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ok. so i was skinned by a piece of nougat.

yesterday afternoon, i cut a little finger off the stick of italian dark chocolate nougat that my good mother bought me at fratelli a few weeks back. it is a moist, fudgey thing full of whole roasted hazelnuts, with a protective layer of rice paper. mmm…

i put it to my mouth wherein the moisture from my lips adhered to the rice paper, so that when i removed the nougat after taking a bite, it removed the skin from my lips.

sure, it stung at the time, but i didn’t pay too much attention until a couple of hours later, at dinner, with the boy’s olds no less, when my lower lip was really, really stinging and i was having trouble speaking because it seemed like i couldn’t close my mouth properly. still, how much attention will you pay to your lip when the table is covered with a bounty of sashimi?

not too much.

and then i got home and looked in the mirror, and well…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 December 2004 at 12:28 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, snacks

so i looked over at the still-unwrapped chocolate bar on my bookshelf, and along the spine of it, next to “extra creamy milk chocolate” in gold print, were the instructions “open here”.

ok, mr chocolate bar.

my bookshelf is now much closer to my desk — which explains why i managed to read the tiny type on the side of a chocolate bar despite near-legal blindness — since i moved it over from the opposite side of of the room, to make space for the crib and change table for the new person who will soon be upon us, holy fucken crap.

aside from moving furniture around, the mammoth magazine cull continues… the last couple of days i finally made it to my pile of “juice” magazines. if you read the previous post about cutting down the swathe of “spin”s and detected a faint poignancy about the exercise, this new challenge has been a few notches more melancholy. because these, i actually worked on.

i have issue one, and two, and three (you get the idea), from when i had to buy them at the newsagent… through to a couple from around issue ten when i did a spell of work experience there in third year uni, and then a bunch more, and then every issue from march 1995 when i was deputy art director for a couple of years, and then the year’s worth from november 1997 (issue 57) when i became art director, to october 1998, when i went postal and had to leave the company, and then a random few from after. yeah, i have a lot of issues.

now there’s a pile, facedown, at the top of the stairs, awaiting transfer to the recycling bin downstairs. it feels like i’m throwing out a chunk of australian publishing history, and every time i walk past i wonder if i’ve been too brutal. of course, i did keep all mine, and took clippings of choice layouts from the rest, where “choice” includes both the aesthetically pleasing and the “what the?” ludicrousness of that heady mid-nineties period of cutting edge magazine design. but aside from a very select few from the very early days (issue three, with evan dando in love beads and nothing else on the cover; issue eight: nirvana; issue 18: eddie vedder “on kurt’s death”), there they are, facedown, top of stairs.

sigh. there’s a feeling not so far back in my head that if my entire stash had not been so dotted with cockroach shit (just the outside covers, but still a misadventure in storage if there ever was one), i would have blogged instead about the extremely delicious watermelon i procured this week from the supermarket at a bargain 95c/kg.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 October 2004 at 12:53 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, snacks, werk

during what was akin to an archaeological dig, i unearthed a small pink carton in the pantry the other day. i think i bought it in a supermarket in singapore at the start of the year, but really, your guess is as good as mine. it was only just past its use-by date so i boiled up the requisite litre of water, dissolved the pink powder and some refrigeration time later… guava pudding!

so light and tangy. so agreeably pink.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 September 2004 at 4:14 pm

permalink | filed under snacks

it’s good to have a plan, because then you can be quietly pleased when everything falls into place. in this case, tuesday, the nori rolls were a perfect balance of salty and sour and sweet and umami (there is no place for bitterness in my life), “donnie darko” (apart from the arty digi-montages) was still good, and the coco loco mocha freezer (while too damn watery and ice chippy in texture) was a powerful chocolatey force. for about ten minutes into the film, the number of people in the cinema was one — me, and then sadly four teenagers arrived and took out the back row, and giggled when cherita chen gets told “go back to china, bitch”, and received phone calls on their mobiles, and giggled some more.

teenagers. feh.

having a plan with a bit of leeway on either side is especially good, because then you can duck into kmart before for a pair of new underwear, and pop into harris farm after for beans and asparagus and a tub of raspberry yoghurt.

—

completely unplanned was the sudden waking at 2.30 this morning, the lying awake for an hour before rolling out of bed and the resigned heading downstairs with a handful of pillows and “the new yorker” food issue. having over the last couple of days already read about the struggles to develop a superior ketchup and some guy’s obsession with pasta, 3am seemed a perfectly alright time to learn about the commercial production of salad greens.

here, look:

it took … until 1989 … to mass produce the first retail bagged salads. salad spinners were perfected, shredding knives sharpened, battalions of chemists subcontracted to create the perfect polymers. today’s bags are a triumph of practical ingenuity. their plastic is made up of five to ten layers, each with a different function. some are designed to make the package shiny or crinkly, others to carry print well. together, they have to be just permeable enough to keepthe bag’s artificial atmosphere in balance — the wrong ink alone can suffocate a salad. as the lettuce sits on the shelf, the gases in the bag are constantly consumed, released and replaced. oxygen, nitrogen and carbon-dioxide molecules bond with the polymers on one side of the plastic and are released on the other, diffusing from high concentrations to low. every type of salad requires a different type of bag, tailored to its respiration rate by gas chromatography and computer analysis. every bag is a miniature biosphere.

from salad days: how a lowly leaf became a high-end delicacy
by burkhard bilger

yesterday, at a luncheon in which everyone at the table turned out to be with child (way to go, my fertile friends!), what i ordered off the specials board was a grilled haloumi salad. it wasn’t just slabs of grilled salty cheese; there were lightly dressed baby rocket and mint leaves, cucumber ribbons, fresh beetroot, roasted eggplant, and on top, a dollop of herby yoghurt. there were also two bits of bread which in the end were used to wipe the plate clean.

oh cook + archie’s, i am privileged to be fed by you.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 September 2004 at 12:10 pm

permalink | filed under around town, at the movies, bookshelf, drink, kid, lunch, snacks

ok, shhhh, don’t tell anyone, but in two hours i’m gonna skive off werk, and walk out into the blue and sunshine down to broadway, where i will procure two nori rolls — one beef teriyaki (or maybe eel) and the other most likely some sort of vegetarian option (the one with the pickles and shredded inari tofu is pretty tasty) — and perhaps a raspberry mocha frappucino, and settle myself into the cool and dark of “donnie darko: the director’s cut”. yeah.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 September 2004 at 9:39 am

permalink | filed under around town, at the movies, drink, snacks

the first day of spring brought such bad things as:

1. the lovely and amazing cafe zoe up the road having black bean and spinach soup on the menu, but no longer in the kitchen, because although the winter menu had changed to the spring menu, they hadn’t printed them up yet. in truth, this was only a bit sad for a little while because the ensuing second breakfast of a spinach and poached egg english muffin with grilled-in-butter mushrooms and a mesclun salad more than redeemed the situation.

2. nellie flying back to new york, which was such a sad bad thing that we began saying “ok… well…” and “goodbye” yesterday afternoon so that we’d be used to it by the time today came around. in addition we had to have first breakfasts (actually the second course of first breakfast) of ice cream sundaes to cheer ourselves up.

the sundaes were composed of a perfunctory layer of tim tam ice cream, strawberries, vanilla ice cream, strawberries, more vanilla ice cream and strawberries, crushed lebanese date biscuits, vanilla ice cream, shaved chocolate and strawberries.

3. coming out of two and a half hours of birth class to discover that it is raining, and arriving home to find all the laundry that was oh so close to sundried is now close to sopping wet. at least now i know how to swaddle a baby.

4. my sister not being here.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 September 2004 at 10:03 pm

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, kid, lunch, nellie, snacks

this week’s getting away from me again, but oh how good it feels to see the deadlines falling away. before the coming weekend tumbles unto me, i thought i’d just record for posterity the following facts about last weekend:

1. there was a drive beyond the blue mountains and up mount canobolas in orange, where capital W weather was experienced — water fell from the sky, simultaneously, in three states (liquid, solid and um, flakey with six points), whited out the view in a fourth, and there was a windchill factor that made my skin break out in a welty rash not ten minutes out of the car.

2. there was, from a bakery in oberon, a wagon wheel as big as nellie‘s head.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 August 2004 at 4:28 pm

permalink | filed under boy, nellie, snacks, trip

i’m doing too much. i’m not doing enough. either way it seems to have resulted in this field of blog lying fallow.

aside from the nonstop happy rollercoaster of my sister being in town, i’m also working to a handful of print deadlines. this basically means that any given day involves moving between a pastry and a computer, maybe even three or four times a day. sometimes a great distance across inner-city suburbs is walked to get to a pastry, other times i only have to stumble downstairs to the kitchen. on these occasions, i hope the foetus is absorbing any extraneous kilojoules.

this morning, what awaits in brown paper bags strewn across the kitchen counter are: a blueberry brioche, a custard brioche, the biggest custard-filled, caramel-topped profiterole in the world (which the boy bought because of its resemblance to the enormous, pulsating, million calorie, poison-creme-filled dessert offered to homer in food critic mode), and a loaf of sourdough spelt fruit bread…

do your teeth hurt? a pot of strong black bush tea will help.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 August 2004 at 8:04 am

permalink | filed under around town, boy, cake, kid, nellie, snacks, werk

you know what’s weird? when you don’t really go to a place — say parramatta — very often, and then a month or two after your last trip there you catch the train to a job-related meeting at said place, and you get there and bloody hell, the train station has moved! sure, it’s only moved about 30m along the track, but when you descend the wide new escalators and exit the shiny new turnstiles and stand out on the street, facing unfamiliar buildings and streetscape, unfamiliar only by being 30m down from where you normally step out onto the footpath… you will be utterly confused.

ok, well *i* was confused.

but happily, i oriented myself in the end, made it to the meeting, had a salad, avocado and pesto wrap and cloudy lemonade lunch bought for me, and then found myself blissfully wandering the aisles of the wonderland that is harris farm market for half an hour. which is why i sit here now with a bag of sweet tart cherries in front of me, and a slab of triple cream brie downstairs in the fridge.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 July 2004 at 4:20 pm

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

crap. clearly, i have lost the ability to write. a whole week since getting back from whirlwind vacation jaunt, and alls i’ve had time for is to post a picture of a sugar-crusted apple turnover that was eaten on a sunny, grassy spot in narooma. a week gone by filled with werk to be done, dishes to be washed (and cups… so many cups), and um, actually that seems to be it. what the hell?

so, yvette, while that last “entry” may have appeared random, it was actually intended that a roundup of the fun and hijinx surrounding the pastry would soon follow.

alas. but look:

it was a short but intense roadtrip, bookended on one end by enormous and tasty fish and chips at summer-in-wintertime jervis bay, and on the other by a whole grilled trout with buttered almonds and three veg up in the wintery mountain town of adaminiby, “home of the giant trout”. in the middle, aformentioned apple turnover, not quite enough baked treats from bakeries in small coastal towns, a cooler bag full of flavoursome mandarins that the boy had picked off his nanna’s tree just the week before, a visit to the bega cheese factory…

…cheese samples, more breathtakingly gorgeous beaches than you could shake a bit of driftwood at, and — two hours in from the sunny south coast — alpine climes in the snowy mountains.

strange. we awoke in our toasty roadside motel, too early, to the sound of revving 4WDs and families setting off for the snowfields. watched the parade of beanies through the picture window, drinking motel tea and breakfasting on anzac biscuits. hot showered, dressed, stepped outside… and the snow had come to us. it was a just light dusting, and good lord! just like the books said! six points, and all unique! not quite an hour after driving past the statue of the trout in the town centre, there we were standing on the site of the old town of kiandra, except that kiandra was not visible under two feet of fresh powder snow.

well, i was surprised, anyway.

and now, bloody hell, a week’s gone by, and what i’ve done is dishes, and scanning, and fixing up scans, and moving stuff around a page. this week coming up brings more (and more) of the same, but hurrah, culminates in the arrival of nellicent, who’s been meeting, greeting and eating her way around the world, and finally, oh my god, makes it here.

yay a yay.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 26 July 2004 at 9:38 am

permalink | filed under boy, breakfast, dinner, lunch, nellie, snacks, trip

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