Category Archives: snacks
hmm. after a few hours of sleep, alternating left side, right side and on my back, i was awake at 3.30am, sitting up in bed with a tub of vanilla yoghurt, the “new yorker” summer fiction issue, and “rage” on in the background playing old silverchair videos, from back when they were a lowercase band.
i wasn’t lucky enough to have the first “tomorrow” video included in the programming, where the band were little puppy boys loping across the screen (or even the second “tomorrow” video where mark pellington did a convincing job imitating his own “jeremy” video), but it sure was educational to see the progression over the years… as daniel grew his cheekbones and chris grew his neck and ben — well, i guess ben just cut his hair — and more significantly, how the music evolved, because i stopped really listening to the band after the second album.
a random line over at gempires: “grunge on the jukebox. we reminisce about pearl jam.” made me think about how maybe i don’t even have to reminisce about pearl jam because i frequently have them on the CD player, even the newer albums, especially at deadline time. i’ve seen both bands a bunch of times, the most memorable of which were: silverchair at their first big day out, where they played a little stage and the crowd to see them was so inversely big that you didn’t have to stand up, you were just held up by everyone else; and being in the moshpit (twice!) at pearl jam, propped up against the security bar and looking up at eddie and feeling the voice just vibrate through me. how is it that i outgrew silverchair and not pearl jam?
watching the silverchair videos in the wee hours, it struck me that silverchair evolved in a way that pearl jam didn’t: good old dependable three-guitar + bass + drum sound (and dammit, pearl jam even did the rock cliche of revolving door drummers) versus fancy orchestration and operatic tendencies. and thus, really, it was silverchair that had outgrown me.
this drivel was brought to you by the 3.30am waking hour, the tub of vanilla yoghurt and, oh bloody hell, ok, half a bag of sweet chili pretzels.
so i could’ve spent today drawing a map of western sydney and delivering a bunch of artwork to a scanning place. instead i sat in a cafe in leichhardt, eating a plate of braised lentils pooled around a silverbeet-wrapped timbale of polenta and molten cheese. somewhat (completely) out of character (for me), my luncheon companion was mother-of-boy. this uncharacteristicness extended further into the afternoon, when sister-of-boy was met and an expedition launched to an eastern suburbs homeware emporium, where cake and coffee were had, and then somehow i managed to get everyone to each buy a pizza stone and cutter set. odd.
and then it started to rain. ^_^ aah.
perfect dvd-watching weather, really. the way this free DVD delivery trial works is you sign up and compile a list of DVDs from the database that you want to see, and they get sent out to you as they become available. it seems like maybe they also get sent out in alphabetical order, because so far what i’ve been sent are:
– 11’09″01 september 11
– 28 days later
– a mighty wind
then again, what showed up in my mailbox today was the “indiana jones” bonus material DVD, ahead of the “hulk” bonus material DVD.
[ what a thing to just be able to get the bonus material DVD and not the feature disc. i really do like the special features on a DVD, but they can’t be just any old special features. like, if the package lists a particular film’s special features as “theatrical trailer” or “subtitles”, i get mildly irritated. did you ever watch the special features on “the man who wasn’t there”, and the deleted scenes included a sequence of billy bob thornton performing various curiously-named haircuts? that was cool. ]
is “raiders of the lost ark” a terrific movie or what? can anyone say they like steven spielberg (at least in the early days, before that unnecessary bit in “A.I.” that began “and then a thousand years passed”) without coming across all dawson leary? but damn they were fun films, and harrison ford was such a fine specimen of hero back then. mmm…
in “the making of…” you will see footage of tom selleck screentesting for the indiana role, and you will laugh out loud because really, it’s magnum p.i.. and then you will learn that the sound effects guy made those squelchy snake noises down in the chamber by squelching his hands through his wife’s cheese casserole.
what’s a cheese casserole anyway?
i think i might want some.
it’s a frabjous day when you discover a new gelato place with a flavour you just want to lick straight out of the display tub, and then mere hours later your cousin txts, requesting a gelato date.
approaching lunch hour the next day, we fronted up at the counter and ordered, me stuttering c-c-c-c for long seconds as my brain short circuited between cup or cone. it ended up being cone, and what a cone. sam chose raspberry, no, butter pecan, um, no, raspberry. oh, actually butter pecan, with lovely patient scoopergirl hovering her gloved arm over one then the other. of course, white chocolate raspberry was the scoop of the bottom of both our cones.
and good lord, it was a milky feast, frozen raspberries unsurfaced with every lick. the butter pecan was buttery, and the pistachio slightly gritty on the tongue with that ground-up nut texture. …why are you still sitting there reading?
so, i think that you must go see the film “control room“, a very non-propoganda documentary about behind the scenes of the media covering the um… war? in iraq. it’s full of charming, articulate, smart people — which you rarely get to see once the evening news goes to air with the rubble and people firing guns into the air and boiled-down soundbites — and then some really squirmy clips of misters bush and rumsfeld. mrngh.
if you see it at the valhalla, you can walk back up glebe point road after and pop into badde manors for a double scoop of pistachio gelato and sour cherry sorbet. or instead (and this necessitates a special trip back to glebe on my part) you can walk over to chinatown for yumcha. either way, it will be an excellent way to spend a sunny winter morning, packed with education, exercise, tasty treats and fun.
hurray for the queen; if not for her royal highness, there would be no public holiday to celebrate her birthday, in a land sorely lacking in public holidays. monday, given the choice between filing photocopies into a stack of new folders, and going for an excursion to cabramatta, the boy wisely chose not to file. that’s why he’s the school teacher. not too soon, we were on a good train — an express service with no stupid, reasonless stops inbetween stations, and airconditioned — whizzing our way out west.
a very short walk from cabramatta station, we fell into a small dimsum factory and found ourselves in possession of a small paper bag each of assorted dumplings. not ten minutes later, i was perched at a bakery counter, handing over $1.20 for a wedge of pandan chiffon cake. we decided we had to put a stop to this disgraceful behaviour by sitting down to lunch.
egg noodles, glisteny with garlicky oil, and an assortment of roast duck and porks.
something happens to the boy, where having eaten his fill, he is rendered incapable of thinking about and preparing for subsequent meals. fortunately i am free of this sad affliction, and despite our post-lunch activity being primarily the quest for a bamboo steamer (so much harder to find than you would expect in such an intense asian community), my cloth bag slowly (quickly) filled up with these:
an assortment from lawrence cake shop: green and red jelly cakes, a pandan slice and — oh happy nostalgia — a cream horn; and this:
the label says “sticky rice cake”, but in fact it is black sticky rice, and pandan flavour sticky rice, and sandwiched inbetween, mung bean paste and shredded coconut and ground-up peanuts, wrapped in a pancake. surprisingly, the rice is sweet, the mung bean salty, and it is all extremely flavoursome;
and a tub of ginger flavour tofu pudding, and bag of dried longans from thailand.
we were there only for two and a half hours, but it was freakishly warm for winter, and we were wilting. later that night, a dinner made up of a selection of exotic cakes revived us.
the next best thing to being unemployed is being a freelancer at the end of a bunch of projects, where you can take half a day off and sit in the bastion of tranquility in the middle of the city — the tea centre [specialists in tea of fine quality] — sipping iced tea and nibbling on one of those dipped-in-chocolate, shortbread-and-jam sandwich biscuits, in the company of …mmm… jake gyllenhaal. alas, it is only 2D jake on the cover of glossy airfreight GQ, so it turns out that the biscuit is much more enticing company.
when you buy loose leaf tea at the tea centre, the always smiley girls behind the counter measure it out of very large tins off the wall-to-wall shelving. if you are unsure, or confused, they are happy to shake the tin before lifting the lid just in front of your nose. inhale. if it is the stockholm blend, which is black tea with orange peel, vanilla pieces, apricot flavour, safflowers, calendula blossoms and rose petals, you will be overcome by the need to buy a packet. the shop girl will scoop the desired quantity into a blue or red cellophane-covered foil bag, sealed with one of those bendy wire thingys so that you can open it easily for another smell on the bus home.
i don’t normally like fruity or flowery teas (and tisanes? pah!) but the vanilla (i guess) makes this smell like magic cake. magic! cake!
best monday ever
anzac day continues…
a cross-continental conversation with nellie
nellie: um. are you working?
bowb: umm. sort of, but not really. it’s a public holiday!
n: oh! is it anzac day?
b: eh! yah! how did you know?
n: because it’s a biscuit!
b: ummm. yesss. but there isn’t like, oreo day…
n: hngh. you can keep oreo day.
b: … and there isn’t tim tam day…
n: but there should be!
and with that the twinkies were off for three, count ’em, three hours. the phone company should start paying *us* money.
what to do after a marathon phone session, with ear hot and hand cramped into craw, than finish up my goddamn business activity statement, make a bacon, avocado and chutney (pear and fig) roll and walk briskly up to oxford street where the cinema is already quite packed with a holiday crowd ready to see “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”.
when joel says “i love you” to his last remaining fading memory of clementine, oh it brung a twinge to my nose.
and then, another brisk walk to pellagio providore for a litre of pink grapefruit fizzy and two bits of $4 (each!) turkish delight studded with pistachios and covered in white chocolate (sometimes if you’re lucky, pink chocolate. today i am unlucky, but only just), and then on to infinity sourdough bakery for a walnut sourdough loaf swaddled in tissue like baby jesus.
sadly the only thing awaiting me after another powerwalk into the city, is a queue at kinko’s while the toner is replaced in two photocopiers, and then once i am at the machine, another queue to get some paper for the machine. so. it takes half an hour to photocopy one double-sided business activity statement form.
happily what awaits me on returning home is a boy on the sofa who is quite agreeable to the idea of me buying him end-of-school-holiday dinner in the malaysian restaurant up the street. not only is there a flavoursome mee siam with an egg boiled for so long it has a grey circle around the yolk, there is also ice kacang with bits of jackfruit hidden in the bottom.
except for kinko’s, best monday ever.
anzac day was commemorated with a cup of tea and an anzac biscuit, while watching the tail end of a 50s war movie on tv. people sure spoke loudly and clearly in those days.
earlier in the day, during the televised parade of ancient diggers and their medals marching up george street, the question “what happens as they all die out? who’ll take their place marching?” was answered with “there’ll just be more wars”.
the boy and i visited the australian war memorial museum in canberra a week and a bit ago. [could the hype-writers across the country please take note that this is the mark against which “world class” should be measured?] packed with relics and stories and dioramas, so many dioramas. scale models of battlefields. helmets all sieve-like with bullet holes. archival footage of a japanese child, still alive, whose back was skinned by an atom bomb.
it still surprises me, what people do to other people.
road trip report
no, there was no easter road carnage. not involving us anyway, and surprisingly few incidents that involved squished marsupials. there was nary even an attempt to learn to drive (let alone start up the car) on my part. mainly, i handed out snacks and gazed out the window at brown and cows. ahh cows.
there were many tasty treats along the way, including such fabled delights as a curried prawn casserole for tea and a breakfast involving two kinds of sausages, bacon, fried eggs, toast, sweet tea and a surprise delivery of lambs fry (with bacon). there was a roasted loin of lamb wrapped in vine leaves perched atop a tomato and olive salad, drizzled with tzaziki, with a bowl of buttered vegetables on the side. there were pasties and sweet buns, and a pizza experience the likes of which may i please o please never have again. there were two sips of a yummy sparkling shiraz before my throat started to close. there was a kebab. there was a turkey and salad sandwich half the size of my head, and a strawberry thickshake. there was a fat burger from a takeaway shop in yass, which had a refrigerated counter full of coleslaw…
there were mountains, and walks up and down mountains, and valleys, and the magnificent murray river, and the bewildering national museum of australia in canberra. there were good times, dammit.
