meanwhile in the western suburbs, someone goes healthy.
Category Archives: shoping
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.
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.
“i think you might as well switch to butter,” is one of the last things my mother said to me, before she got on the plane home last month. we were brought up on margarine, but for a few years now she’s been trying to get me onto one or another miracle yellow bread spread product.
about four years ago she announced that my preferred choice of spreadable butter-canola blend should be replaced by this tub of gloopy yellow grease that she had just bought at the supermarket. it was gloopy, i think, because its manufacture did not include the evil, death-causing process of hydrogenation. so it may have prevented your arteries from being clogged up (and in fact i think it may have been one of the cholesterol-reducing spreads), but the gloopiness was like a suspicious slick on your toast, which became a very disagreeable slick on your tongue. i just could not get that gloopy, slicky feel off my tongue, no matter how hard i scraped with my teeth. i can’t remember what it tasted of (gloop?), so the flavour was probably surprisingly un-disagreeable, but i do remember that one of the ingredients in this product was rosemary extract. perhaps it was added to counter the actual taste of the gloop, by neutralising it. my mother dutifully ate this spread on her bread for the rest of her trip, but when she left, it sat quite unloved at the back of the fridge, for months probably, before i stopped feeling bad about throwing it out.
texture is an important factor in butter or margarine or hybrid yellow spread isn’t it? you want it sort of solid, so you can scrape it on your toast, and watch it melt and sink into the surface, so you can see the texture of your bread, rendered all shiny and golden with melted butter. the gloop started off gloopy, and then had the audacity not to melt or sink; it just sat on the surface of the toast, waiting to ambush your hapless tongue. but maybe this was intentional. i read a diet tip once, where the advice was to wait until your toast became cold before you buttered it, so that the butter would not melt and sink, so that you could see how much butter you had put on, and not re-butter an already buttered spot. oh how i laughed, and then put down the magazine to never read again.
in the meantime, my mother had been happily eating her special health-giving margarines until just a few weeks ago when she discovered that her preferred product had changed its formula, and contained trans fats, just like all the other margarines on the market. “aiyah, you know,” she said, “sometimes i think i will just switch to butter. i mean, how much do you eat at one time anyway, and it tastes so nice when they give it to you at a restaurant.”
sometimes my mother astounds me with her clarity.
so last week, at the end of my tub of spreadable butter-canola blend, i bought a block of lightly salted butter at the supermarket. and so clearly, i had to also buy a butter dish. a simple task, no? i searched the kitchen departments of big city department stores, and trawled through the underground homewares emporium. “yes, butter dish!” was what the shop person would say. “right over here… er, over there… er, we seem to be out of stock.”
i went online; ebay had an eclectic selection including a tupperware set where the description of “mission brown” was included as though it were a good thing, a depression era glass specimen weighing two kilos, a crystal heirloom with a reserve price of $98 (no bids yet), and a porcelain one in the shape of a cow. and yet none of these were quite what i was after.
at one online shop, a search for “butter dish” gave me this:
which actually i would not mind having, but being a limoges legle provencal blue butter dish, it costs just under $100, not including postage.
finally i went up the street to the local kitchenware shop, where i had previously seen a glass butter tub with an embossed cow on the lid… but it had been sold. recently, even, because there was still a sad rectangle of empty space where it had previously stood. i thought i should get the one that remained, before it too disappeared: a simple, white china dish, square, with a modest little knob on the lid:
everything the limoges is not… except, um, of course, a butter dish.
as i paid for my new material possession (and this is the sad truth: having run out of things to buy, i create situations which will allow me to buy related accroutement i might otherwise not have to. switching to butter… having a kid… etc… just watch, now that i have a butter dish i’ll have to go out and buy a stick of salty, cultured french butter), it struck me that i had been mistaken. it wasn’t that people didn’t eat butter so there should be plenty of butter dishes in the shops, or even that people didn’t eat butter so there was no demand for butter dishes and no reason to keep them in stock. it was that everyone is eating butter these days, and butter dish supplies cannot keep up. i don’t mean to alarm you, but this winter, we are facing a critical butter dish shortage.
you think this is crazy? how ’bout if i told you i paid just over $5 for three bananas this morning?
because on sunday afternoon, as we stood just clear of chinatown pedestrian traffic, enjoying a post-yumcha gelato (of course), i grumbled a little about the price of bananas.
the friend up from hobart mentioned that her organic grocer was still selling them for $4.95/kilo, quite a bit below the $12/kilo all around town, even if you did expect that the standard of living in tasmania would be more affordable than in glamorous sydney. the kid and i were sharing a cup of banana and mango gelato, because since the banana supply dried up, maeve has been banana-less. well, maybe just one banana every couple of weeks, as a treat. one $1.48 banana.
but then i got to thinkin’, that that $1.48 was actually less than the $2.48 or so that i’d just handed over for the scoop of banana gelato. what crazy economic theories had i been prey to, depriving the kid of one of her eight favourite fruits? and really, have i not paid like, $4 for a fancy, but tiny, chocolate bar?
so this morning, after the library, we marched into the fruitshop, and plonked the three bananas down on the counter, and there you have it. she was already waving her arms and keening “na-naaaa. NA-NAAAA.” as we walked back in the front door.
but what of this psychedelic purple bread? on the way home on sunday, we stopped for takeaway meats in the belly of world square, and i decided that i would finally buy something at breadtop.
my relationship with breadtop has been somewhat uneasy. of course, i’d been wanting and wanting to go since i saw someone walking about town carrying a filmy bag embellished with the voluptuous chinese calligraphy that said “bun shop”. but were they affiliated with, or “paying tribute to”, the singaporean breadtalk?
[ does a cursory google; no one out there seems to know either ]
aside from the similar, somewhat meaningless asian-english names, the two brands also share the same grey-orange-white aesthetic. they both have a wide variety of meat floss-covered bun products, and green tea-red bean cakes. and as i write this now, and try to specify what my misgivings are, i have nothing beyond: well, they may be a rip-off of breadtalk. and i mean, just look at this:
sigh, beautiful. on previous wistful visits, i always thought i would get some sort of green tea bun — the green tea or taro swiss roll really requires some sort of special occasion — but then on sunday i saw the shiny little loaf on the end of the exotic bread shelf, the last of its kind: purple sticky rice loaf!
you open the bag and inhale: it smells of sweet, yeasty chinese bread. you take a bite: it is soft and sweet and has a creamy, nutty flavour from ground up sticky rice (no whole chewy rice grains in it like passionflower’s sticky rice ice cream). in fact, it would make a terrific ice cream sandwich.
omigod! i have ice cream in the freezer!
the third day of winter, i walked up the street singing hot hot heat in my head.
at the supermarket, i picked out a kilo-punnet of mandarins off the shelf. the price label said $3.92, but at the checkout, it checked out at $4.88. ghastly! i showed my receipt to the girl at the service desk, and she sent someone off to check, (and oh how i crossed my fingers that i’d seen right), and some minutes later, i was being refunded the $4.88, which due to rounding up, was actually $4.90. a free kilo of mandarins and 2c to boot!
the scanning code of practice is your friend, trusting consumer. be vigilant! in the last few years, i have gotten such free food as a loaf of bread or a tub of ice cream or a bag of rice crackers or whatever else was on special that hadn’t been updated in “the system”.
i tried it once at kmart, though, and the checkout boy was scathing: “we don’t do that here.” ooOOkay.
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.
[ back cover, “apples for jam” ]
last week i bought a new desk ornament: 300gb of space, cleverly hidden in a compact block of industrial plastics. when i say “last week” i mean “thursday night”; around dinnertime, i clicked my mouse on the purchase button, and shortly after lunch on friday, a courier knocked on my door with the parcel in hand. if only all internet shoping could be like this. i bought an external hard drive once, years ago. it was all of 2gb, and cost me $800. so i’m much happier with the new one, which cost less than half that, and which allowed me last night, for the first time ever, to back up my computer (which has been making a disconcerting whirring noise of late). if you live in sydney and would like to pay substantially less than retail for all manner of computer stuff, and have it delivered to you before teatime, you could try shoping here.
this weekend i bought a lovely book of colourful and tasty treats, “apples for jam” by tessa kiros, despite my vow not to buy any more cookbooks ever. having finally decided that i didn’t really need a copy of “falling cloudberries”, i was ambushed by this book. it’s sort-of italian, and the food is photographed on vintage tablecloths or vintage china, and there are kids’ drawings, and a recipe for pudding made of greek yoghurt and condensed milk. and a bookmark of pink satin ribbon. right beside it on the shelf was the next book that i vow not to get: nigel slater‘s “kitchen diaries“, which has none of those things that make “apples for jam” so warm and sparkly, and which reads like what this blog would be if it were better. hem.
next week, fingers crossed, i will be buying a ticket to pearl jam. ridiculous! aren’t we too old to be doing this? (clearly, no, because while i haven’t rushed out and bought the album, i did hand over good money for the latest “rolling stone” with eddie of the cover) i have seen pearl jam five times. in 1995, i slept out overnight on the pavement outside the ticketing booth, showed up late at my newish job the next morning, and watched the band, small as ants, from the nosebleed seats. in 1998, deep in the throes of that job laying out pop magazines, i wrangled my way into three shows, two of them in the moshpit. in 2003, post-rothskilde, there were no more moshpits, and no more pop magazines. the seats weren’t too bad: the band were as big as… large ants. who knows what this year will bring. next week i’ll be sitting here, finger poised on my mouse, hoping the ticketing site doesn’t get shut down by traffic overload, hoping the seats won’t be too crap in an arena twice the size of previous shows — stadium rock!! whatever. there’ll be guitars, and eddie will start singing, and it’ll be really, really good! waarrgh!
another day, another truffle.
what with the late morning spent meeping at squirrels, and then chasing first ducks, and then the royal horses, up and down the length of st james park, and then giving up on the non-event that was the changing of the guard, we were quite ready for lunch… when the baby gave up fighting the pram straps, and fell asleep.
in such a situation it is best to keep moving, so we found ourselves trundling up piccadilly just as the london drizzle kicked in. fortuitously we were right by fortnum and mason.
one of my favourite touristy things to do is to go to supermarkets in new cities, and gawk at packaging, and fondle bags of exotic potato chips, and buy interesting-flavoured yoghurts. i had been feeling quite slack, because it had taken me a whole week (and a day) before setting foot in the sainsbury’s down the road and round the corner from the apartment. true, i had already been to the food hall of the local marks and spencer, but we were in a rush to get somewhere else, and there was only enough time for a cursory supermarket sweep of the aisles, a pathetic exercise that yielded just a bottle of orange juice with crushed raspberries.
note to self: go back to M&S food hall.
note to self: and, um, waitrose?
but here we were, stepping through the heavy doors of fortnum and mason, and finding outselves sandwiched between tea on the left and chocolate on the right. i was immediately troubled because i wanted to buy it all. the fancy honey; the ten drinks coaster-sized tablets of single origin chocolate (from ten places of origin), individually wrapped in coloured tissue and bound in twine; the majorcan sea salt with crushed hibiscus petals… you see? it’s crazyfood, and i was slightly crazed, quite addled, as i stood before the truffle counter (chocolate truffles, although the pig-digging sort is also available, in little glass bottles, in a locked glass cabinet, for a rather large sum of money) trying to figure out which ones i really wanted.
four hours later (an exaggeration, you think?) i handed over the equivalent of $36, for two dozen pieces of chocolate, which doesn’t sound too bad, innit? i also bought a canister of convivial yorkshire crisps — “luxury hand made crisps” in the almost exotic flavour of sourcream, dill and mustard. and some promising biscuits: clotted cream shortbread and marmalade oatmeal, with no hydrogenated vegetable oils, and instead, about one quarter butter!
my question now is, which truffle shall i have with my cup of tea? after which the question will be, when shall i make a return trip to fortnum and mason to buy all that tea which i managed not to today?
