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Category Archives: lunch

[ chris ware in “the new yorker” ]

and my favourite lunch? not the about life grilled haloumi salad. it is possible to have too much haloumi in a grilled haloumi salad. despite the best intentions of the well-dressed rocket, red capsicum and grilled zucchini to balance it out, every cheesy morsel will burn its way down your throat, leaving a salt trail that the icy mango-watermelon-vanilla-orange beverage will not wash away. and because it is not freshly grilled haloumi salad, but one picked from several large bowls in the glass case, each one of the six or seven slices will also be cold and rubbery.

on the plus side, the salt really disguised the coldness. as burning!

damn, that was salty.

we caught the bus to the newsagent, where the thanksgiving new yorker was not only the cartoon issue, but also came with four different chris ware covers. truly, today is the day where generousity becomes a curse. but i managed to buy just one. and now i see that you can download the series, with an online comic strip thrown in (so you can see the pie and sandwich in action). and a chris ware interview mp3.

well. it got me excited, anyway.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 December 2006 at 3:24 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, lunch

the third time the swede caught sight of us, according to deborah, he had to look again, just to make sure. i didn’t notice; my attention was on the daim cake.

he had first seen us four hours earlier. we had worked our way through the magical maze that is the ikea showroom, and had arrived at the cafeteria, only an hour and a bit into the adventure; we had a modest haul of wooden cutlery caddy (to double up as pencil organiser), teddy bear bedlinen and two notebooks. it was still early, as lunchtimes go, but i figured if we ate early then there’d be an opportunity for afternoon tea later. we joined the queue and filled our trays. organic apple-guava juice, salmon with chips and vegetables for me, organic apple-guava juice, meatballs and chips, herby bread roll for deb. potato salad and beets to share.

“can we have chips and vegetables with the meatballs?” asked deb as the efficient lunch ladies plated up.

“no.” said the efficient lunch ladies.

i suppose we had already taken up too much of their time deciding if we should get ten meatballs, or fifteen. we were going to split everything, but lurking in the back of my head is the awareness that there can be too many meatballs. even if meatballs have been the main drawcard for a long-overdue ikea excursion.

it only seems like i have too much spare space in my brain, for lurking.

the swede, you remember, from the start of this story, checked us out., by which i mean, at the checkout. “ah!” he exclaimed, on spotting the pink juices, “this is organic apple and guava juice! it is new.” he seemed pleased that we had chosen so wisely.

and then a long and leisurely lunch, where i discovered a couple of the carrots had a strange frosty appearance, even though they were perfectly… room temperature. despite being hard and crunchy, they had an un-carrotlike texture. i was flummoxed, and then in spite of that, i decided that ikea should launch a string of ikea cafés around town — no furniture or curtains on show, just a refurbished mcdonald’s with cheap meatballs and salmon meals behind the counter, and a room full of coloured plastic balls for the kids. you would go, wouldn’t you?

it only seems like i have too much spare space in my brain, for lurking.

and then a long and winding wander through the downstairs maze of the market hall, where our restraint from upstairs was gradually undone. damn you, kitchen department! but we got through it. we even sat down on a saggy, discounted sofa in the bargain basement and reviewed our loot. one of us, not me, even put stuff back on the shelf. we joined a short queue and paid. and then we came face to face with the ikeafood(c) store.

sigh.

at least i had known ahead of time, had not pretended that the rows of swedish jams and cordials and ginger thins would not move me. too soon a shopping bag — “the taste of sweden” — was filled with cloudberry jam and blueberry jam and lingonberry jam, a single daim bar, a bag of salty licorice fish (for the boy; i shall not touch the stuff again), a bag of dillchips — and this is where the swede bumped into us again. “ah, these chips are really good! but i like these ones better,” he said, pointing to the american style sour cream and onion. but, ch, you can get sour cream and onion potato chips anywhere. dill-flavoured chips are hard to come by.

remember, in greece, all those oregano-flavoured potato chips you ate, not because they were so delicious, but because, where else will you come across these exotic crispies?

things that didn’t make the bag this time: creamed crab in a tube (30% crab meat!), gingerbread house kit, instant meatball sauce powder. as it was, the magical display of pulling rabbits out of this hat was quite a sight to behold, this show i put on at the checkout counter.

we were pleased, but wilty. the girl on welcome duty at the foot of the escalator looked confused as we rode back up; we were already weighed down with sweden’s best. back in the cafetaria, we sat beneath jaunty polka-dotted lamps and ate cake and drank tea. that’s when the swede did the double take. we’d been there about five hours. by the time the last crumb had been eaten, we’d have nudged it closer to six.

the feeling we had on realising it, i do not think that you could call it pride.

but it wasn’t bad.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 November 2006 at 2:42 pm

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

sometimes you know the solution to a problem. that is, you know of its existence, independent to the relevant problem, but you haven’t quite put the two together.

for example, i’d known about the orange grove organic market since shortly after i moved into the area. i’d also known that the 445 bus sort of headed in that direction. but to me, the market was always just a little bit too much of a walk. i’d say it would have taken over half an hour to hoof it. it was only recently that it clicked that i could take a bus there, and that the bus actually stopped right outside the market. brains — what would we do without them?

saturday morning, we walked to the bus stop with a spring in our step, and not too long later, we were on the bus with three other families with young ‘uns. off the bus, there were kids, and dogs, and sunshine, and bouncy castles. it was spring!

we did a couple of laps around the market, with no particular plan, just to see what was available (which was lots). i take a little while to warm up at markets, but then once the first purchase is out of the way, it always spirals out of control.

as it happened, that first crucial purchase involved standing in front of the artisanal lemonade stall for longer than you might expect. there wasn’t actually a queue, mind, it was just me trying to decide if i wanted the pineapple lemonade — a great beehive of glass filled with sunny yellow, with small chunks of fresh pineapple floating inside — or the raspberry lemonade — deep red, and copiously seeded. there was also a rather complex looking ginger ale with bits of chopped up chillis and other vegetation, but i thought that i’d save it for when i didn’t have to share with the kid. the lemonade guy recommended the pineapple… and it was nice and all, but i was too busy trying to drink my share of it, before maeve guzzled it all. the last i saw, her grimy little paw was sloshing about in the dregs, fishing for the fruit.

but so. now the purse strings had been freed! there was interesting bread, but we already had two loaves at home. there were two stalls with pink lady apple pies, but it was too soon after breakfast. there was some lovely rose geranium soap, but it was $5.50 a bar. we worked our way through the maze, accepting samples of nougat and oranges and raspberry ricotta cake. the south american food was inviting, and the calabrian too. the g–zleme ladies were there too, with variations i hadn’t yet encountered: organic chocolate and banana (must have been $15 g–zleme).

i bought: a brown bag of pink ladies; a packet of eumundi smokehouse double smoked bacon and a red wine and garlic salami; a small tub of gympie farm butter; a tomato and olive pastry, for sustenance; and some mushrooms.

ah the mushrooms. they were spread out in boxes across the counter: button, swiss brown, oyster, king brown, shitake, enoki, chesnut. i wanted them all. “can i buy a mixed selection?” i asked the mushroom man, and “how much are they?”

“they all cost the same,” he replied, “$4.50 for a hundred grams.” he even measured out 100g of oyster mushrooms, so i could see what 100g of mushrooms looked like. and then i asked for a 400g mix of the five more exotic funghi.

there were so many, he packed them into two of his sturdy brown bags. “$18,” he said.

see, i know that four times $4.50 is $18, but somehow i didn’t do that calculation in my head when i put my order in. and so when we caught the bus home, i had just under a dollar left in my wallet. but a bounty! of tasties! in my shoping bag.

dinner was fettucine with a myriad of mushrooms, fried with bacon and garlic in gympie butter. all together now: mmmMMMmmm.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 September 2006 at 9:05 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, drink, kid, lunch, shoping, snacks

earlier in the week, we were on our way to starbucks to try the new signature hot chocolate, when we stopped by the menu posted outside circle cafe. top of the hand-chalked specials list was turnip and chesnut soup!

it was so unexpected, interesting and enticing, that i immediately pulled the plug on the starbucks idea. maeve didn’t seem to mind; “this one?” she said, “climb stairs?” and up she went.

the soup was a lovely shade of camel, sweet and smooth — a potage, if you will. even maeve liked it, although she had her own plate of sourdough toast with grilled mushrooms and roma tomatoes to contend with. but the trouble with soup is that it leaves no room for belgian hot chocolate, to say nothing of the chocolate brownies doing laps in the revolving dessert case up front.

so when carla gypsygirl came to visit us friday lunchtime, bearing gifts of ice-cream hairclips and rainbow beaded bracelets, we went back to circle. you must know by now that my favourite lunch is breakfast, and that is what i had. the all-day big veggie breakfast is similar to the all-day big breakfast: eggs, mushrooms, hashbrown, tomatoes, and sourdough toast, with a mountain of sauteed spinach replacing the tangle of bacon and sausages (which is what carla had to counter the effects of a dodgy chicken dinner. props!).

half the big veggie breakfast though, is not quite enough to fill a belly; after maeve polished off all the tomatoes and half the mushies and an unexpected amount of toast, i was back at the front counter ordering my belgian hot chocolate and the lucky last brownie on the tray. the brownie is studded through with big chunks of chocolate, and is served warm so that all those chunks go moist and runny.

i had ordered it to share, three ways, but i think that the kid won that battle. of course.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 September 2006 at 9:50 pm

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

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

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

the thing about having a list of things you might like to do when you go somewhere, even if it’s a very small list, is that you might end up not being able to do any of it. so that even though you might have eaten chocolate until it seeped out your pores, the fact that you didn’t eat any chocolate from the one place you really wanted to… well, it makes you feel like you’ve sort of failed, doesn’t it?

right now i would like to go to a nice hotel, just me, where there is room service, an in-house DVD library, and a cakeshop next door.

i need to recover from my week away:

—

by the time we get to melbourne, at 3pm on a friday afternoon, we have already been on the road for a couple of days. this means there have already been pies filled with lamb mince in rich brown gravy and pies filled with creme patisserie and syrupy raspberries. in fact, as a testament to the cake frenzy i found myself in on thursday afternoon, the recipt from the bakery reads: 1 beesting, 1 snickerdoodle, 1 raspberry harvest cake, 1 fruit eccle, 1 cup of tea. it wasn’t all for me! i like buying cake for other people!

our brand spankin’ new serviced apartment (complete with stainless steel galley kitchen and villeroy-boch china) is touted as being on the edge of carlton, so i kinda figured we’d be feasting italian every day. however, the reality is a billowy outpost quite a hike away. nevertheless, it is on the tram route straight to the city, so before too long we’re riding into the sunset and reacquainting ourselves with the monstrosity that is federation square

— it’s not as ugly as it used to be —

and having hot soupy noodles in chinatown.

and then what does one do in melbourne on a drizzly friday night, when holidaying with a toddler? one takes the kid back to the hotel, washes her and puts her to bed, puts the boy on babysitting duty before he can arrange to go out drinking with his friend, and then one catches the tram back into the city to see you am i at the forum.

i’d seen the poster as we walked along the twilit streets and thought i’d call up to see if there were still tickets. who knows? who knows if people still go out to see 90s aussie rock? maybe it would be sold out. but it wasn’t. when i rocked up (so to speak), the crowd was like the mid-to-late nineties; comforting, in a way, like so many plaid shirts. the theatre is a gorgeous old building, with a gilded foyer, and a hall full of banquet seating. there are classical sculptures perched over the bar, and the domed ceiling is blue like the evening. i found myself a spot inbetween the dancefloor and the seats, on a step, so i could see.

i last saw you am i, like, in 1998. so long ago. friday night, they sound the same (maybe louder). sound as ever, as it were. tim prefaces every second song with, “you think that’s a corker, wait till you hear this one!” (and it’s true!), and punctuates with windmills. it’s all fun and good until the stupid girls in two groups to my front and back start getting drunk and falling over. on me. repeatedly. and they think it’s funny, and their friends do too. and what the hell is wrong with people these days? well, what is wrong with girls then, because the boys in the group look over my way and smile, and say things like, “would you like to stand in front of me so you can see?” and “i have a spare beer, would you like it?”

even though i turn on my heels right after the final encore, and bypass the merch stand selling footy scarves with YOU AM I woven into various team colours, i miss the last tram and walk for a bit in the rain before a taxi comes by. it’s nice.

the next morning we walk past bakery lane…

…en route to the queen victoria markets, with its aisles upon aisles of fruit and veg, and its warren on delicatessenal delights such as picked octopus and festive sausages (you will see, if you squint, one of these starbusts says “wedding sausage”).

but i resist the lure of the salami, and even the hot kranski with sauerkraut. or any number of continental pastries; this morning the spinach and cheese borek calls to me. it all works out in the end though, because the boy goes back in after his sausage, and reappears with a wedge of kolace: a yeasty base topped with poppyseeds, sugary ground walnuts, sour cherry jam, and soft white cheese. thank you, boy.

come back later. i’ll tell ya all about it.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 July 2006 at 11:25 am

permalink | filed under boy, breakfast, cake, dinner, lunch, soundtrack, trip

do you eat chicken? do you watch sunrise? i do, quite a bit, and i, um, do… only sometimes, and in small amounts, honest. this morning they had a lady from the chicken board on, to set the record straight on the state of today’s poultry.

and now that i’ve googled “australian poulty association”, i see that that the board are actually called the australian chicken meat federation, and three days ago revealed in a press release that “almost 80% of australians believe that something is added to the australian chicken to make it grow artificially larger, with a staggering 66% of australians believing added hormones are a contributing factor making chickens larger”. ok.

well, i mean, that’s what i thought! have you seen the size of those chicken breasts in the supermarket deli counter? monstrous! sometimes, from my old supermarket at least, they even tasted like chickens of death. but in fact, what the chicken board woman said was that modern chickens are a different breed from the dainty specimens of the past, and comparing the two was like comparing a shetland pony with a workhorse. (and also that any antibiotics given to the birds are no longer in the meat by the time it reaches the consumer, and that organic chicken is no better for you than the other kind is.)

so. you’d believe it wouldn’t you? this chicken lady on a tv show where businesses and tourist attractions pay money to be included in the lineup?

it’s just, having read “my year of meats” (ruth ozeki) a couple of times, and sort of wanting to read “the way we eat: why our food choices matter” (peter singer) — but being sort of afraid to — and to be honest, the size of those chicken breasts is still a little disconcerting…

it’s just, the kid really likes chicken.

hormones and antibiotics aside, organic may not necessarily be better for us, but it probably is a bit better for the chickens. but then after the playground we went to the supermarket to buy a roast chicken for lunch, and the woman behind the counter asked if i wanted the regular $8.48 chicken, or the reduced-for-quick-sale $6 one.

“why’s it reduced for quick sale?” i asked.

“because it’s been out here for more than four hours,” she said, almost like a challenge.

the unspoken question, i suppose, was, how much longer than four hours had it been out here? (and also, did the chicken have a good life?)

but i took it. it fell apart in the woman’s tongs as she wrestled it into a bag. it made a tasty sandwich, on soy and linseed, with avocado, tomato and cheese for the kid, and avocado, sesame seed furikake and chili pepper sprinkles for me.

i still don’t know how i feel about the chicken debate. i want to read the book, even though i know it will make me (more) uneasy about the food i choose to eat. i mean, we can’t all be fruitarians, can we?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 June 2006 at 9:45 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, lunch, shoping, tv

according to the internet, uludag is the highest mountain in western anatolia. its name translates as “big mountain”, and from its peaks is where the gods watched the trojan war. we didn’t make it as far (or as high) as uludag last saturday; instead we went to auburn.

i had checked the street directory before i set out that morning, and so it was with only slightly wavering conviction that i pointed helen, sue and sarah in the direction of the RT Delight factory. [nellie, it will please you no end to discover that the RT on the logo stands for Real Turkish] as it turns out, getting off the train and walking down the station stairs had confused me such that we found ourselves in the exact polar opposite location from where we were meant to be. fortunately, deb arrived not long after and saved us from…

well. there was the first lebanese bakehouse, full of baklava and biscuits and a quite fierce baker who ordered us out as soon as he saw the cameras. (he was easily placated by some of us buying biscuits. yummy sugar-dusted, lemon-iced biscuits filled with crushed pistachios or walnuts.) there was the second lebanese bakehouse, next door, where helen sensibly thought to buy real food in the form of a za’atar pizza. there was a grocery shop, and this is where deb showed up and turned us around in the right direction.

there was a vietnamese bakery, and suddenly every one else had real food too: pork banh mi with chillies, not too shabby for almost eleven on a saturday morning.

’round the other side of the station, we found ourselves finally in the turkish delight factory, which is less a hot and heaving kitchen with vats of sugary paste and rosewater being stirred by sweaty turks, than a gleaming white showroom manned by a stern woman overlooking trays of chocolate truffles in glass cases. but where? the turkish delight? it is all pre-wrapped, sealed in plastic bags, or cardboard boxes or foil packaging, or combinations thereof. ch.

the chocolate was mediocre: my chocolate indulgence truffle tasted like an uneasy union of milo and nutella, coated in a hard shell of milk chocolate, dusted with cocoa powder. the turkish delight — with almonds, and covered in milk chocolate — was no better than any other turkish delight i’ve had here, and certainly no match for those individual little cakes of the stuff dipped in thick dark or white chocolate, studded with a single pistachio or almond and retailing at nigh on $80/kilo (just over $4 a piece!). mmm… but that’s another story.

deb led the way to arzum market on rawson street, which truly was the aladdin’s cave of shiny treasures. just look at this:

– smiling strawberry jelly biscuit, from eti

– multi-coloured, sprinkled, marshmallow biscuits, also eti

[ when i was in turkey a few years ago, i bought a packet of oreo-like biscuits, called “negro”, which is one of the eti stable. i considered bringing it to my sister in new york, but i thought maybe the customs officials at JFK would be somewhat less amused. ]

– a tube of special hazelnut cocoa cream from ülker… ah ülker, we share fond memories, don’t we? i know it’s just nutella, but a tube!

– bananko! from the croatian confectioner, kras. i haven’t tried it yet (or any of the others actually), but the company website assures me that “a fluffy banana-flavored filling and rich chocolate coating make bananko a delicious treat.”

– also from kras, a somewhat familiar trapezoid-shaped milk chocolate bar with hazelnuts and honey.

– a roll of turkish cherry candy

– the beautiful bottle of turkish fizzy you see at the top of this post

– and in case you think i just blew my budget on candy, a jar of honey.

if you read deb’s account of the adventure, you will see that we were both torn between the honey with whole nuts, or this one with the intricate pattern of crushed nuts (and cumin and coconut and raisins and apricot stones). when we asked the jolly shopkeeper if he recommended the honey, he opened up a jar of his favourite — the plain one, put it down on the counter with a fresh loaf of turkish bread, and invited us to try. it tasted of flowers. mine tastes of peanuts. i think they reversed the order of the ingredients on the label, so that groundnut, which appears last after pistachio, almond, hazelnut, and walnut, is actually the predominent nut. in fact the impressive tiling you see here, it is only a couple of millimetres thick. the rest of the bottle is a sludge of indistinguishable chopped nuts. nuts. i think you got the better honey, deborah.

back on auburn road, we stopped outside mado, where we only briefly considered what flavours of ice creams to get… before we found ourselves at a handsomely appointed table in the depths of the restaurant (not quite the inner sanctum though; that was a child’s birthday party waiting to happen, with a pointy paper hat on every plate). it is warm and glowing in mado. the walls are festooned with brass treasures and leather booties and satin turbans. the booths are plush and comfortable. the waitress is patient.

if you were silly earlier and ate a whole pork roll, forcing you to choose something light off the menu because of course you have to leave room for dessert, what you will have is a bowl of hot soup. a surprisingly light and creamy red lentil soup served with a lemon wedge and chilli sprinkles and two great slabs of bread. and then as the others feast on the salad with walnuts and (allegedly) pomegranate syrup, and beans in tomato sauce, and charred lamb cubes, you will sink into the plush and comfortable seat, under the warm, golden lights, and feel sleep come upon you. only the promise of dondurma will keep you in the realm of the awake.

but just dondurma? it’s just that, on the way in, helen and i had spied platters of oozy puddings on the dessert counter. it was labelled “caramelised pudding” in the display, and “charred pudding” on the menu, but what had really attracted me was the pale, plump pudding innards, oozing from beneath the golden brown crust. there was a half-hearted dicsussion on whether or not dessert would be a takeaway affair, but then cups of turkish tea and salep milk were ordered, as well as ice cream and pudding. we were in for the long haul.

the raspberry dondurma was bright red with an intense, tart flavour. the date was mellow with datey bits all the way through. the plain white salep was extra chewy and quite comforting. but the pudding! soft, oozy pudding, with the caramelly crust, with the sprinkle of cinnamon, with a lingering aftertaste of toasted marshmallows. you could sit around eating bowls of this pudding, and then one day your belly would peek out from your waistband, looking like pale oozy pudding too.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 June 2006 at 8:53 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, ice cream, lunch, packaging, shoping, snacks

wednesday, after a harrowing morning spent buying a fridge (and then later finding out it was $100 cheaper online, with free delivery, but would you buy a fridge online? wouldja?? in retrospect, yes, i would.) me, my mum and maeve retreated to the much more warm and welcoming arms of sopra, upstairs from fratelli fresh, where we stood in line for twenty minutes? half an hour? who can tell, when yer starving. anyway, the truth is, my mum stood in line while maeve tried to dismantle a display of bulk-bagged italian chocolates artfully arranged at the feet of a classical roman statue of a lady.

i last ate here more than a year and a half ago, when i lived just down the road, and my mum was in town, and maeve was just a few weeks old, strapped sleeping to my front. back then i ate antipasto, because of the inclusion of what is listed on the menu as “egg mayonnaise”, and arrives a perfectly boiled egg, halved, with a slurp of tangy real mayo over the still moist, golden yolk. after months of being careful about properly cooked eggs, it was exactly what i wanted.

wednesday afternoon it was sort of what i wanted too, but after we were seated, and the waitress approached, the words out of my mouth were, “oyster mushroom salad, with asparagus, kipfler potatoes and caciota“, the last of which i thought would be some sort of cured meat, but turned out to be a curdy white cheese. which was just the first pleasant surprise, because when the salad arrived, it was a mound of mushrooms, an entire small harvest really, and little discs of sliced potatoes, both of which had been grilled to the point of crunchy bits, in butter and oil and salt. and the blanched asparagus and cheese, and some mesclun, for light relief.

i wanted to eat and eat, so it was just as well that maeve was intent on guzzling the innards of her own bocconcini-and-tomato panini and was disinterested in my lunch; after losing the battle with her over the strawberry granita, it was only right that i got to eat every last mushroom.

and then having only had a light lunch of mushrooms, i thought it was necessary to have dessert. i sort of wanted the buttermilk pudding with mixed berries, but i truly, madly wanted the eton mess with strawberries.

“and um, could i get the eton mess, please?” is what i said to the waitress.

she beamed wide. “of course you may!”

it came, this great big dollop of pink on a plate. just strawberries and their juices folded into cream, atop chunks of sticky-on-the-inside meringue. oh yes. “i could eat this every day,” i told my mother, although for $12 a pop, i was being figurative. maybe.

“really?” she said. and then she had a spoonful. “oh, it’s quite nice.”

because, as you may remember, my mother does not like sweet things, i was not too concerned with the dent she was making in my pud. but the battle with the baby had already begun. she didn’t quite match me spoon for spoon, and i was making sure that my spoonfuls were bigger than hers, and really, it wasn’t hard to just keep shovelling this magic into my mouth… but at the end of it, i wanted another one, just for me, to eat very slowly in sunny sopra.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 26 May 2006 at 7:50 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kid, lunch, shoping

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