ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: kid

last night after my computer died, i hopped over to the one across the room and blogged about it. after a little while, i heard a clicky-clunky noise from deep within the silent beast. and twice more. and then when i casually pressed the startup button on my way to bed, it did.

it’s working fine today, but every now and again, the clicky-clunky noise. unsettling. i know i shouldn’t think too hard about getting a new computer, because old faithful here will pick up the vibe and then cark it for sure. this is what happened to my previous machine. it was working fine, and then i bought the G4 and while it was still sitting in its box waiting to be set up, the powermac 7200 looked across the room, rolled its eyes and breathed its last.

maeve of course already has her own laptop. there was an ad in a magazine the other week, from which i cut out an almost life-sized keyboard. i glued it onto the corner bit of a nappy carton, and viola: she spends a good few minutes on her typing each day. these are precious minutes!

i’ve been a bit slow on the crafting pickup, but amber has a terrific thing going on at kid’s craft weekly. go look.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 August 2006 at 4:19 pm

permalink | filed under kid, werk

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.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 August 2006 at 5:18 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, chocolate, kid, lunch, snacks

ah, blogging, that thing i used to do.

such is life in balmain…

we went to the toyshop the other day, and while i paid for the kid’s latest booty: two paintbrushes and a fetching nylon smock, the counter lady asked if i was a member of their loyalty scheme. she went on to explain that the scheme was: for every dollar i spend “on toys”, i get a point, and when i have collected 400 points, i get a $40 voucher.

thing is, i actually do like to collect points and get vouchers (and the like), but i also like to be realistic, and so i asked if the points had an expiry date. she hesitated, looked momentarily bashful, and then said that i would have six months.

“wow. um, i don’t think i could spend $400 on toys in six months,” i said.

“people say that,” the counter lady said encouragingly, “but then they do!”

“it’s true!” said a lithe woman who had just entered the shop. “you’d be surprised! it all adds up!”

i paid the counter lady $20.45, and she printed out my receipt and showed me where i could see my points balance. “only 380 points to go!” i exclaimed gamely… except it wasn’t — the computer had only given me 19 points. i’ve barely begun and already it’s a losing battle.

then we walked a block up the street to a café for some orange-ginger juice and a babycino, and the counter guy was steve bisley.

but the reason why there’s been no time for anything else is that for the last couple of weeks, i’ve been immersed in the eye-straining, RSI-inducing, yet educational world of laying out (and proofreading, and copyediting) a manual on wound care. oh the three different numbering/labelling systems in the same chapter! oh the glamourous photographs of sliced-open toes! oh the email of amendments that arrived yesterday, which says: “page 225 should be relocated to page 180. urgosterile is a dressing! you may have to renumber the pages! sorry lah!”

quite.

so.

now for something completely different. my head is in sandwich mode, and springtime, and picnics! these last couple days i have washed many mixing bowls, and many things have been mixed in-between. i’m waiting for a pot of chocolate ganache to cool down. and already there is a sweet and tart by-product of yesterday’s eggwhites: today’s lemon curd.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 August 2006 at 2:49 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, kitchen, shoping, werk

sometimes (though not often!), you may not want an inventive maccha-infused, bean-studded bun from a shiny modern asian bakery. sometimes, the exercise of walking the edge of chinatown in search of a printer capable of spewing out a two-metre wide poster will put you in the vicinity of the grimy little chinese bakery perched above the burlington supermarket.

you may have already bribed the child to get back in her pram again, after the half-hour wait for the bus, and the half-hour busride, and the half-hour spent looking at polypropylene samples in the backroom of said printer, with the promise of a bunshop.

so there you have it.

where the newer bakeries may have 20 or so cases filled with all manner of bundom and flossy bread, this one — and i have no idea what its name is; i just call it “the chinese bakery on top of burlington supermarket” — has a small wall of nine. but the nine cases hold more than what we need. it is always difficult to choose just one, from the bank of old-skool classics: pork with pickled mustard bun, ham bun, curry bun, taro bun, pineapple bun, pineapple custard bun, pineapple red bean bun, chocolate bun (filled with solid slabs of chocolate in lieu of the chocolate creme patisserie you might be expecting), those tall spongy cupcakes…

but here is an empty case, containing none of the bun i really want: the best ever baked charsiu bun, with a sweet sticky glaze and a sweet sticky filling containing actual bits of meat (rather than bits of fat and gristle). i looked around, panicked, those minutes passing all too slowly until a cheerful girl emerged from the inner sanctum with a fresh tray.

they were still warm.

i tonged one, and then two, and then a pineapple red bean bun, and then an afterthought, this ethreal “sticky rice with custard”. a soft, moist mochi (even a day later) in a coconut coat, with a pale yellow centre. it was sweet and delicate, and why have i never bought one before??

we ate the pork buns on a park bench, before a steadily advancing arc of seagulls, pigeons and ibises. at the end, maeve wore a joker smile of red and sticky.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 August 2006 at 2:28 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, snacks

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.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 August 2006 at 3:10 pm

permalink | filed under boy, grumble, kid, werk

a surprise midweek jaunt into the city put me once again outside the plexiglass lockers at breadtop, looking in. the buns sat there, glowing a faint green… and then i bought them, finally.

a single hefty green tea melon bun, and a bag of six little green tea buns, filled with red bean paste.

the green tea melon bun — where the melon refers not to a flavour, but the crisscross pattern on the surface of the bun — has all its flavour concentrated in the crust. you crunch through this sturdy green armour to get to a plain yeasty sweet bun beneath. it’s like kogepan’s friend, melon-pan, come to life! a life that sadly came to an end after dinner wednesday night, washed down with a pot of jasmin green tea. mmm…

the next morning, a green tea-red bean bun fulfilled its destiny. this bun had green tea flavour (and colour) all through the soft dough, and contained just the right amount of sweet red bean mash.

the next morning, the kid and i, and another kid and her mum, trundled down the street in the rain, to about life, again! clearly i am deluded about the amount of money i’m earning with my high-flying, stay-at-home mothering, extremely-part-time graphic designer job (except, i’m not, because i just calculated my entire year’s earnings for my tax return, and even though i thought i was doing more paid work than last year, i actually ended up with less money! sucks when that happens!)

but my $9 bowl of mushroom soup made it all better. up on the chalkboard it said “cream of mushroom soup”, but after interrogating the countergirl to find out if there were actual mushroom bits in it, i was delighted to receive an enormous bowl of pureed brown mushrooms, with mushroom bits, slices even, all the way through.

maeve ended up eating most of the oversized inside-out unagi maki that i’d thought we’d share. it was a splendid vision in the glass case, its outer layer made up of artfully sliced avocado and seaweed sprinkles. it came with a salad of lightly dressed rocket leaves, and a little receptacle of wasabi and soy sauce fish.

we are thinking of moving in.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 July 2006 at 5:10 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid, lunch, snacks

you know how it is: step out to buy a butter dish, and suddenly you have a butter dish, and two little glass tubs for storage, and a pretty pink mixing bowl, and some ocean trout for dinner.

i recently found a recipe for lemon curd sponge pudding in a magazine, and it became clear to me that i would have to acquire a pudding bowl. (you see how it is? if you have already read the previous entry, you will shake you head sadly and agree: it’s an affliction!)

but it was half price!

monday lunchtime, the bowl was sitting clean and fresh on the drying rack as my bucatini came to a boil, and before i realised what was happening, i had grabbed it and filled it with a tangle of spicy coriander pesto noodles with peas and broccoli.

ah lovely and versatile pink mixing/pudding/pasta bowl.

maeve was ambling down the street the other day in a pair of pink trousers and her black and white stripy t-shirt. she looked like a giant licorice allsort. we went to starbucks, and the girl behind the counter said, “is that your, um, sister?”

“UM… no, my, um, daughter.”

“it’s just,” she said, “you look so young… and my sister and i, we have eight years between us, so…”

“ah,” i said, “there are 32 years between us.”

and then she offered maeve a chocolate muffin sample and a baby-cino. note: starbucks balmain does baby-cini for free. me, i had noticed the scrawl on the blackboard that said, “hot white chocolate”, and instantly i had to have some, with raspberry syrup.

i had some, and it was way too sweet, and thick, and white. i mean, of course, but i was surprised. like that time in sainsburys, nellie, when we gazed up in awe at the shelf of brown-bagged gourmet chocolate chip cookies, and picked the one labelled “white chocolate and raspberry” because you said they were amazing, and we took the bag home and broke it open and ate a cookie and thought, hmmm. because it was a regular chocolate chip cookie, and standing flummoxed in the kitchen we could even see through the cellophane window in the bag that they were clearly brown chocolate chips, and how had we not made the connection, standing at the end of that aisle in sainsburys, that the “white chocolate” label did not compute with the brown chocolate within? we did not compute.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 June 2006 at 4:02 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate, drink, kid, nellie, shoping

you think this is crazy? how ’bout if i told you i paid just over $5 for three bananas this morning?

because on sunday afternoon, as we stood just clear of chinatown pedestrian traffic, enjoying a post-yumcha gelato (of course), i grumbled a little about the price of bananas.

the friend up from hobart mentioned that her organic grocer was still selling them for $4.95/kilo, quite a bit below the $12/kilo all around town, even if you did expect that the standard of living in tasmania would be more affordable than in glamorous sydney. the kid and i were sharing a cup of banana and mango gelato, because since the banana supply dried up, maeve has been banana-less. well, maybe just one banana every couple of weeks, as a treat. one $1.48 banana.

but then i got to thinkin’, that that $1.48 was actually less than the $2.48 or so that i’d just handed over for the scoop of banana gelato. what crazy economic theories had i been prey to, depriving the kid of one of her eight favourite fruits? and really, have i not paid like, $4 for a fancy, but tiny, chocolate bar?

so this morning, after the library, we marched into the fruitshop, and plonked the three bananas down on the counter, and there you have it. she was already waving her arms and keening “na-naaaa. NA-NAAAA.” as we walked back in the front door.

but what of this psychedelic purple bread? on the way home on sunday, we stopped for takeaway meats in the belly of world square, and i decided that i would finally buy something at breadtop.

my relationship with breadtop has been somewhat uneasy. of course, i’d been wanting and wanting to go since i saw someone walking about town carrying a filmy bag embellished with the voluptuous chinese calligraphy that said “bun shop”. but were they affiliated with, or “paying tribute to”, the singaporean breadtalk?

[ does a cursory google; no one out there seems to know either ]

aside from the similar, somewhat meaningless asian-english names, the two brands also share the same grey-orange-white aesthetic. they both have a wide variety of meat floss-covered bun products, and green tea-red bean cakes. and as i write this now, and try to specify what my misgivings are, i have nothing beyond: well, they may be a rip-off of breadtalk. and i mean, just look at this:

sigh, beautiful. on previous wistful visits, i always thought i would get some sort of green tea bun — the green tea or taro swiss roll really requires some sort of special occasion — but then on sunday i saw the shiny little loaf on the end of the exotic bread shelf, the last of its kind: purple sticky rice loaf!

you open the bag and inhale: it smells of sweet, yeasty chinese bread. you take a bite: it is soft and sweet and has a creamy, nutty flavour from ground up sticky rice (no whole chewy rice grains in it like passionflower’s sticky rice ice cream). in fact, it would make a terrific ice cream sandwich.

omigod! i have ice cream in the freezer!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 June 2006 at 2:08 pm

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

oh this rain it will continue through the morning…

it paused briefly today — blue sky! sunshine!! — to allow us to stroll boldly up the hill splashing in puddles, before laughing in our faces and raining on our heads. still, we made it to bakers delight, as directed by the kid.

“bun shop? ok. bun shop!”

and then the supermarket, where everything was on special, and where maeve sat in the pram, docile, ok, content, gnawing on her bun while i walked the aisles thinking of all the possibilities. at the checkout, an elderly european woman said to her, “oh you are very selective, picking out all the chocolate and raisins.”

but they were actually olives.

i recently learned, via tomatom.com, that raging yoghurt is one of the top 20 food blogs in australia: i scraped in at 19, woop. ed succintly summed up the blog in one word: “cakes”. so i unleash unto you, the ragingyoghurt cupcake tshirt, featuring a drawing you may recall from the other month.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 June 2006 at 10:59 pm

permalink | filed under around town, blog, kid

a week ago today, my mother and i sat at a tucked-away table in the leafy courtyard of la renaissance patisserie, at the rocks, eating french pastries (after our lunch of french meat pies). while she perused someone’s left behind tabloid newspaper, i photographed my gateau. then she said, “you know, the baby is really sweet and good, but sometimes it’s nice to go out without her.”

“mowmy, it’s always nice to go out without her,” i replied, which is sort of maybe an exaggeration, but that afternoon at least, i was happy to be left alone to eat my hazelnut biscuit with chesnut puree, vanilla bavaroise and candied chesnuts. the “biscuit” was actually a dense sponge cake studded with chopped hazelnuts, and its base was a thin layer of dark chocolate. it was a small cake, compared to the monster wedges you get at other cafés around the city, but mmm… it packed a lot of cakey, creamy, nutty, chocolatey punch. and because my mother is practical, she wrapped the decorative star anise in a serviette and told me to take it home to flavour a soup with. really, the cake that keeps on giving.

the next day she got on a plane, and flew back home to a stack of old newsapers that she will be compelled to spend a couple hours each day reading, until she has caught up with all the news she missed while she was away.

me and the kid? we spent the last week getting used to normal life again. coincidentally, the last vestiges of illness — the lingering cough, the leaky nose — also vanished. so now it’s playgrounds and parks in the sharp morning wind, and then healing hot chocolates and baby-cini after. it’s watching maisy DVDs on demand or listening to the child sing, in perfect pitch, the maisy song (or versions of it in which “maisy” is substituted with any number of two-syllabled words: mummy mouse, or water mouse, or nana mouse, or potty mouse… you get the idea.) it’s trying to squeeze maybe a flier design or a bout of invoicing in during naptime. it’s kind of awright.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 June 2006 at 4:06 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kid

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