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two weeks ago… or was it three? either way. a recent weekend, and it was hot. the boy’s family thought it might be a nice outing to have a picnic at the botanic gardens in auburn. the plan was we’d all meet on the main street in auburn, pick up picnic supplies, and then head over to the gardens where we would sprawl on the grass and eat ourselves silly.

i seized this opportunity to make a tart, because who doesn’t want a slice of tart, all sticky summer fruit, while lying in the sun on a saturday afternoon? amalgamating two… (or was it three?) recipes from an old donna hay magazine, armed with a kilo of just right plums and a scant-used food processor, i spent friday night and saturday morning at the kitchen counter. minutes before it was time to head out west, i had this: a ricotta and plum tart in a hazelnutty crust. it was still warm — actually, hot — from the oven, radiant on my lap with two folded up tea towels in between.

we got to auburn road early, and inside of twenty minutes we’d bought fresh baclava and custard eclairs and little buns filled with salty white cheese and chopped herbs, and had finally come to a halt outside mado. i’d been wanting to come here for years, for the turkish ice cream.

late summer in 2000, the boy and i caught a ferry up the bosphorus to the edge of the black sea. we thought it was a boat trip there and back, but the steward ushered us off and told us not to return for two (or three) hours. we bought grilled fish sandwiches in an alleyway, climbed a grassy hill to a fort and ate our delicious sandwiches in the presence of hilltop cows. when we climbed back down to the town on the ground, our boat was ready and waiting. we had just enough time to get ourselves ice cream cones from a nearby café. what strange and gummy ice cream, full of fruity bits; gleeful, we chewed on them as the ferry puttered towards istanbul.

and now here on the main street in auburn, dondurma, waiting in tubs out front, for us. these were some of the labelled flavours: date, pistachio, mulberry, mango, turkish coffee, and cherry. there were also two unlabelled flavours, yellow with bits, and white, which the counter girl revealed to be apricot, and “… special turkish ice cream”. the price list only went up to three flavours, but i wanted four or maybe even five. but also, i wanted tart later, so i made do with cherry, apricot and special turkish.

it is fun, this stretchy ice cream. but we have to eat it quickly, so quickly, because not only is it very hot and melty sitting by the road, but if we do not shovel it into our mouths fast enough, the child will devour it all. as it is she has great red rivulets running down her chin and onto her AB/CD tshirt, so she looks like she’s on the losing end of a pub brawl.

but here comes the boy’s family now, and there we go to the big kebab shop on the corner.

to be continued…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 March 2006 at 2:39 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, cake, ice cream, kid, kitchen, snacks, trip

what i’ve been wanting to tell you for a week now, is that if you think you may have sliced too many mushrooms, it will only be just enough. this mound of mushrooms, as big as my head, sauteed with garlic until that moment before everything collapses in a soggy mass… it was just enough to toss through a pot of fettuccine, with several spoonfuls of a dill pesto i’d found in a deli earlier that afternoon, and a handful of chopped fresh dill for extra greenness. it was only the promise of ice cream for dessert that prevented me from having a third bowl of the stuff. i think about it, still.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 February 2006 at 9:57 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen

lessons i have learnt this week:

if you make banana buttermilk pancakes on sunday, and then save the rest of the buttermilk for an opportune moment when you can make a chocolate cake, even if it’s just two days later, when it comes to the part in the recipe where you add the buttermilk, you will find that you now have half a carton of thick, tangy yoghurt.

if you substitute normal milk for the buttermilk, the cake turns out fine, in as much as a cake can when you’re still experimenting with the hidden hotspots in a still-unfamiiliar fan-forced oven.

if the top of the cake rises way too quickly, and cracks a big, gaping smile all the way around one side, you can shave off the extra high upper lip, and then use pieces of it to fill in the sludgy hole in the middle of the cake where it hasn’t quite cooked through, which you discovered when you sliced the cake in two.

if you sandwich the cake back together with the pink grapefruit preserve that nellie gave you the last time she was in town, it will be a subtle and unexpected citrusy edge to the dark chocolate cake.

if you hide the scarred surface of the cake with a simple but decadent icing made of dark chocolate melted down with a bit of butter and a bit of milk, and if the chocolate you use is scharffen berger, which also came by way of nellie, it will be all glossy good.

it is a most agreeable thing eating chocolate cake for afternoon tea on the balcony, sharing alternate mouthfuls with the child, watching the planes go past.

if you leave chocolate cake on the kitchen bench in the moist, warm summertime, on the fifth day it will develop an intricate lace of tiny bubbles across its glossy chocolate icing, and make you wonder what will happen should you have another slice tomorrow.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 December 2005 at 8:27 pm

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, kid, kitchen

i was feeling virtuous the other night, having finally stepped into the swimming pool for actual swimming, as opposed to paddling or splashing about or pushing the baby and her floaty-seat-ring from one end of the pool to the other. i set my ambitions low; after all it had been a ghastly 20 months or so since i had the pleasure of doing laps. but after i’d done five, i thought maybe i could get to ten, and then when i reached ten, it didn’t seem so hard to get to fifteen, and by twenty-two i thought i could probably get to thirty… but i didn’t stick around to find out.

instead i came home, and made myself a celebratory mini kaiseki: miso soup with spinach and wheat cakes (the spinach and wheat cakes come freezedried in a silver sachet!), steamed beans, pumpkin and potato in a sesame-mirin-dressing, some bits of chinatown chicken and duck, and because we like carbohydrates around here, a bowl of white rice.

how pleasant, this tingly feeling in one’s muscles.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 December 2005 at 10:37 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen

for the last week or so, i’ve had three bananas going soft and ripe on the kitchen counter. not just leopard-spotted ripe, but dark, slug-like ripe. and really, i guess i started out with three, but the boy kept cutting them up for baby snacks. at one point i was sitting downstairs at the computer and heard him in the kitchen making knife-extracting, snacktime noises, and had to yell upstairs most unbecomingly, “i’m saving those bananas to cook with!”

for the last week or so, blueberries have been plentiful and cheap… well, affordable at least. remember that time we went to fratelli fresh and reached our hand out for a punnet of blueberries, and then recoiled and fell over frothing when we saw the pricetag? it has not been like that this time. at the supermarket, blueberries were going for a song (.94 a punnet, which, ok, is just over twice the price of an song at the iTunes store. a song and dance then).

for the last week or so, my father was in town. while my mother was here we discussed her dumpling skins, her kenwood chef, and what her old mixer was doing these days, now that she had mr kenwood. it turned out that old mr philips was languishing in a plastic bag in the back of a kitchen cupboard. “aiyah,” she said, “i should have brought it for you.” aiyah, i could only agree. and so a txt was sent and a box was packed, and when my father got off the plane a couple weeks later, he came bearing an electric mixer.

there is a point to all these little stories, and that point is everything came together sweetly — even with just one and a half black bananas — in a loaf tin in a 175° oven. yes, when i tipped it out, it were the most perfect banana-blueberry loaf ever. i didn’t even take a picture of it, because all you have to do is imagine the most perfect banana-blueberry loaf ever, and it was that. i had some fresh hot out of the oven yesterday afternoon, and some more toasted with butter this morning, and i will have more again tomorrow breakfastime, and it will be crunchy on the outside, light and moist on the inside, fat blueberries running deep blue stains over everything.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 November 2005 at 9:56 pm

permalink | filed under cake, kitchen

the best excursion ever…

[ well, ok, the best excursion since that time nellie and i stole the car and drove north, to ikea, for swedish meatballs and daim cake ]

…was on saturday. it started with a banh xeo and a dried longan drink, continued through the messy middle bit with the baby wiping every piece of food on the table before eating it, and ended with the unearthing of a selection of tasty treats in a vietnamese grocery along illawarra road. among them:
a tray of “gourmet mushrooms”
a just ripe pineapple
a bottle of rose cordial
a tin of jackfruit in syrup

the mushrooms were shiitake, enoki, oyster and shimeji (so pleased to meet you all!). this evening they were folded through olive oil and cream, with parsley and garlic, pepper and salt — and somehow i managed to resist eating them straight out of the mixing bowl at this stage — before being baked en papillote to be tossed through angel hair pasta and topped with shaved parmesan. this was slurped down so quickly that i felt i had to make dessert.

“would you like some pineapple?” i asked the boy.
“ummmmm… … … no,” he replied.
“but what if i fried it in butter and brown sugar, and put vanilla ice cream on top?”

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 October 2005 at 9:50 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, ice cream, kitchen, shoping

of course, the good thing about making something that requires two egg yolks (refer: gnocchi, previous entry) is that it leaves you two egg whites with which to fashion a pavlova.

i once helped to make a four-egg white pav, a pav so big we ended up making it in two parts: a large meringue at the base, and then the whipped cream and fruit, and then another, smaller meringue covered in more cream and fruit, and shaved chocolate, which was a bit controversial with the purists at the table. finally assembled, it looked rather like the titanic, suitably festooned for its maiden voyage. the pav, though, never even made it through the first night.

two egg whites yield a much more modest and manageable pavlova. this is the third pav i’ve made, and all according to stephanie‘s recipe. sort of.

sort of, because this time ’round, i thought i’d try and get the meringue into the oven before putting the kid to sleep, and in my clock-watching, distracted state, i managed to forget all the ingredients after the sugar.

which is exactly half the list. oh no! while waiting for the meringue to be done (done for?), i googled such questions as “what does vinegar do in a pavlova?” but my research proved inconclusive.

so i asked the boy, “is there such a thing as a bad pavlova?”, and his reply, “hmm… i do not think there can be a bad pavlova,” spurred me on to whip the cream, fold in a dollop of yoghurt, and arrange a bloom of thinly sliced mango on top. it were pretty good.

i ate the last wedge tonight while watching “save the last dance“, which i think i like because it reminds me of being eleven and watching “fame” on tv.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 October 2005 at 11:15 pm

permalink | filed under boy, cake, kid, kitchen, tv

over the weekend, i chanced upon a recipe for spinach and ricotta gnocchi. usually i like the idea of gnocchi, but i can’t imagine eating more than maybe two or three before i get bored and start looking around for, um, tiramisu or something. (strangely, i have no problem sitting and eating mounds and mounds of mashed potato, even to and beyond the point of pain.)

this recipe though, was more than just mashed potato. in fact, there was no potato at all. and just look at the picture in the magazine: so green and enticing! and covered in butter and cheese.

so yesterday, after i stopped being distracted by cake, i went up the street and bought a kilo of spinach and a wedge of ricotta, and stood at the stove for a good part of an hour, following the recipe exactly.

after i dropped the first four balls into the lightly salted boiling water, they disintegrated and looked like a bubbling swamp in the pot. hmph. the next four held together a bit more, but when i drained them and put them in a dish, they sighed into each other and became one large, soft… i don’t even think you can call it gnocchi (gnocco?).

each subsequent batch ended up being floured a bit more, and left to cook a bit longer after they had risen to the surface of the water, so by the end it looked less swampy-mulchy and more italian cuisine. sadly, by this time it had been rejected by the baby (and in a cruel twist i ended up making her mashed potato instead, and baked beans), and forsaken by the boy (who thought it was tasty but soft and lacking meat, and then quickly moved on to cake and ice cream), which is why this afternoon, i ate a large plate of them for lunch.

they were still softer than the magazine ones look (oh, maybe the food stylist put some sort of firming agent in to stop them collapsing under the lights, yes yes, that is my excuse), but gawrsh, so yummy.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 26 October 2005 at 3:54 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kid, kitchen, lunch

i made dinner for my mum and myself last night. pan-fried ocean trout on mashed pea-potato, with beansprouts in a mirin-soy-sesame dressing.

confoundingly, the last few of times i bought trout or salmon, the pieces of fish came sans skin. where did the skin go? did the fishmongers think they were doing me a favour? did they sell the skin to those nori roll places that do the fried skin and mayonnaise maki?

[ momentary lapse in blogging as i salivate and think about a salmon skin maki ]

did they save it for themselves so they could prance around at home draped in nothing but fish skin?

it’s just, peppered and salted and fried… well you know. and i can’t even continue.

so. eating the crisp, raw beansprouts last night made me reminisce about the stir-fried beansprouts we used to have at home, while growing up. they were cooked until transparent and limp, and tasting faintly of, dare i say it, rancid water. the saving grace was the bits of salted fish tossed in. all those plates of dinnertime flaccid turned me off beansprouts for years and years. such a pity.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 October 2005 at 11:21 am

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen

a quiet start to the trip away: a slice of passionfruit tart from a bakery in berrima.

two weeks in a sparsely-furnished house in still-wintery north-eastern country victoria, we knocked together such treats as:

a homemade vegetable soup standing triumphant on the base of a tin of five-bean mix. five!

a grand breakfast of fried egg on buttered toast, mushrooms and bacon.

a main course that was supposed to be a grilled lamb chop, but really, it was the enormous tin of sauerkraut.

…which lasted for another couple of meals, including this grilled chicken wing with three white vegetables. yes, i’m counting the mashed potato as a vegetable.

there were cakes of course, many other cakes, but they were eaten too quickly to be documented, which is a pity because the gooey chocolate nougat cake, as big as a car tyre and covered in a mound of shaved chocolate, was a sight to behold. there were scones with cream and lemon butter. there were meat pies and pasties… which, if i lived in the country is surely what i would become. pasty.

there was breakfast at the tourist cafe in cooma (also serving greek meals and continental meals), which was so old skool that the mushroom omelette had the consistency of a kitchen sponge studded with tinned champignons, because indeed the cook had used tinned champignons…

see? see that rubbery little mushroom?

…and everything on the breakfast menu came with buttered white toast and chips. which ordinarily would have been a cause for celebration, but i was already full from the massive swirl of soft serve ice cream floating atop my iced chocolate, and so. uneaten chips. most unusual.

ah, the country.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 October 2005 at 9:59 am

permalink | filed under breakfast, cake, dinner, kitchen, trip

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