ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: kid

oops. i forgot that i was blogging again.

it’s just, the end of the year ploughed into me, and the list i carry around in my head, of all the stuff i need to get done before next wednesday, takes up all the room.

it’s by no means an awful list of terrible things, just a big one. of projects such as: “call around to all those places you want to eat at, to see if they’ll be open between xmas and new year’s day” (sort of 50/50); or “send invoices” (invoices as yet unsent); or “bake gingerbread” (men totally devoured at preschool xmas party yesterday, houses assembled and awaiting dispatch) or “paint the kid’s room in a day” (still on schedule for tuesday, must buy paint tomorrow!); or “buy flowers, and mangoes, and a kilo of smoked salmon”.

i can’t even bring myself to consider “clean the house”, but “get those dishes done” is unavoidable; they seem to pile up so fast these days.

before i started a load the other day, the kid asked me to tie a pretend clothes line across the landing of the stairs. so i did, and then went about washing more cups than you’d think a household of three might get through in a day.

and then when i was finished, and moseyed over to see what the kid was up to, i discovered a wonderful installation of miniature cooking utensils strung across the line. much better than when she disappears in silence for half an hour and re-emerges with her toenails (and entire toes) covered in shiny pink nail polish.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 December 2008 at 5:39 pm

permalink | filed under kid

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

as we walked that stretch of circular quay between the lego blocks and the cardboard cartons yesterday, we were stunned to see that a chocolate cafe had materialised in the toaster, right next to the dendy cinemas. mid-afternoon, after the rain had cleared, and a modest skyscraper had been constructed out of five cardboard boxes, we popped into the brand-spankin’-new guylian belgian chocolate cafe.

it was an impulsive move: we had eaten lunch not too long ago, and the kid was in that precarious mid-afternoon mood. but what do you do when 1. you stumble upon a new chocolate cafe and 2. you decide on a whim to enter said cafe? you can’t really have just a cup of tea and a biscuit.

can you?

well. we certainly couldn’t. as i read down the list in the menu (which took rather longer than necessary to be presented), the kid expressed her interest in certain items by repeating them back at me.

“cheesecake!” she said at one point. and then, “milkshake!”.

all right then. the dark chocolate buche filled with raspberry cream would just have to wait.

the dark chocolate raspberry cheesecake, though, appeared soon enough, a squat slice cut from a fat, round cake. it was surrounded by swirls and puddles — raspberry coulis and white chocolate sauce — and the kid went straight for the heart-shaped pool of red. the cake itself was dense and chocolatey, sitting on a base of slightly soggy, lemon-scented biscuit crumb, and there were clearly bits of real raspberries in it: we crunched on the seeds. although it seemed like a modest serve when it arrived, in the end it remained unvanquished. would this have been different if we had been less laden with lunch? or if the cake had been that bit more delicious?

perhaps it was the milkshake’s fault. though for something called “chocolate shake”, it wasn’t overly chocolatey. in fact, i wouldn’t even say it was chocolatish. what it was mostly, was a glass of cold milk, with a small, partially intact scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, and the inside of the glass had been zigzagged with molten chocolate, which, by virtue of sitting in a volume of cold milk, had solidified completely. how very strange to have to scrape these trails of hard chocolate off the surface of the glass.

i guess if it had been an actual chocolatey chocolate shake, we might have died. as it is, we didn’t even get to the bottom of the glass. there were a lot of milkshakes going round that afternoon, and trade in general seemed brisk. when i asked the guy behind the counter when they’d opened, he said, only a little agitatedly, “two days ago”.

i really must work on getting my tolerance for rich chocolate desserts back up to the levels they were five years ago. you must know by now, the adriano zumbo chocolate cafe opens at the end of the week.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 October 2008 at 10:45 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, chocolate, kid

we looked the drizzle in the eye today, the kid and i, and we headed down to circular quay for the sydney architecture festival.

down in front of the opera house, the rain had stymied the cardboard city; a thousand paper cartons lay in wait under a giant sheet of green tarp. but over at customs house, beneath the tents that had sprung up overnight, another city was taking shape.

a megalopolis of lego!

there must have been millions of pieces of plastic there, spread out over a bunch of trestle tables. every person that showed up was given a little bumpy mat, pointed to an empty spot at one of the tables, and given free reign over the crates (and crates and crates) of lego.

there were some amazing creations, like the building made entirely of doors…

…and the one made entirely of heads.

and the kid wanted to touch everything…

but got bored surprisingly quickly when it came time to build her own.

drawing’s more her medium, i think. she’s in her mermaid phase.

though sparkly princess fairy shoes come a close second.

boy! it feels good to be walking about again.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 October 2008 at 11:37 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid

my bank account is the lowest it’s ever been (she says, remembering back to a week ago when she threw caution to the wind and money at the dinosaur designs), but today, tossing up between bagels at bagel house and a nice cafe sitdown, we chose about life. actually, the kid did. it’s my fault, i suppose, but she has really developed a taste for “scrambled eggs at a cafe”.

“you know, i can make you scrambled eggs at home,” i’ll say.

“but i want scrambled eggs at a cafe.”

sometimes i play along.

so we hop-skip-jumped over the potholes of the backstreets, and sat ourselves down at a big wooden table. these days the kids’ scrambled eggs at about life come with a fat slice of lean bacon.

on the grownup menu there is cinnamon chocolate french toast, but i’d been burned by their regular french toast before — sure, it looks impressive, cut some two inches thick, but the egg only penetrates not quite enough to render palatable a great wodge of bready bread. this problem might have been fixed by a copious dousing of maple syrup, but there was only a small puddle of the stuff. which only confirms my suspicions that about life is not the place to get a delicious sweet thing.

instead, today, i got the about life vegan breakfast — scrambled tofu with red onion, spinach and roasted pumpkin relish, served on soy and linseed toast. it sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? in my head i saw a great mound of sauteed spinach, maybe another pile of pumpkin, and good wedges of grilled onions. instead, i got this:

it was all kind of scrambled together, and placed rather politely on a solitary slice of plain — and unbuttered, damn vegan breakfast — sourdough. which, you know, is fine. fine. because why should i be disappointed when the thing on my plate doesn’t match the thing in my head?

because it was $15.50, is why.

still, it was almost tasty, even. a good sprinkle of black pepper, and salt (and i never add salt) fixed that. as did a scraping of butter from the kid’s order, and a blistered and fatty bit off her bacon that she refused to eat.

i further sullied the vegan experience with a pot of chocolate chai, a wonderful, creamy mix of chocolate and spices brewed in frothy milk. it was particularly gingery — tingly on the tongue — and it looked like there was even real chocolate in there, and when i got to the bottom of the pot i encountered a veritable swamp of tangle leaves. so ok, the about life drinks, at least, are delicious sweet things.

but the virtue — vegan or otherwise — is overrated, and anyway, possibly too expensive to indulge in with any regularity.

– – –

last week, i spent $15.50 eight blocks down darling street, at circle cafe. there, it buys you the salad of the day. but what a salad! poached egg and bacon salad!

a perfectly cooked egg — glorious and runny inside — perched atop an enormous tumble of well-dressed leaves, and many slices of crunchysaltymoist bacon, and shards of parmesan. the accompanying bread basket held half a baguette and two pats of butter.

you see where i am going with this? if you have $15.50 earmarked for lunch, you should go there too.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 September 2008 at 10:26 pm

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

we lunched at haberfield last saturday, where we discovered that the most innocent-looking vegetarian offerings at pasticceria papa might be harbouring bits of meat. tiny chunks of chopped-up schnitzel amidst the chopped-up tomatoes on top of a particularly springtimey pizza, for example. or two enormous meatballs concealed within a “broccoli and potato” schiaciata. but because none of us are actually vegetarian, we ate every last crumb, even the ones that the kid generously graced with scraps of salami off her salami pizza.

she is all about salami these days. and ham. and bacon, she told me, she loves the best, although i think it’s really ham. how much salami should a kid eat? surely italian kids (or spanish, or hungarian… and wherever else salami come from) eat quite a lot of it?

before lunch, we stopped by zanetti 5 star deli, and bought olive mortadella, and pickled octopus, and a packet of little starry pasta. we sat on the the steps out front eating mortadella, which, after an initial uncertainty about the olives, went on the list of approved cured meats.

and then after the cold cuts, and the pizza, and the gelato, and the ricotta cannoli — oh wait, that was me! — the kid requested soup for dinner, with her new starry pasta. here’s what went into our minestrone pot:

onions
garlic
salami
celery
carrots
cabbage
a potato
two bay leaves
a couple squirts of tomato paste
chicken
chickpeas
frozen peas
cherry tomatoes
the stars baby, the stars

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 June 2008 at 10:41 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, kid, kitchen, lunch

the pistachio crumble topping from “the sweet melissa baking book” resurfaced yesterday, the crunchy golden eiderdown on a bed of tart rhubarb and bosc pears.

leftover rhubarb crumble makes a glorious breakfast the morning after, gives you the energy to leave a tearful and protesting kid at playschool, where she will spend most of the day crying. it was a smooth trip into glebe today; normally the bus crawls down the clogged artery of victoria road, packed full of feral schoolchildren. but today we had our pick of seats, and we were there in a flash.

weird.

i walked to the cinema then — because honestly, that’s why i put the kid in school — and it became clear why the streets were so empty: everyone and their kid was at the movies. this is the thought that went through my head: what, all these people sprung their children from school so they could come see “indiana jones“?

but then amidst all the squealing and shrieking i heard a tired parental voice say “teachers’ strike” and “nim’s island”, and i knew that it would all be ok.

the movie was great fun, even though indy’s not quite so hot anymore. oh, saggy indy in baggy trousers, we are all getting so old and creaky. still i left the cinema with a spring in my step and the raider’s theme in my head. in fact, it’s still in here!

the next time i see a film, remind me not to have rhubarb crumble beforehand, no matter how delicious. it only gets in the way of having a banana choc top during the proceedings.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 May 2008 at 10:38 pm

permalink | filed under at the movies, breakfast, kid

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

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