ragingyoghurt » nellie

Category Archives: nellie

when is a post not really a post? when it’s a postcard!

but i’ve been werking. werking so intently that there has only been a break for hank moody — i only break for moody — and my right eye twitches even when i’m not at the computer.

yesterday, this postcard showed up in my mailbox, and though it wasn’t a real, live cake, it cheered me immensely.

from nellie:
“CAKE! is what i have just had in the little cafe at the back. i came to ask if they were hiring — they are not. but in the cafe in the back they had cake, walnut cake, very light, with strawberries and cream. i am always hiring for cake.”

i think i am done. done-ish, because i seem to remember that saving print-ready PDFs takes about 1400 hours longer than you expect. and normally i would say, “this calls for cake!”, or “send cake!”, but on the cards is a batch of red velvet cupcakes for the kid’s birthday tomorrow. she wants raspberries on ’em.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 October 2007 at 9:59 am

permalink | filed under cake, nellie

the first thing counterboy said to me as i stepped into zumbo this morning was, “why haven’t you been blogging?”. to which i might have mumbled something about being busy. i dunno.

i don’t remember so much of last week. i know there was a crazy deadline that had lurched and hiccupped over the weekend, and then into the week itself, where corrections and adjustments were still being made an hour before it was due wherever it was going. and then a large bunch of flowers showed up on my doorstep the following evening. and then, um…

i met my aunt for a devonshire tea in a foodhall in chatswood, where the scones were warmed in the microwave before being plonked on a plate with two little squirts of cream-in-a-can and two tiny foil-sealed packs of kraft strawberry jam. that’ll learn us to get scones at a muffin place, although really, the scones were the best thing on the tray. she paid for morning tea, as she is wont to, and then she paid for dimsum as well. and right at the end, she handed me a box of home-made yam cake. good value, my aunt.

i met a friend (really, my sister’s friend) for brunch in newtown, and although i couldn’t persuade her to have tacos at 10am (plus, they weren’t actually open yet), we didn’t do too badly at the cafe across from the cinema, with buckwheat pancakes, coconut-infused mascarpone, maple syrup, and half the fruit in a small greengrocer. oh, and a side of bacon. she is from singapore; we spoke singlish. it was great.

i became addicted to the pre-packed exotic mushrooms at harris farm. shiitake, enoki, shimeji, and oyster mushrooms, quickly sauteed in sesame oil with rather a lot of chopped garlic and whatever asian greens are handy, poured over jasmin rice — what a dinner it made… twice! i had it first with flowering choi sum one night, and then addressed my addiction head on by buying more mushrooms to have with broccoli and baby buk choy soon after). you don’t need any more seasoning than a spoon of sea salt: the mushrooms flavour everything.

i went to the organic markets and bought just short of half a kilo of salty french-churned butter.

i found myself stepping, too casually, too often, into the jewelbox that is adriano zumbo: a mandarin macaron one day, a brioche stuffed with custard and mixed berries the next. or was it both on the same day? and another the next? i lose count.

oh! also, my sister got married, not that you’d know, since she hasn’t been blogging either.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 August 2007 at 8:42 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kitchen, lunch, nellie, snacks, werk

in the midst of one of those two-hour, long-distant calls to nellicent the other night, i asked, “um, where is your sainbury’s?”. i thought that i’d made it seem an innocent question, apropos of nothing, though my index finger was making random loop-de-loops on the magazine page.

she gave it serious thought. “oh. it’s in [name of suburb], on [name of street] and –,” she paused, before the shrieking began. “i know what you want!!”

“argh!” i shrieked back, “i want it! i want it!”

“i know what you want! i have already bought it for you, in my head!”

“well,” i said, “i hope that you are not talking about cheese.”

because i surely wasn’t. a week ago, i’d read a story on anya hindmarch, in “vogue“, that mentioned a shopping bag she’d designed for sainsbury’s in the UK, in one of those everybody-wins exercises to reduce plastic bag consumption. and what a bag. before it’s even gone on sale at the supermarkets, it’s already sold out its online pre-sale allotments, and gone on to appear on ebay at forty times its original cost.

we went on to discuss the logistics of obtaining one (or two!) of these bags — which sainsbury’s branches might sell them, and if she might have to rope in one of her friends in case there was a one-per-customer limit (there is!) — and now that i’ve read a bit more about the madness, it all seems just a bit too stella-at-target.
so perhaps i won’t be getting one after all.

but what better time to spruik the raging yoghurt shopping bag? ok, so it’s not designed by anya hindmarch, is not a limited edition, will cost you more than £5, and will make me a couple of bucks too… but you can hang it over your shoulder and carry all manner of groceries in it, just like the sainsbury’s one. anyway, don’t you just need another canvas shopping bag? i myself have a selection of eight or ten hanging from my laundry door.

and while we’re on the hindmarch comparisons, look what i made saturday morning: chocolate-covered pretzels.

after breakfast (sour cherry jam on buttered rye and caraway bagel, yum) i melted down a 100g bar of lindt dark chocolate in a large bowl over a pot of simmering water. i tipped in a bag of salted pretzels, and stirred until everyone was well-coated. i fished them out with a bamboo skewer and laid them out to set on a sheet of grease-proof paper. it’s an effortless and addictive snack, i tell you, with the bittersweet chocolate (just a thin enough coat to start melting in the warmth of your fingertips), and the sharp crunch of the pretzel, and the lingering surprise of a random salt chip.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 April 2007 at 1:42 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, chocolate, kitchen, nellie, shoping, snacks

the kid was drawing circles with dots in them the other day (“biscuits!”), when i said, “why don’t you draw a hot cross bun?”. she only paused long enough to look at me like it was a really good idea before she went on to draw bun after bun after bun. three pages of them in fact, until she got bored and wandered off. illustrated food blog? it’s a cinch!

how is it easter already? well, ok, only good friday, but it was only last friday that i discovered the hot cross loaf at bourke street bakery and promised that i would return for it. by wednesday, it struck me that it was only a couple days away from the easter weekend, and after that… who knew if hot cross loaves would still be baked. after all, bourke street bakery is not a link in a chain of franchise bakeshops who churn out hot cross buns all year ’round.

after an obligatory hour spent with the ducks, geese, pelican and playground at victoria park, we arrived at the bakery on the stroke of lunchtime. i had never registered before if it was set up to eat in; other times i had only stood just inside the narrow doorway for as long as it took to order a takeaway loaf or tart. but yes, there is a single corner table, which might seat four snugly, and if you have an extraordinarily long torso, there are also three stools at a counter mounted so high up the wall that it came up to my chin.

all seating will be free if you arrive at an early hour as we did, but if you spend too many minutes trying to choose what you might like to eat (as i did), the corner table with the sensible seating will be taken, and you will be forced to perch on one of the bar stools. when maeve sat down, the counter was t h i s far above her head.

but so, the choice, enormous! i knew there were delicious sausage rolls (a few years ago i had the lamb, harissa, almond and currant one, and this time, eyeing the pork and fennel — there is also a chicken option — i went with the lamb again. the pastry so flaky and buttery! the filling so flavoursome and crunchy with chopped nuts!), but there is also pizza (ready-made, cut into slabs) and panini (the kid chose roast pork with coral lettuce and mayonnaise on a herby-oniony roll).

by the end of lunch, we had migrated to the corner table after the original inhabitants vacated, and there was a good two thirds of pork sandwich leftover for my lunch the next day. also, maeve had endeared herself to the countergirl to the extent that she offered me anything in the window in exchange for the child. my eyes darted to the chocolate tart, but in the end, i paid my $5.50 for a hot cross loaf and we skipped outside to the bus stop where we waited quite a bit over half an hour for the every-20-minutes service back home.

earlier in the day, in the treasure trove that is the discount-stickered upstairs shelvery of gleebooks, i had found “candyfreak“, which is self-explanatory, really, and an appropriate read for the choc fest that is the easter holidays. [of course, you could argue that chocolate is not really candy, that it is a whole different (and better) entity, which it is, but yeah, maybe next time.] there is a front-cover endorsement from amy sedaris, and a blurb about the author, steve almond, being “the dave eggers of food writing”, and the dust jacket itself mimics the silvery foil of a candy bar wrapper, so clearly this book (published in 2004, two copies left at gleebooks, $14.95 reduced from $44) is like, waaay cool. we shall see; i’m only up to chapter two, and steve is still talking a bit more about himself than about candy… and i never really could get into dave eggers anyway. but i have skipped ahead, just right now, and there is a visit to the necco factory, whose outlet store annex in boston i visited with my obliging sister several years ago.

[ sighs wistfully ]

we pass like ships in iChat.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 April 2007 at 10:43 am

permalink | filed under around town, bookshelf, kid, lunch, nellie

[ a picture of a baked treat: a slab of pandan cake topped with a good smear of red bean paste, enveloped in puff pastry; it has been baked, in its entirety, with a sprinkling of polo topping, and then sliced down the middle and filled with buttercream. in the background, a steamed pork bun. ]

there you go.

’round about noon yesterday, after we had walked through the ten courts of hell, and climbed the winding path up the hill which culminated in a vibrant tableau of the journey to the west, it began to drizzle. we were damp and sticky from a moist, 34 degreed morning, so we took it as a sign to climb back into the car and leave the feral gorillas for the next trip.

the rain was pelting down by the time we got to crystal jade kitchen, and the queue for a lunchtime table was long. from the bakery annex, i put together a quick inflight care package for nellie; she was booked onto KLM, so she’d need all the help she could get.

CRYSTAL JADE CAKERY
( JUNCTION 8 ) PTE LTD
1 Cake Cup 1.05
1 BBQ Pineapple Bun 1.24
1 Pineapple Kaya Bun 1.33

and for myself, just to make me feel better,
1 R.Bean Pandan Cake 1.33

it worked, i think, though it hasn’t stopped raining. everything around me, indoors even, is limp and damp.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 March 2007 at 11:39 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, nellie, snacks, trip

hui(2) niang(2) jia(1). traditionally, the second day of the chinese new year is when those daughters who’ve been married out return to their old family homes, bearing gifts for the parents they left behind. and so, my good mother bought us all bus tickets to KL, and we rode into town with a box of mandarins, a box of persimmons, a box of belgian chocolate truffles, and half a tub of plant fertiliser.

there is quite a range of buses to choose from doing the singapore-KL route; some have toilets in the back and karaoke lounges downstairs. some have a hostess who serves you a satisfying meal of dry-fried beehoon with nothing more than a few bean sprouts and a couple strips of thin egg omelette. based on the bargain price of $50 for the return trip, we rode the one which is known for nothing more than its on-board oreo snack. and it’s true, behind the check-in counter at the depot office was a wall of cartons: classic oreo, and a new-fangled variant filled with an unholy (though strangely compelling) union of peanut butter and chocolate creme. krim kacang dan krim coklat!

at the pagoh reststop, i bought a beefburger and a bag of fries, solely on the basis that on the bus, it would be easier to eat than soupy noodles… and then many hours later, during the night, in the royale bintang damansara hotel, i had four dreams about vomitting before getting out of bed at 6am to make my dreams come true. twice.

the rest of the day was spent in bed, in the darkened room, while everyone else went about paying their respects and exploring the hot and dusty hellhole that is KL. nellicent was kind enough to bring me a $14 (ringgit) green tea frappucino, of which i only dared to drink half because i wasn’t up to experimenting with verdant vomit… but it really is my favourite starbucks beverage.

the next morning i was healed enough to savour teh tarik and roti bakar from the greasy, greasy place next door. it turned out to be honey toast, with a bright yellow slick of what i’m sure could only have been planta margarine. mmm.

we ate at aunts’ houses, and at indian eateries. at ikea (it was across the road from the hotel, really), we bought a packet of mild, milky cheese to supplement the pitiful hotel buffet breakfast. at the indian vegetarian place, the kid was plied with free pappadums. at my grandmother’s, we feasted on such things as stuffed crabs (in which the crabmeat and minced pork and other things are put into the crabshells, and deepfried) and salted vegetable and duck soup, which we will never know how to make, and perhaps soon, will never have to chance to eat again.

sigh.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 February 2007 at 2:38 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, dinner, lunch, nellie, snacks, trip

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

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

but it was half price!

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

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

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

“UM… no, my, um, daughter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

anytime now, though i’m not sure in which order, my child will awake from her nap, and my mother and my aunt will arrive on my doorstep. this will be the cue to bundle everyone off to bar italia for a late sunday lunch. who knows what treats and surprises will be in store: a tiramisu-affogato? a great big sugo stain down the front of my shirt? in fact, while getting dressed earlier, i took the child’s grubby paws into consideration, and put on a black tshirt.

there is a bar italia in london too; you’ve probably been reading about it at stellou for several months now… “the boys at bar italia this… the boys at bar italia that…”

the first time nellie took me there was about 10.30 on a tuesday night, post-drizzle, and more importantly, post-“fame, the musical” at the aldych. we were still gobsmacked by what passes for musical theatre these days (and outraged at the lack of the song, “fame”), and felt we had to sit down to something sweet to recover our sense of balance. while the hot chocolate and tiramisu were ultimately forgettable (and really, i can’t even remember if that’s what i actually had), the street theatre that unfolded before us — drunken, dischevelled yobbo taunts dapper black bouncer — was an enjoyable few minutes.

but we were back for lunch a week later, and a pizza was ordered. what a pizza!

all thin, crunchy crust with a modest amount of melty cheese. and on top, just left to wilt at their own sweet pace, several handfuls of rocket and great sheets of prosciutto. a large bottle of chili oil had preceded the pizza, and was put to good use. one of the best pizze ever, oh yes.

addendum: no saucy stains on anyone, not even the baby! a ricotta cannoli split five ways was our reward.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 May 2006 at 1:16 pm

permalink | filed under kid, lunch, nellie, snacks, trip

i bought a bacon hock today, for the purpose of making a bean soup, and i was somewhat taken aback by how much the hocks looked like a pile of feet, lying all higgledy-piggledy in the glass-fronted trough of the supermarket deli. tasty, though.

for dessert, i finally ate one of the macaron that my mother was given, gratis, by the head counter girl at yauatcha on the afternoon of our departure from london, because — “eh, kakilang!” — they were both from malaysia. lucky for me, my mother does not really like sweet things. when we got back to singapore, i left the bag on the kitchen counter overnight, under the misimpression that it was hermetically sealed. hey, i checked! but in the morning, i discovered that it was fastened only with a pretty pink ribbon, and that the cluster of brightly coloured macaron were quite imploding from the tropical humidity. let me explain: if i so much as nudged one, it gave. i was so alarmed, i whisked them into the fridge, and refrigerated they have remained, all the way back to sydney.

while we admired the macaron, back in london, my sister said that yauatcha didn’t make just any plain old flavoured macaron, and that these would be raspberry –something or lemon-something or green tea-something. i couldn’t tell what the something was in the bright pink one i had tonight, but even in its slightly squishy, slightly crumbled, slightly jetlagged form, it was um, really good. maybe even better than one of the ones i had a laduree. maybe.

the laduree story is, one drizzly sunday afternoon, after a slightly fraught luncheon (in which the child discovered how to undo the fancy birdcage-style highchair in which she was perched, and refused to sit in it any longer, and had to be walked around the harrod’s food hall, which calmed us both down immeasurably) of roasted scallops on parmesan risotto with vanilla-infused oil, my sister and i had two macaron and a cup of laduree-blend tea. each. for the information, i think hers were lime-chocolate and caramel. mine were rose and chocolate. the tea was floral. my mother, being neither a fan of sweet things nor tea, sat back and nursed the sleeping baby. as we made our way through the macaron, we offered bites to our mother. she was very obliging, even as she nodded then grimaced after each one. “i don’t really like sweet things,” she intoned, and we offered her sips of tea to wash them down.

when it was all over, it was duly noted that our mother, who refuses sweet things and cups of tea, had had one whole macaron and a cup of tea.

i have been coughing for a month. i am very tired.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 May 2006 at 9:31 pm

permalink | filed under cake, kid, nellie, snacks, trip

my sister, who keeps me in constant supply of cool comics, recently sent me a “drawn and quarterly showcase” in the mail. you see the drawing above? it is by a french-canadian girl, geneviève elverum/castrée. her pages in the book made me want to fall over and curl up into a ball. in a good way. there are pages completely covered in intricate ferns. and there is an elephant. and sadness and wistfulness.

sigh.

i used to draw. i even used to want to draw a comic, but i think that time has passed. a combination of extreme laziness and the thought hanging over my head that i couldn’t do it: self-defeating blah.

these days i lie on the floor with scraps of paper, blunt pencils and the kid, and i draw dogs and cats and lions and cows. tigers, ducks, monkeys, frogs, elephants. i tried to draw a rabbit the other morning, but it turned out to be a totoro.

gripped by a short and uncharacteristic burst of motivation over xmas, i drew this:

because who doesn’t like that light and fruity taste of baby yoghurt? i find myself licking the spoon, just short of nicking mouthfuls myself, when i dish out the kid’s breakfast in the morning. you can buy it on a bib for that grubby baby in your life… or maybe even for yourself! we all spill brown and red down our fronts from time to time, no?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 January 2006 at 10:12 am

permalink | filed under bookshelf, kid, nellie, werk

Category Archives: nellie

Click

Search

Categories

Archives