal walk slowed down to a coastal crawl, as every body stopped to look. and look. and look. even funner than seeing the sculptures was watching the hardcore joggers trying their best to run around the punters, the school kids, the old ladies, the dogs, the sculptures, and then looking irritated to find their path blocked, again. again. dear bondi locals: stop grumbling! find an alternative jogging route for a couple of weeks! do you see me spleening about the queues out of zumbo, keeping me from cake?

the funnest thing of all though, was the magical dream house on top of the hill, a life-sized cubby house completely covered by one jane gillings in an armour of found toys and plastic bottle caps.

oh how we wanted to buy it and take it home with us! instead we opted for hot chips and potato cakes down by the beach.

we had gelato then, once the spuds had settled, not by the sea, but tucked away in the cool and dark of messina. the mythical gingerbread gelato eluded me, so i made do with a triple chocolate extravaganza. chocolate fondant — rich and creamy with a hazelnutty edge; chocolate sorbet — smooth and light and intensely cocoa-y; and chocolate yoghurt — milky with a pleasant tang, my pick of the pack.

and you might think a birthday would end there, what with the kid falling asleep in the car on the way back to my dad’s hotel suite in the city and all…

but she performed that trick of bouncing out of bed about two minutes after she was tucked in, so we trekked into BBQ king and they brought us soup, all porky and ribby with a single chunk of carrot.

then they brought us a great bowl of roast duck congee, infused with delicious ducky flavour and a wonderful surprise of ginger slivers hidden deep in its heart.

and then a platter of fat, fried you tiao. the rice grains in the porridge had broken down into lush creaminess, just perfect for dipping.

now that’s how you end a birthday. lips glistening with oil, a starchy rice mass expanding slowly in your belly.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 November 2009 at 9:03 pm

permalink | filed under around town, art, breakfast, chocolate, dinner, ice cream

what a difference a half hour makes. if you aim for dinner at 6 o’clock, but become distracted beforehand in the subterranean cave of delights that is basement books, your 6.30 arrival at din tai fung will mean another 30 minute wait for a table. when we did front up at 6 a few weeks ago, we were ushered straight in.

the half hour of waiting groomed our appetites into big growling beasts, such that we had to order two baskets of xiao long bao (one serve with crab, and one without, and oh, how they both burst with sweet, porky, crabby juices) to quell their grumbles. between the four of us, we also put away a little dish of cold cucumber salad — more a miniature great wall fashioned out of thick slices of the gourd, in a chili-oily dressing; a large dish of dry-fried green beans with minced pork; a bowl of soup noodles with a moist and tender fried pork chop on the side; another bowl of soupy noodles topped with pork and picked vegetable.

we like pork, we do.

here’s the thing, the servings at din tai fung are moderate, and the food delicate, but dessert is constructed to a whole other scale. we were just short of full once the last noodle had been slurped, that last sliced of peppered pork chop dealt with. and we were bold, and ordered fresh mango over crushed ice.

and as it approached the table, other diners swiveled their heads around to stare. behold: a mountain of shaved ice (packed a little too tightly tonight; they should have served it with an ice pick) doused in mango syrup and sweetened milk. a generous globe of mango gelato perched precariously at the summit. fat slabs of mango at its base. and when it was gone — no, actually, we only made it three-quarters of the way through — we were completely stuffed.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 November 2009 at 1:14 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, ice cream

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

well. we did have a plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, lunch

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

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

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

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

indeed, it was.

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

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

it’s old news by now of course. while i was eating my way through auburn last saturday, a select group of sydney’s finest foodbloggers descended upon zumbo cafe and ate their way through the dessert menu.

there were still only three up on the blackboard when i rocked up with singapore girl on tuesday, and just one that i was hellbent on trying.

“it’s not a hamburger.”

… is what it’s called. perhaps you say it like, “it’s nodda tooma.” plus there is a subtitle: “it’s a macaron.”

and behold: an enormous macaron-ice cream sandwich. beneath the initial crunch, the biscuits were moist and chewy, extremely chocolatey. on top were crumbs, from another darker, crumblier specimen. in between was a generous scoop of luscious dulce de leche gelato. there are plans for the ice cream to be made instore, but for now it’s shipped in from messina in darlinghurst.

and right at the bottom, was a layer of rice pudding. strange, no? but so delicious. it was sweet and cinnamony, and surprised me — pleasantly, no, joyously — with chunks of caramelised banana .

in its entirety, it was just enough to hit my chocolate threshold; perhaps if the kid hadn’t eaten quite so much of the caramel ice cream quite so quickly, it would have vanquished me.

singapore girl ordered the deconstructed miss marple. what began at the patisserie as a crepe-encased gateau, and evolved into a tart, now arrives at the table wantonly draped across a big white plate: a pair of slinky mascarpone-filled crepes, all glistening with syrup and crackling with caramelised bits, lay in a tangle with fresh strawberries and tart little orange jellies. but you see, frozen jellies. put one in the kid’s mouth and watch her eyes light up. it worked on us bigger people too.

we sat and ate slowly — well, as slowly as we could; by this time, the kid had had enough of ice cream and jellies, and had grown bored and a little belligerent — each thinking our dessert was the better one, and of course we were both right.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 November 2008 at 8:37 pm

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, ice cream, kid

holy crap, but the kid turned four last saturday.

just look at her, eating cake like a pro. that very morning, as we were on our way to the supermarket to pick up picnic supplies, she volunteered from the back seat of the car, “i want a sponge cake, with strawberry cream, and chocolate, and sprinkles.”

“uh huh,” i said. at least she had given up on the chocolate cake covered in jelly snakes that her cousin had had last year.

we swung by bakers delight for a loaf of pane di casa (for the record, casa broadway is at least 73 times better than casa balmain) and a loaf of olive pane di casa — where big chunks of kalamata olives are worked through the dough, and pulverised olive puree must surely be part of the dough, because the bread, she is purple.

we did a lap around harris farm, picking out such treats as a bunch of radishes, a couple of red onions, a tub of coriander hommous and a tub of parsley pesto, a jar of cornichons, a block of fetta, two avocadoes, and a kilo of smoked salmon for the bargain price of $26.

and then with a little covert manouvering, i was able to collect the enormous pink cakebox and slide it onto my lap while she was being clipped into her seat. at some point, she asked, “what’s that pink thing?” but wasn’t actually interested in the answer.

in the minutes before the guests were due, i halved baby roma tomatoes, and sliced red onions, and dressed them in a basic vinaigrette; i cubed the fetta and anointed it in olive oil and crushed garlic; i sliced radishes. there: a salad platter to go. the kid’s dad drove it all to the park. the family arrived, bearing gifts and chips and bread and salami and a big tub of toum.

an unabashed display of eating ensued. the kid and her cousin downed the tops of four supermarket cupcakes before running off to the playground, but the rest of us made tartine after tartine. this one was my favourite i think:

white bread topped with a dollop of the pungent garlic dip and a smear of the parsley pesto and a couple slices of smoked salmon. mmm… stinky…

at the end, there wasn’t much of anything left. my cousin’s dog, peanut, discovered he really liked fetta.

we adjourned to the house for tea and cake, and the kid was not too disappointed with the pink, sprinkly hello kitty rainbow ice cream cake. there was even a layer of sponge at the bottom.

the best part about an ice cream cake — just under $40 from wendy’s. do it. you know you want to — is that even with two kids, and two aunts, and two cousins, and a gran, and a great gran, and a mum and a dad, there will still be enough for two post-birthday breakfasts for two girls who like ice cream, and cake.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 October 2008 at 10:25 pm

permalink | filed under cake, ice cream, kid, lunch

if you’re walking quickly between sydney town hall and the cinemas, you might almost miss, just next to the KFC, the great vertical slots in the slate grey walls of the new city building on the corner. but if you slip into one of these and walk down the narrow passageway, you will find yourself in an atrium of still empty shopshells. it’s dark, though not gloomy, and the harsh sounds of the street are muffled. through the narrow shaft of the escalator well, a bright oasis of small things, colourful and twinkly, might catch your eye. here is the subterranean wonderland of the newish maxim supermarket, and currently one of my favourite places for a cheap treat in the city.

there is a comprehensive inventory of japanese confectionary — all manner of crunchy, chewy, gummy, marshmallowy, [random unexpected texturey] goodness. exotic yoghurty beverages. instant noodles and umami seasonings — liquid, flakey and gritty. and the main attraction, for me: the bank of freezers packed with row after row of single serve japanese (and korean) novelty ice creams.

here’s one on a stick, resembling — and tasting like — a wedge of watermelon. a couple over, a wafer shell in the shape of a corn cob, filled with corn ice cream. there are perhaps a dozen variations on the theme of green tea – red bean, and one of them might be an ice cream-filled mochi, just the right size for nestling in your hand until it softens to the right consistency. if it’s all too much, you might just go the way of a simple icy pole… peach flavour!

saturday, when it was hot, the kid got a lurid mango popsicle, with little cubes of mango jelly embedded throughout. the comic drawings of hula-dancing mangos on the wrapper surely clinched the deal.

i got this handsome tub, in equal parts for the packaging and for the flavour, which was annin tofu, that milky almond jelly pudding you might find in a chinese restaurant. it was delicious — light and creamy, and not as sweet or frightening as you’d expect from something whose ingredients list begins: glucose syrup, sugar, palm oil, whole milk…

mmm… wholesome.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 September 2008 at 8:02 pm

permalink | filed under ice cream

breakfast, sunday morning, 9am.

saturday afternoon, we stopped by luneburger for lunch, on the way to the kinokuniya zine fair. as i finished my delicious sunflower-seeded roll filled with pastrami, cheese and salad, i glanced over at the counter and discovered that a whole new tray of sweet buns had appeared during the course of our little meal. it really was an amazing sight, and in my mind i was already eating one for breakfast before i had even returned to the counter to buy it.

[ countergirl, visibly surprised: “oh! you were just here!” ]

behold: the chocolate-crumble roll. a base of plain yeasty bun topped with a monstrous amount of soft, crumbly, cocoa-rich biscuit and a flirty zigzag of sugary icing. in fact, the edges of the pastry were all crumb, and in the end, too much even for one and a half chocolate-mad girls.

of course, we anticipated none of this after the zine fair, when we returned to the underground labyrinth around town hall station to finally cash in my krispy kreme birthday voucher from two birthdays ago.

there’s nothing like a free doughnut sundae to bring cheer to a random unbirthday celebration. i picked the current promotion doughnut — “chokkolate” glazed — and a scoop of boysenberry ripple, and the kid chose “rainbow”. mmm… lurid. honestly, i wasn’t expecting too much of the ice cream; i figured it would be like if you ordered a grilled fish meal at KFC… turns out it’s super premium stuff, rich and creamy with an almost stretchy texture. totally outdid the doughnut i thought, which was after all the regular yeast doughnut, with a fudgey chocolate glaze, just like the name sez. i don’t know why i thought it would be chocolate on the inside too.

it’s probably just as well it wasn’t though, given the breakfast we were up against in the new day.

probably.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 June 2008 at 10:47 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, chocolate, ice cream

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

we got to changi airport early, because nellicent had to buy a computer, and i had to buy a soft-serve soy milk ice cream. five or so weeks ago, in transit on the way between london and sydney, i had popped out into the non-business side of the painfully gleaming new terminal three, to have a crystal jade shanghai dinner with the olds. our post-dinner explorations unearthed, on basement two, a mr bean outlet, offering not just a range of traditional chinese soy milk products, but also new-fangled curiosities like roasted hickory-smoke-flavoured soy beans and soft-serve soy milk ice cream.

well!

i was extremely curious at the time, but had eaten too much dinner, and so with great regret i had to walk on by. but now, here we were, three hours before flight time, dinner long gone, in need of a quick sugar burst for a modest bout of duty-free shoping.

i must tell you that soft-serve soy milk ice cream is amazing! it is not that awful, chalky western soy milk, mind, but the light, refreshing and, above all, beany asian soy milk. you know tauhu fa? the wobbly pudding version of soy milk? this is the frozen version, in a wafer cone, with a topping of finely chopped peanuts or chocolate sprinkles, if you so desire. at SG$1.20, an absolute bargain, and immediately after fighting off the kid and finishing off the last, pointy bit of the cone (the ice cream went all the way to the bottom), i considered — quite seriously — getting another.

but i did not. so i was able, in the departure transit mall, to sample one of these ice cream mochis. at the mochi creamery stand, they were set out like jewels in the display case, a selection of pretty pastels in flavours like green tea, or chocolate-vanilla, or passionfruit. i picked azuki bean and warmed it in my hands for a few minutes before splitting it three ways with nellie and the kid. the mochi skin, evenly dusted, was soft and chewy, and not sweet; the ice cream within was. the dainty confection was perfect all ’round: small and pink, for starters, and grainy with red bean.

an hour earlier, the pure white soy milk ice cream had made me almost buy a shiny white computer at the duty free apple shop, although sanity and bank balance prevailed and i finally settled for a dazzling mighty mouse. kids, i am scrolling with my fingertip!

after relinquishing the last melty bit of pale pink mochi to the kid, on the way to the departure gate, i bought myself some fancy paul smith perfume, which smells of roses and green tea.

and then the beef pastrami croissant served up by the tardy flight crew at 2.30 in the morning, and the fitful slumber crammed into the economy class seat, and the rude old bags pushing their luggage trolleys into our persons… and once more we find ourselves in sydney.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 24 February 2008 at 11:39 pm

permalink | filed under ice cream, trip

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