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there was a brief and generally good-natured discussion as we stood in the kitchen the other evening, about my collection of little bowls and dishes. “they’re all behind cupboard doors,” i said unapologetically, “and i like them, and use them all.” my little vietnamese ceramic bowl, for example, holds the perfect portion of such things as japanese slaw: finely shred some wombok, then toss with a squirt of kewpie mayo and the tiniest dribble of mirin, a few salt flakes and a sprinkling of shichimi togarashi. you don’t need a lot of mayo; after a little sit, the cabbage juices run into the mayonnaise to create a light, milky dressing. this was a clean and crunchy accompaniment to the wintertime stodge of an oyakodon dinner.

the bowl is especially pleasing at breakfast, when the weather is agreeable and i get to sit in my sunny backyard with a big dollop of greek yoghurt drizzled with honey. walnuts, of course, are the go-to crunch factor, but i finally got around to making that granola i saw at orangette the other year. i dallied for the longest time over what i wanted to put in it (pistachios and dried cherries) but what went into the mix on the day was walnuts and black sesame seeds, and what happened to the cooled-down, out-of-the-oven mix is that i chopped up into it a whole bar of orange-infused dark chocolate. this chocolate, from cocolo, has quite a sharp break, and adds a compelling crunchy punctuation to the chewiness.

once, i also filled the bowl with blue jelly. it really is endlessly versatile…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 July 2011 at 2:00 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, chocolate, dinner, kitchen

still working through my broccoli puree obsession…

put some pasta on to boil. add to the pot all that broccoli you have in the vegetable drawer (i had two medium heads). when the broccoli is just tender and still bright green, remove and refresh in cold water. puree to desired consistency in a food processor. continue cooking the pasta.

fry some chopped garlic in a bit of olive oil in a large pan. add the broccoli puree, salt to taste and a couple of ladles of pasta water. simmer. tear up a fillet of hot-smoked trout. add it to the broccoli to warm through. i had a tub of store-bought chunky spinach and cashew pesto in the fridge, so i put a couple of spoonfuls of that it as well. drain the pasta and toss into the sauce.

think about salsiccia and crema di broccoli pizza.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 June 2011 at 2:42 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen

the kid turned five over the weekend. FIVE!

no, i lie. the kid turned five the weekend before last, while we were living it up in melbourne. how’s that for time flying eh? last weekend was the party.

so this is the way it goes… four years of casual family-type functions, and then the kid goes to preschool, and suddenly i am looking down the barrel of a princess party with actual school friends.

princess party, of course, meant that half the class — the boy half — was automatically excluded. the task of whittling down the remaining girls to a more manageable number (four) was only a teensy bit harder.

and so, at ten thirty on saturday morning, with the dining chairs swathed in pink tulle and sparkly ribbons, and the cucumber sandwiches stacked daintily on the top tier of the serving dish (heart-shaped fairy bread on the bottom), we welcomed a host of visiting princesses for crown-making and morning tea.

there were plastic wineglasses of fizzy fruit juice, melon balls on frilly-tipped picks, sugar-crusted fruit gummies, and it all went without a hitch — hitchless — with the only frisson of anxiety during a round of old skool pass-the-parcel. (you know, in which there is just one prize in the heart of the layers of pink and purple tissue, instead of multiple little prizes all the way through. the attending parents squirmed uneasily, and said things like, “remember, it doesn’t matter who wins”, and “they’ll learn about life’s disappointments”. so true…) pin-the-tiara-on-the-princess was much less fraught, so much so that the girls gamely played it three times in a row before losing interest to the newly unwrapped polly pockets.

and there was cake. a lovely, moist and crumbly cake that i baked the night before — with a smattering of experimental raspberries — before frosting in the morning amidst the last-minute pottering.

now, let’s talk about frosting. here is a genius recipe, in which cream cheese is beaten with sugar, and then folded into whipped cream. you get a light, cream-cheesy taste with a voluptuous, dollopy texture.

more importantly, you get quite a lot left over, and, as a result, the desire to eat it straight out of the bowl. the only way to prevent this is to make more cake, so we did. monday afternoon, straight out of school, we baked the same cake recipe into cupcakes, emptied the last of a bottle of blue colouring into the leftover frosting, and voila.

cake for days, i tells ya.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 October 2009 at 10:21 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, cake, kid, kitchen

i have returned home from an evening that began with the final preschool parents’ committee meeting for the year, and ended with several rounds on the sushi train. in between i bought — for twenty bucks in the sale racks of gleebooks — a heavy tome with a simple typographic cover, called, “vegetable love“.

it contains no pictures, and 750 recipes. o how i love vegetables!

why, this very afternoon i made a matching set of tartines, topped with a couple wedges of laughing cow and a bunch of asparagus and some green capsicum, grilled and seasoned. a selection of green vegetables makes me so happy. sometimes i can get five or six in a meal, but today, just two was enough to put a smile on my face.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 October 2008 at 10:44 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, kitchen, lunch

i found a small packet of white rabbit candies the other day, not just the plain ones, but special edition red bean white rabbits. these i had bought while i was in singapore back in february. yes, i really am getting better at not hoarding food — by which i mean, actually eating what i buy rather than not buying excessive amounts of (usually) junk food in stellar packaging — but sometimes i do chance upon a box of treats in a most unexpected location in my house. at the very bottom of my bookshelf, for example, or the highest, most out-of-reach kitchen cupboard.

so. i’d acquired these months and months ago, way before the chinese melamine-in-milk scandal, and the melamine-in-white rabbit scandal specifically, and i spent quite a bit of time thinking about whether or not i should eat them. even if they did contain melamine, how much toxicity could there be in a handful of candies? the verdict is still out as of this moment (your counsel would be appreciated, dear reader), but here is something i did decide to eat a couple of weeks ago as i lay dying on the red couch: pearl sago.

i think, at the time, my argument was, well, it couldn’t possibly do any more harm. i was already zombie, and besides, how reassuring is a packet emblazoned with… well, i think it says, “lupenion luality”, which in a parallel universe untainted by melamine in milk, might possibly pass for “superior quality”. maybe.

but i’d received a tip from a reliable source championing the restorative powers of a bowl of freshly cooked sago. so i retrieved the packet from the back of the pantry, and boiled (and boiled and boiled) a cup of these colourful little spheres, and after straining them from their supernaturally gooey residue, i stirred in a couple spoons of coconut milk and a swirl of kithul treacle. twas pretty good, and not in the last bit poisonous. i lived to tell the tale after all.

now, about those white rabbits…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 October 2008 at 7:54 pm

permalink | filed under candy, kitchen, snacks

back when i was deathly ill — well, i’ve finally taken the last antibiotic tonight, so really, the bugs could be back, stronger, tomorrow — my good sister called up to check that i was still alive. we had been talking for a little while, when she casually announced that she had just online-ordered me a box of groceries from fratelli fresh, and that these groceries would be with me the next day, and that maybe i shouldn’t buy a bunch of asparagus if i went out shopping before then.

and truly, the next afternoon, an enormous cardboard carton showed up, gleaming white and emblazoned with swirly gold script. it was like christmas come early, though of course, the packer had somehow forgotten to include the bunch of asparagus.

but what a bounty!

1x punnet tomatoes – cherry
1x 400g cannellini beans
1x 300g jam – homemade – conservi del padre – raspberry
1x 250g pasta – guiseppe cocco no. 15 egg papperdelle
1x 500g pasta – guiseppe cocco no. 59 orecchiette
1x 250g cheese – ricotta – paesanella
1x 1kg mandarins – imperial
1x punnet berries – blueberries
1x 150g peas – snow peas
1x 190g antipasti – mushroom fantasy in olive oil
1x 100g deli – mortadella – sliced
1x 500g sausage – lamb, rosemary and garlic
1x each bread – fruit loaf

you really can’t tell from the descriptions on a packing slip, and so you will be amazed that a kilo of mandarins numbers 30, and 100g of mortadella is but four slices (but still a magnificent offering packed on a golden board with a fancy sticker), and the lamb sausages are from a.c. butchery.

i expect nellie had already prepared the meal in her head — a couple of nights later we had orecchiette with sausages and snow peas.

of course, you must remove the meat from the casing, and fry it up with chopped garlic and a tin of tomatoes, and then later in the game you can add some broccoli florets, and roughly sliced snowpea pods, and a handful of frozen peas for good measure.

and while you are eating it, you will smile large, and toast the good name of your good sister, and curse the day and a half — and the halfway ’round the world — that separates you.

happy birthday, nellicent!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 October 2008 at 10:50 pm

permalink | filed under kitchen, nellie, shoping

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

deborah’s been running hither and yon getting her wedding together, but when she returned from over the mountains the other week, she brought me back a handsome bottle of vinaigrette from a french patisserie in bathurst.

it came in handy on friday — a most elegant dressing for a tumble of mixed leaves and orange grape tomatoes, topped with three fat slices of salty fried haloumi. i don’t know why i don’t make more of an effort at lunchtime, but this was a pretty convincing argument in its favour. i didn’t really need it, but the accompanying slab of morpeth olive sourdough, buttered, was a good chaser.

the bread came into its own for breakfast the next morning. toasted, it develops a lovely crunch on the outside, and becomes far more receptive to a slathering of salty butter. and here’s the clincher: chestnut honey. that pungent, woodsy aroma of the sweet honey gives way to the intense salty bursts of the embedded kalamata olives.

the first slice was so good, i made another, and then i couldn’t wait for the day to be over and done with, so i could have it for breakfast again today.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 June 2008 at 4:13 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, kitchen, lunch

this time last week, the cold, harsh light of day saw me finishing up the last, leftover slice of a sour cherry pie with a pistachio crumble topping. i was sad to see it go. it had been long, long overdue, and the previous friday afternoon i had arrived for a weekend at my aunt’s house with two containers of dry ingredients measured and mixed and ready to go. one was to become the crust, and the other, the crumble.

more weeks ago than i’m prepared to specify, the good people at penguin mailed me a crisp, new copy of “the sweet melissa baking book“. i must admit i was not immediately enamoured of this book. aside from feeling generally ambivalent about cake (!) after the nonstop cakefest that was xmas, new year, chinese new year, sister-in-town… there was the somewhat lacklustre publication design to get past.

it’s 2008 after all. who puts out a cookbook — a cakebook, no less — with no pictures but for an 8-page colour section two-thirds of the way through? the rest of it — 240 pages in total — is cheap black helvetica on cheap white paper, with copperplate headings and mustard yellow embellishments. there are bees on every second page — the logo of the eponymous brooklyn-based bakery. it really looks like an early-90s effort, and even coming from me, with all the golden memories of the early 90s, this is no compliment, humpf.

but. see. the more i flipped through the book, never really wincing less at the just too large italicised helvetica introductions to each recipe, the more i came to realise that you really shouldn’t judge a book by its interior design (the cover is… fine. not “ooh baby, you so fine”, but just, “oh, alright. fine.”: there is an honest photograph of a chocolate cake, crowned in nubile and glistening berries; but there is also a subhead in 12pt helvetica bold.). in fact, the book is so packed full of delicious-sounding things, that i could not decide what to tackle first.

there is a good selection of trusty basics: orange-scented scones, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate walnut brownies. there is a chapter of some quite over-the-top layer cakes: sweet almond cake with lemon curd and lemon mascarpone frosting, roasted pecan cake with caramel orange marmalade and burn orange buttercream, (there is a classic red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting.) there is a bit up the back full of truffles and caramels. and in between, there are buns, pies, cookies, cakes, and cookie cakes.

eventually, i picked the sour cherry pie with pistachio crumble, because i love every single word in the name (yes, even “with”.). also, in her introduction, sweet melissa claims it is her favourite pie, and a best-seller at her bakery. there was even a glossy colour photograph of it. i set to work.

the section on pies begins with a lesson on pie dough. it is a comprehensive breakdown on all the elements that go into the crust, and what to do with them. there is a page on pie dough technique, followed by three recipes for different sorts. all up, it’s 11 pages of thorough instructions, about an hour and a half of combined chilling time alone, and me, a pastry novice, making a rather wonderful crust that baked up golden brown, light, crisp and flaky.

yay.

the crumble topping, with its whole oats ground to a flour and its pistachios hand-choppped, was even more wonderful — sweet and crunchy with a rich, buttery, pistachioey flavour. the cherry filling — now that’s where i came unstuck. i’m blaming the kilo of frozen cherries; i’m going to argue that they released a lot of moisture as they thawed in the oven. at the end, they were so plump and juicy that the base of the pie crust disintegrated into soddenness. delicious sod, mind, which more or less rendered this pie into a crumble with a pastry crown. and we all fell upon it like bears.

one of my favourite memories of new york is of sitting in the upstairs cafeteria at bloomingdales, eating a wedge of blueberry pie to recover from the ordeal that is accompanying my mother shoe-shopping. the crust on top was light, crisp and flaky, and sprinkled in sugar. once i figure out how to overcome the soggy fruit, i think this book will take me right back.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 May 2008 at 9:13 am

permalink | filed under bookshelf, cake, kitchen

it’s true what they say: icing sugar makes anything look better.

the kid was quite adamant that we should make cookies on a rainy afternoon last week, but i managed to lure her down the madeleine route by telling her they were little cakes like cat paws. i have a new madeleine tray, and wanted to see if i could avoid the alien pods of doom — you may remember — from last year. i feel heartened enough from this batch to give those darned maccha madeleines another go.

but not just yet. this morning, we are padding quietly on our paws, out of town aboard the slow train to albury. back in a week, i think.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 April 2008 at 6:07 am

permalink | filed under cake, kitchen

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