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these are busy days. i’ve been laying out the program booklet for the sydney arab film festival for a week now. last friday, as i waited in the train station beneath the airport, i fielded a call — the most crystal clear reception in an underground station! — asking me, only partly in jest, why i was not at home laying stuff out. but it seems even super urgent and late jobs are entitled to five rounds of author’s corrections, so here i am, the millstone still tied to my neck. a very sleek millstone, mind, if i do say so myself.

night times at the computer call for simultaneously stimulating and comforting snacks. a cup of tea, definitely, and a rotating roster of small sweet things. a square (or four) of chocolate one night, a raspberry cream biscuit another.

this particular raspberry cream was unexpectedly good, though somewhat smoushed from being in its paper bag for too long. we found it at the cookie man concession at david jones, nestled close to the caramel creams. you get a crunchy shortbread sandwich, filled with sugary “cream” and anointed with a dab of sticky red jam. the caramel’s definitely on the cards for the next trip to DJ foodhall.

speaking of caramel…

i never dallied the mille feuille at adriano zumbo patissier, not even that season he filled it with mandarin creme. i don’t know what held me back — all that pastry cream, all that pastry — but i suspect it was that there was always something pinker on display. if he’d just remolded it into a cream horn, i totally would have bitten.

but all this is in the past now, because to herald the autumn, there it was: the salted butter caramel mille feuille. after a couple of weeks of missing each other in the shop, i finally had one cornered. and… the planks of pastry were crisp and very nicely sugar-glazed, the fat lines of creme patisserie most enticing. and while the richness of it was lush on my tongue, and i felt completely full after a mere third of the cake, i was left wanting more. more! more salt! more caramel even. i still have two thirds, just to make sure. but, just, more.

zumbo is a riot of colour at the moment: a rash of new cakes hit the counter in the last few weeks. there’s a fancy piped meringue thing crowned in fat, shiny cherries. there’s a slab of chocolate (and chocolate rice crispies!) beneath a wave of pistachio something. there is a multi-layered pink thing in a glass wearing a jaunty pink macaron beret, another incarnation of the macaron marie (ispahan), which will surely be the next thing i pick. but oh! the pink things to be had!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 March 2008 at 10:09 pm

permalink | filed under cake, snacks, werk

this is how the days go when a sister is in town.

you might wake up early on a sunday morning, breakfast in a flurry, catch a bus and then another bus to the sparkly blue edge of bondi. you will meander through the markets, spurring each other on: a sausage on a roll, a red pleather handbag. you will eat fish, and chips, and pineapple fritters, when all the while you really want to get to the gelato shop on the corner. you will meet with cousins. you will bury your hot feet in the cool sand, and build a colony of tiny sandcastles, fashioned from an empty gelato cup.

you might wake up at a respectable hour, breakfast leisurely, catch a bus and then a train out west, to auburn, just to eat a couple scoops of chewy turkish ice cream. you will step into one, then two, and maybe even three dollar discount stores, coming out with bags of cheap household treasures. a pink plastic basket for pegs, perhaps; a rubber anti-slip mat for the tub; some rolls of masking tape… all these things take on a desirable mystique when they are under $3. you will step into one, then two, then three bakeries, and come away with as many little paper bags of sticky sweet lebanese biscuitry. meat shaved off a large rotating torpedo will be eaten, as well as dips the colour of candy.

you might wake up just in time to be lazy, and sit in the park across the scout hall, while the kid takes a music class, and then you will catch a bus to the art gallery, to meet another cousin — the city is just full of them at the moment. you will look at bats — wooden ones at the gallery, and real, hanging-upside-down, screechy ones in the botanic gardens. on a whim you will catch a ferry to luna park, to arrive just in time for a ride on the carousel — it spins at a cracking pace, to the tune of “bonanza” — before the park closes. because you can, because it is the last day of your weekly travel pass, you will catch a train back across the bridge to marrickville, and walk a great distance to a restaurant you know will serve you excellent chilli-lemongrass squid (or tofu, you can’t decide), and when you get there, you will learn that said restaurant is closed mondays.

nights, after the kid has given up and gone to sleep, there might be a selection of truffles unearthed during the day’s outing, or a rose syrup and shaved chocolate sundae. there might be something from zumbo with the gilmore girls. or a whole season of “sex and the city” and the ensuing pangs of not being in new york. there are always cups of tea. jasmin, rose pu erh, chocolate spice.

days, well, they go by, and today, we followed the script we know by heart. someone takes someone to the airport. “see you real soon,” we say, although we don’t know if it will be one year, or two. we felt queasy, but we put it down to hunger. we felt queasy, and we put it down to the mcdonald’s we ate simply to quell the hunger, because the hot cross krispy kreme doughnut hadn’t quite done the job. and then she got on the plane and i got on a train and our lives returned — instantly — to normal.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 March 2008 at 11:34 pm

permalink | filed under around town, nellie, snacks

so. burrata.

saturday, we barreled up to haberfield, which is always less than the expedition in my head. which is to say, it is a great adventure, but it takes only two buses to get there, and if you time the connections right, and if the buses run punctually, then you can be there in just over 30 minutes. deborah can walk across the highway to get there in 10 minutes, but let’s not hold that against her.

because i don’t actually get to haberfield that often (see: expedition in my head), i end up going a bit crazy with the procuring of comestibles. this time, i’d even brought my stripy esky.

it was exactly the right size. by the end of the afternoon, it was packed to the brim. from the italian deli, a modest package of freshly-sliced olive mortadella, and one of chilli salami, both wrapped neatly in luridly printed waxed paper. from peppe’s, two boxes of ravioli: veal, pancetta, sage and white wine; roasted duck, prosciutto and caramelised onion. and from paesanella, a small tub of ricotta and a large tub containing a voluptuous ball of cream-filled mozzarella. burrata.

according to my recent googling, burrata is “the current darling of cheese lovers” — around southern california in any case. i first had it a couple of years ago, and i think about it from time to time. it is a spongy white lump, formed by hand. essentially, it is a thick outer skin of freshly-pulled mozzarella, filled with shreds of leftover mozzarella and fresh cream, before being sealed up.

we brought it home and had it for lunch a couple days later. it’s true what they say: you slice it open and the cream runs out. it is mild and rich at the same time, and the innards have the texture of scraps of cheese sealed in a pouch.

it was wonderful with sliced tomatoes, pepper, salt and a drizzle of fruity olive oil.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 March 2008 at 11:06 pm

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

the fizz is nice against the prickle. distracting, anyhow. for i am falling sick once again, and in need of distraction, from the sharp (in the back of the throat) and the cloudy (all around my head). my rose-print drinking glass is filled with rose-red fizzy. i’d been searching for a while, in a cursory and on-and-off manner, for a bottle of rose syrup cordial. this involved falling into any indian spice-and-video shop i might happen to pass, and not finding a tall bottle of red. last thursday, though, i got lucky. so. rose syrup + soda water = the bestest red fizzy ever.

thursday was lucky for several other reasons. first up, we dropped the kid off at playschool. and then nellie said, “let’s have breakfast at bourke street bakery.”

at the bakery’s broadway outpost, we lucked into the corner booth. well, the only booth. my sourdough toast with house jam came with a just-right portion of salty butter, wrapped up in a twist of waxed paper to look like candy. my hot chocolate came in a wide, low bowl. it was perfect fuel for a day of trudging through the rainy streets of surry hills.

a litany of old favourites unfurled. at object gallery, we found ceramic thongs hand-painted with intricate blue-and-white scenes. at christopher’s cake shop, we bought a bag of shortbread, filled with jam, dipped in chocolate. we moseyed, ambled up bourke street and down crown, and finally came to climb the galvanised staircase at fratelli fresh…

…to sopra. here’s a tip. get there a little way past two. the masses will have lunched and departed, and the water jugs, though empty, will be refilled with a smile if you bring one up to the counter.

the handwritten blackboard, as high as the ceiling, confounded me with choice, so i fell back on another old favourite: the antipasto plate. there are always four parts, and three of them change according to the seasons; the one constant is egg mayonnaise, which sounds a bit low-rent, but in fact it is a perfectly boiled egg draped in… silk. in the silky mayonnaise there are great chunks of chopped-up cornichon. it is great. great, i tells ya.

today, the lineup included some asparagus, pickled beetroot with gorgonzola, and boiled fennel with salsa verde. everything was simultaneously light and intense, the kind of delicious that makes you slowly whittle away at each element, one at a time, as you weigh up in your mind which you want as the final taste in your mouth.

as it turns out, the final taste in my mouth that afternoon was of an ethereal (and ephemoral) buttermilk pudding, which collapsed halfway into its own puddle of berry sauce.

we caught a break in the rain, and a bus to the city, and then another bus back out to get the kid, and after spending some time looking at pyjama pants and petshops, it was dinnertime. we had lured maeve to playschool that morning by promising a sushi-train dinner afterwards, and we are not girls who fall back on their word.

especially when it involves tomodachi. upstairs at broadway shopping centre, they do a fast trade in exotic sushi filled with schnitzel and cream cheese, or topped with blowtorched scallops and kecap manis. we had a plate of maki, whose crowning glory was a sliced of grilled cheese.

for dessert we pulled this off the train: an azuki mochi, divided into bite-sized portions, decorated with aerosol whipped cream and fresh strawberries.

it’s like all the fun in the world happened on thursday.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 March 2008 at 11:15 pm

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

the first day of the new year, we joined the convoy of nice, nice 2 and nice++ buses up the highway to the shimmery hot centre of kuala lumpur. it was past lunchtime when we finally arrived at my grandmother’s house, but lunch was there waiting for us.

just in the door, we caught up with our once-a-year cousins on the unyielding rosewood chairs, but our mother, always straight to the point, was already at the big round table, hunched over a small bowl of new year noodles. what it is, is meesua, roughly hewn bits of chicken, and a whole, perfectly hard-boiled egg. it was only the first of many meals to come.

because what else is there to do when it’s shimmery hot outside? we did venture out, full of bravado, to the playground across the street one morning, but we were quickly humbled. so we visited the old aunts, the ones who confuse us year after year. third grandaunt on the grandmother’s side? fifth grandaunt on the grandfather’s side? i thought i had it finally worked out, but now… nothing. next year, we start again.

one thing that is constant: the glass jars of salty pistachios. the kid discovered a taste for them, and a monkey-like trick to open each nut with the half-shell of the preceeding one. anything else was a random bonus: sarsparilla cordial, or van houten scorched almonds, each one coated in a thick shell of wax-glazed milk chocolate. twenty years can go by, and these are the tastes you remember. soft, juicy dragonfruits, an unnerving red on the inside — these are new, but whisked out of a gentle aunt’s well-stocked fridge, they are slurped up, already a favourite.

and every few hours, it seemed, we returned to our grandmother’s house for another feast. one lunchtime it was assam laksa, the ingredients meticulously sliced and laid out for fine-tuning the flavour; the pungent broth simmering in an enamel cauldron just beside. one lunchtime — our last — there was a fish, and acar, and otak otak. stuffed crabs and lobak. jiu hu char wrapped in lettuce leaves. two soups: one of porkribs and salted vegetable, and the other an innocuous broth of pig intestines. three generations of relatives came and ate in three waves, and i sat through them all.

there was a neverending jelly, multilayered, and each layer tasting of itself: coffee, or evaporated milk. pink even… we made it down to the last sliver on the afternoon we left, sitting around the big round table with our once-a-year cousins. the older one talked about the iron man competition she is confronting in a couple of weeks; the younger one whisked the paiseh portion — left purely to be polite — out from under our noses.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 February 2008 at 9:58 pm

permalink | filed under lunch, snacks, trip

the days go by, all at once fast and slow, and accordingly we are dilligent and lazy. which is to say, we are doing plenty of nothing.

we hang out at the local playground — just before sunset the previous evening, a small boy practised his trumpet, solo; this morning, three high school kids smoked cigarettes and thrashed about to tinny metal — and we go to muji, and we eat.

yesterday, post-dimsum, we fell into a booth at a japanese dessert cafe and ordered treats all-round. mine was a maccha parfait: from the bottom up, clear jelly, maccha jelly, whipped cream, corn flakes, more maccha jelly, a scoop of maccha ice cream, a swirl of maccha soft-serve, two slices of tinned peach, and a crisp wafer.

(pre-dimsum, we ate too many slices of kaya toast at the kaya toast place in the belly of the local mall.)

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 February 2008 at 10:21 pm

permalink | filed under ice cream, snacks, trip

the blue skies and sunny sun on australia day brought them out in droves: buff young blonde things, draped in australian flags, wearing flag stickers on their bumcheek pockets, plastering fake tattoo flags on their faces, sharing the warmth with their flag-emblazoned singlets with “if you don’t love it, leave” printed beneath the southern cross. i don’t know if it was the immigrant in me, but it all made me feel a little uneasy. what do these children think about when they swathe themselves in flags? it goes a little beyond simple, good ol’ USA-style rahrah patriotism, surely. well, maybe not. anyway, we had more important things to think about… like how many minutes it would take us to walk from the ferry to the angie hart show!

yay, angie hart! the whimsy of frente! that i’ve carried around since university brought me and the kid to the steps flanking a little stage in the heart of the rocks. we unpacked our ham sandwich and waited. angie stood alone by the side of the stage as the previous act dismantled and her gear arrived. she looked all adult contemporary rock chick… older. her hair was long and tangled, and her arms were soft, and beneath her billowy blouse, a little pot belly — she has aged as i have! and then her equipment arrived, and her guitarist, and she began to sing and it was just gorgeous. but it was a tough lunchtime crowd, in this little square surrounded by fastfood takeaway: people chatting over cartons of noodles, that man at the table right in front of the stage who kept his face turned away for the entire set.

the kid too was mostly unimpressed. “i don’t like this song,” she said, once the ham had run out. i was not beneath telling her that if she didn’t stick around for the whole performance, then we would not be going to the dorothy the dinosaur show later that afternoon.

but it all went according to plan. the ice creams on sticks, the dinosaur lurching about on stage before going backstage to collapse of heatstroke, the carousel ride, the grande raspberry iced tea frappucino, the ferry back home, the paddle in the pool, the lamb and rosemary sausage in white bread eaten on a picnic rug on the balcony —

hers with tomato sauce; mine with the fancy green peppercorn mustard that i procured at the maille boutique in paris. see, one of us does play at being australian better than the other.

i asked her later what part of the day she liked best, and she replied, “the swimming pool.” tchk.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 January 2008 at 10:44 pm

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, kid, snacks, soundtrack

what is this shiny little beastie?

for a start, it really is small, waiting out its sentence on a saucer from an espresso cup.

i came across a tray of them this morning in the deli counter of norton street grocer, past the great wall of boxed-up panettone, the $4 punnets of fat raspberries, the cheeses…

[ ok, so i didn’t make it past the cheeses; there is right now a fior de latte mozzarella as big as a baby’s head, in a tub in my fridge. oh, and i didn’t actually make it past the raspberries either. ]

what it is: creamy, salty cheese, rolled up in a slice of grilled eggplant, rolled up in a slice of prosciutto, immersed in red-and-green-flecked olive oil. it was about all i could manage for lunch on this crazyhot day (aside from a wedge of chorizo baguette topped with sliced tomatoes, ha!).

about all the kid managed was a mini ice cream cone of sara lee’s finest french vanilla, rolled in coloured sprinkles and studded with raspberries.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 9 December 2007 at 10:43 pm

permalink | filed under snacks

i know that you know that i know that muffins are, like, way behind cupcakes in… well, everything. for a start, there is no frosting. and most muffins i’ve had are bite after bite of dry, dense mastication. the little ones like rubbery pucks, the big ones like a workout for your jaw. so not fun.

but. yesterday, i found the best muffin in the world. sonoma make the best soy and linseed loaf in the world — with the whole soybeans? — whoulda thunk they would also sell the best muffin [note to self: double-check if they bake the muffins inhouse. edit 05/11: i have been informed, via the comments box for this post, that all pastries sold at sonoma, including the best muffin in the world, are made by zumbo. well!].

i only bought it because the kid wanted a snack as we passed by, and then sitting in the park across the road watching the monster raven skulk across the grass, i discovered the muffintop crunchy with sugar, and the moist, moist, crumbly inside with its generous — almost wanton, really — display of juicy berries.

“we’re sharing, right?” i asked the kid, but she was already off chasing the giant bird. tops.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 November 2007 at 10:11 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kid, snacks

that clever simon was selling his lamps at kirribilli art and design markets today, so i bribed the kid with the promise of a cupcake and away we went.

coming out of milsons point station, we took two right turns in the direction of the colonial bakery (as documented by grab your fork) and came face to face with the cold, harsh reality of silver-shuttered windows.

the colonial bakery, folks, closed on sundays.

the kid was understandably dismayed, and truly, so was i. i’d been looking forward to an olde time cupcake (or a cream lamington) eaten on the bowling green. but the grumbling and pleading was only at a low level for now, so we made our way through the burton street tunnel, almost pretending to look at the crafty wares on display as we headed towards the foodstalls at the other end. at some point i gazed over at the other aisle, ostensibly looking for alien lamp pods, but what came into my line of sight was a three-tiered tray laden with tiny cupcakes. well, at that distance i couldn’t be certain, but i said it anyway: “LOOK! CUPCAKES!” before we continued our mosey at a slightly quicker pace. i sure hoped it wasn’t novelty soaps.

and it wasn’t! it was a table covered in actual palm beach cupcakes, every single one of them a lovely and elegant affair. the kid was immediately drawn to the big cupcake covered in pink frosting and a marshmallow flower with a little chocolate button in its centre. i really liked the look of the cake stand: three levels of bite-sized chocolate cupcakes with pink frosting (two shades!), or chocolate, or speckled-cookies and-cream.

“what is the difference between the darker pink and the lighter pink?” i asked.

“they are essentially the same chocolate and raspberry cupcake, but the darker ones have more raspberry,” was the helpful reply.

so i got one of each. delicious, and the darker one was more delicious than the other. the frosting was quite sugary, but the tartness of the raspberries balanced it out. the cake itself had a texture i had not yet encountered in a cupcake. dryish (though not unpleasantly so) with a dense but fine crumb and a deep chocolatey flavour. the frosting-to-cake ratio was about one-to-one, which is the way it should be, no?

the kid was methodical. she picked out the chocolate button, then ate the marshmallow flower, then the frosting, and then finally, the cake. not even half the cake, actually, which when i did try, surprised me with the raspberries baked all the way through, and its, hmm… slightly muffin-like texture. hmm. it tasted healthy, is what it was. that said, i was not lucky enough to eat it with frosting, so clearly, i will have to continue my study in a month.

we chased the cake with a mandarin, and then after a short wander, a bag of farm-fresh strawberries from a stall in the clearing, and then a fat sausage in a roll, and then an apple for the kid, and a laze on a sunny-shady patch of grass. and then we felt ready for another cupcake.

by this time — an hour to closing — the mini cupcakes had been reduced to $1 (from $1.50) and the regular ones $2.50 (from $3.80). you could even buy a tray of 12 assorted minis for ten bucks. and oh, how i wanted to! but instead, it was little chocolate-raspberry cupcakes all ’round, and they were just as good as we remembered them.

the luminous objects were lovely, and i was quite drawn to the bornagain books, but i didn’t end up buying any art or design. instead, having discovered that the bread merchant on these sunday markets is brasserie bread — sold out before he even had a chance to fully unpack his bounty of loaves — what came home with me, wrapped in swirly-printed tissue, was a tender sour cherry-rye-sourdough.

breakfast tomorrow is gonna be great!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 October 2007 at 10:57 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, kid, snacks

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