ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: trip

[ this post is to be accompanied by such pictures as:
– a dumpling shaped like a goldfish
– a bowl of minted horseradish and turnip
– a pie swimming (or drowning) in custard
– a cream tea ]

the house is finally quiet. my mother and my sister, dressed in their flowery spring finery, are off at the opera, the child is asleep, and i have before me a cup of almond-scented tea from the neal street tea house in covent garden and an apple cider and cinnamon chocolate truffle from the borough market, south of the thames. you might realise that these are not typical singaporean pasttimes, and that would be because we are living it up in london.

but, hello. i have just reached into the truffle bag, and discovered that in fact, the apple cider truffle is off at the opera with my sister, and i have been left the cardamom and orange truffle. or maybe it is the extra bitter plain chocolate. it does not matter, because they are all divine.

i don’t know where the time goes. well, i do know that the first half of it disappeared into a haze of antibiotics; that tightness in my throat? from the last post? it evolved (quickly) into a demon bug that knocked me over on the train one morning, in singapore, before conjuring up a thick green phlegm and a fever of 38.7. a little over a week later, i’m weaning myself off the cough syrup, still coughing a residual cough.

in the meantime, i flew fourteen hours with a wriggly, sleepless little person strapped to my lap, and then spent three days waking up at one or three in the morning while this little person adjusted to a strange new timezone. fortunately, preparing yoghurt and strawberry breakfast at 2a.m. was only the first of many food adventures to come my way.

so. chocolate truffles at the markets, and little glass pots of fruity french yoghurt and pear and semolina pudding. salmon green curry made at home. dumplings, noodles and bubble tea in a chinatown café. a lamb burger (with a do-it-yourself condiment table) at a streetfair in greenwich. fruit pies, crumbles and lumpy custard from a greenwich pieshop. regional cuisine on the isle of wight, including a really good indian takeaway and not nearly enough clotted cream teas. chinese takeaway back in london. amazing grilled squid at the river cafe(!). a rose petal macaron at laduree(!!).

you have to walk the length and breadth of harrods to get to laduree, and in the hundred metres of sidewalk before the grand, gilt-edged entrance, the air is achingly infused with the scent of sugary donuts. turns out the door to krispy kreme, within the harrods foodhall, is just before the door to fancy french pastries.

but you have already realised, this is not blogging, merely listing. putting a sentence together requires more sleep, and tonight, all cool and drizzly, seems promising. maybe tomorrow (or next week), i shall be able to tell you more.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 April 2006 at 9:00 pm

permalink | filed under around town, cake, chocolate, dinner, kid, lunch, snacks, trip

after a couple of months of watching heidi klum flog yoghurt gummies on tv, i finally tracked down a bag in kmart. the ad is tantalising: a supermodel looking all soft, pink and bendy, as though she could be a yoghurt gummy herself, swanning around her living room, falling into comfy chairs, eating candy. apparently, it’s healthy.

the bag says: yogurt gums. soft yogurt confectionery. with real fruit juice. no artificial colours. 99% fat free. less kilojoules than many other treats.

still, the first ingredient listed is sugar, followed closely (in second place) by glucose syrup. and because i’m sitting here (dressed rather fetchingly in the singlet and boxer shorts i slept in, and with my hair in a messy pony tail — oh yes, i feel exactly like heidi klum in the ad) eating them from the bag, my throat has that tight gaggy feeling from eating too much sweet all at once, and my stomach feels raw and empty.

i shall stop eating them now. for now. the yoghurty tang is most compelling, and the pear-flavoured gummy tastes just like a real pear.

[ i also found, in kmart, peach yoghurt chupachups, but perhaps that is a story for another day. ]

but the yoghurt bounty continues. trawling the aisles of another supermarket on sunday, i found biore with yoghurt extract. i’m not sure exactly what the yoghurt does in the facewash, and the packaging blurb doesn’t go into such detail; maybe they don’t know either. maybe it is just a cunning plan to sell facewash.

the thing is, a girl needs to wash her face when she’s in singapore, all hot and sticky. yes! here i am!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 April 2006 at 12:16 pm

permalink | filed under candy, shoping, snacks, something new, trip

two weeks ago… or was it three? either way. a recent weekend, and it was hot. the boy’s family thought it might be a nice outing to have a picnic at the botanic gardens in auburn. the plan was we’d all meet on the main street in auburn, pick up picnic supplies, and then head over to the gardens where we would sprawl on the grass and eat ourselves silly.

i seized this opportunity to make a tart, because who doesn’t want a slice of tart, all sticky summer fruit, while lying in the sun on a saturday afternoon? amalgamating two… (or was it three?) recipes from an old donna hay magazine, armed with a kilo of just right plums and a scant-used food processor, i spent friday night and saturday morning at the kitchen counter. minutes before it was time to head out west, i had this: a ricotta and plum tart in a hazelnutty crust. it was still warm — actually, hot — from the oven, radiant on my lap with two folded up tea towels in between.

we got to auburn road early, and inside of twenty minutes we’d bought fresh baclava and custard eclairs and little buns filled with salty white cheese and chopped herbs, and had finally come to a halt outside mado. i’d been wanting to come here for years, for the turkish ice cream.

late summer in 2000, the boy and i caught a ferry up the bosphorus to the edge of the black sea. we thought it was a boat trip there and back, but the steward ushered us off and told us not to return for two (or three) hours. we bought grilled fish sandwiches in an alleyway, climbed a grassy hill to a fort and ate our delicious sandwiches in the presence of hilltop cows. when we climbed back down to the town on the ground, our boat was ready and waiting. we had just enough time to get ourselves ice cream cones from a nearby café. what strange and gummy ice cream, full of fruity bits; gleeful, we chewed on them as the ferry puttered towards istanbul.

and now here on the main street in auburn, dondurma, waiting in tubs out front, for us. these were some of the labelled flavours: date, pistachio, mulberry, mango, turkish coffee, and cherry. there were also two unlabelled flavours, yellow with bits, and white, which the counter girl revealed to be apricot, and “… special turkish ice cream”. the price list only went up to three flavours, but i wanted four or maybe even five. but also, i wanted tart later, so i made do with cherry, apricot and special turkish.

it is fun, this stretchy ice cream. but we have to eat it quickly, so quickly, because not only is it very hot and melty sitting by the road, but if we do not shovel it into our mouths fast enough, the child will devour it all. as it is she has great red rivulets running down her chin and onto her AB/CD tshirt, so she looks like she’s on the losing end of a pub brawl.

but here comes the boy’s family now, and there we go to the big kebab shop on the corner.

to be continued…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 March 2006 at 2:39 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, cake, ice cream, kid, kitchen, snacks, trip

there is a vague queue to get on the bus. having secured my window seat, i only hope that i do not get:
– that musty, musky old chain smoker who sucked his cheeks hollow on his cigarette waiting to get on board, exhaling downwind on everyone
– that obese woman
– any of that quartet of skanky boys, in their big shorts and thin singlets and baseball caps and dirty face scruff

in the end i get a slim, clean asian girl who eats what smells like a salty toasted cheese sandwich, and then spends the first hour of the drive drawing clothes in a sketchbook.

i’m going to canberra to renew an expired passport. a couple of months ago, on the verge of applying for australian citizenship, i called the immigration department helpline, received no help at all from cantankerous old beryl, and so i’m staying malaysian for a little while longer. i know this means that if things went awry, i would be deported to malaysia, despite having not lived there since i was six, but what the hell. it’s mercenary isn’t it, choosing citizenship on the basis of convenience?

this is my first trip away without the child, and without the boy, in forever. in my own bubble of a hotel room, i sprawl across the bed to watch “the amazing race”, and wake up at five the next morning purely on my own volition. stupid volition.

it takes about an hour to walk from the city centre to the malaysian high commission, and from there, about 40 minutes to walk along the foreshore to the national library for an exhibition of ephemera. by this time, you will feel like breakfast, even with that 6.30 cup of tea and sydney brownie under your belt. bookplate, the “not exactly a café and not quite a restaurant” at the library, serves up mushrooms on toast until 11.

see those crunchy brown bits? you have never had mushrooms on toast like these. buttery and salty, yes, but the burnt edges are a bonus. the toast — is it helga’s? — is so buttery you might contemplate not eating both slices, but do so anyway. the magazines on the rack are either australian gourmet traveller or waitrose food illustrated, and you can read them in the mozaic light of the stained glass windows. you can flip through waitrose, while eating mushrooms on toast and drinking a “chai latte” (why does it roll off my tongue to say “raspberry white chocolate frappucino”, but only wince and curdle up inside when i have to order a “chai latte”?), and then be so surprised and pleased to come across an illustration by a girl you used to know.

in the national art gallery bookshop, i bought a book on the fundamentals of illustration, because during the week i drew a horse for money, and things like this could happen more often. but when i picked up my passport later that afternoon, it turned out that the clerk had been too lazy to type in “illustrator” in the profession box, after “graphic designer”. tchk.

in that last canberra hour, i stepped into a chocolate shop in a mall and found the mother lode of desirable chocolate, emerging some time later with $19 of truffle –marzipan–marzipan–chocolate in a white paper bag. “you’ve chosen all french chocolate today,” said the counter woman, “top of the line.”

“my mother gave me a box of valrhona once,” i said, “and now i can’t go back.” counter woman didn’t need to know about the milk chocolate bar with M&Ms minis peanut butter chocolate candies at the bottom of my backpack.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 March 2006 at 9:53 am

permalink | filed under bookshelf, chocolate, lunch, trip

a quiet start to the trip away: a slice of passionfruit tart from a bakery in berrima.

two weeks in a sparsely-furnished house in still-wintery north-eastern country victoria, we knocked together such treats as:

a homemade vegetable soup standing triumphant on the base of a tin of five-bean mix. five!

a grand breakfast of fried egg on buttered toast, mushrooms and bacon.

a main course that was supposed to be a grilled lamb chop, but really, it was the enormous tin of sauerkraut.

…which lasted for another couple of meals, including this grilled chicken wing with three white vegetables. yes, i’m counting the mashed potato as a vegetable.

there were cakes of course, many other cakes, but they were eaten too quickly to be documented, which is a pity because the gooey chocolate nougat cake, as big as a car tyre and covered in a mound of shaved chocolate, was a sight to behold. there were scones with cream and lemon butter. there were meat pies and pasties… which, if i lived in the country is surely what i would become. pasty.

there was breakfast at the tourist cafe in cooma (also serving greek meals and continental meals), which was so old skool that the mushroom omelette had the consistency of a kitchen sponge studded with tinned champignons, because indeed the cook had used tinned champignons…

see? see that rubbery little mushroom?

…and everything on the breakfast menu came with buttered white toast and chips. which ordinarily would have been a cause for celebration, but i was already full from the massive swirl of soft serve ice cream floating atop my iced chocolate, and so. uneaten chips. most unusual.

ah, the country.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 October 2005 at 9:59 am

permalink | filed under breakfast, cake, dinner, kitchen, trip

in case you were wondering, i’ve been away. i meant to give you a headzup, really, but all of a sudden i was in the car, heading off to where the grass is green and the air is clean and the birdsong is plentiful and incessant.

this cream horn was the last cake of the journey, devoured yesterday afternoon in a grassy spot in the shade of the centrelink building at bateman’s bay. more updates soonish, but first, three or four loads of laundry must be addressed.

thank you. thank you. it’s nice to be back.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 April 2005 at 10:27 am

permalink | filed under cake, trip

fancy that. just as i settled in to gussy up this previously posted account of my jaunt into the golden brown country and the golden brown (and pink! and red!) cakes that were encountered, chairman kaga revealed the secret ingredient on “iron chef“: it was dessert battle! in particular, it was strawberry dessert holiday battle!! well!!!

um. so that put the business on hold. this morning i settled in at mr computer with a cup of vanilla green tea and a platter of chocolate sprinkles on white bread… and then a lightning storm thundered in. and then maeve woke up… and then i had a cup of blueberries with yoghurt… and a nectarine… and then maeve went back to sleep… so now it’s three hours later, and before i get too distracted by the gapkids website, i thought i’d best continue.

so. where we were headed, with the car packed to the roof with all the portable baby furniture (and baby) and fishing rod and travel snacks we could fit, was country victoria. ned kelly country victoria, to be precise. there was no set date for our return; we had as much as two and a half weeks if we wanted, house sitting for the boyss aunt in rutherglen. we were welcome to eat anything from the garden: the beans, the eggs, the mulberries, the potatoes from mick’s prized patch. if they had been ripe we could also have gorged ourselves on the peaches from the tree in the middle of the yard right next to the enormous hills hoist, and the grapes, and what appeared to be 20 kilograms of kiwifruit hanging from the trellis. perhaps it was just as well the hanging fruit wasn’t ready for harvest — there is a bit of a rat infestation in the roof, and they run along the grape and kiwi vines, and i’m sure they lick the fruit every now and again. lick, lick.

i was promised driving lessons along country roads, and a cheese factory excursion, and a visit to the beechworth bakery that had been too crowded the last time we breezed through. in the end, i had just the one driving lesson (my second ever, don’t worry, i won’t be hitting a road near you just yet), the milawa cheese company was a gracious host with a counter lady who let us sample every single cheese — and there were lots — on her tray, and the beechworth baker served up this raspberry and pastry cream extravaganza:

mmm…

in rutherglen itself, the black dog bakery had two sorts of cream lamingtons on display: regular brown cube, and little pink ball. there was only a brief discussion in my head as to which it would be.

back in the kitchen i cut it in two –half for now, and half for later. but after eating the first half, i discovered that my hand, all cream and coconut fingers, was rifling in the paper bag for the other bit.

in corryong, home to the man from snowy river, the bakerylady asked if i wanted the apple and blueberry pie with cream or without. this time there was no discussion at all. it was stowed carefully in a shady spot of footspace in the car, and due to the ham and pickle on pumpkin bread sandwiches that we had packed for the drive, wasn’t actually devoured until cooma, on the picnic blanket under a tree.

homeward, we stayed the night in canberra, at a motel next to the harmonie german club. oh how we rubbed our hands in glee at the thought of schnitzel or fat sausages and sauerkraut for dinner. but after we signed in and walked the 20 metres through the gaming lounge which was enough to infuse us with a cigarette-smoky odour for the rest of the evening, we discovered that the little nook of a restaurant offered such standard pub fare as steak and chips, or chops and chips, or fish and chip [sic], or thai style salmon rissoles and chips. right at the bottom of the chalkboard, though, was the schnitzel, so we had that. it ended up being a homey, tasty, gravy-covered thing nestled amongst the boiled pumpkin, peas and potato, and the mound of sauteed mushroom-silverbeet. the counter lady, who had started off a bit surly when i asked what the mustard chicken at the top of the menu was (“well, it’s chicken, with mustard…” she said, pointing at the grimy jar of grainy mustard on the counter), came over to admire maeve, and then a little while later brought us a small bowl of chips and gravy while we waited for her to boil up some fresh vegetables.

the next morning found me in a kingston bakery buying breakfast. the apple pie looked magnificent:

and indeed the pastry was a sugary, crunchy treat, but its interior turned out to be a cavernous space with a gummy, apple-studded filling hugging the edges like a big mass of boogers. perversely, i persisted, and it seemed to improve with each bite. sort of. just.

anyway, what i was really excited about was the tray of cake by the counter, above which the placard read: “new red velvet cake”. i had been reading of this cake recently, and being too lazy to actually make one, i didn’t think i’d get to experience it any time soon. and here it was.

here it is, having survived the trip back up the remembrance driveway, sustaining me as i ploughed through a week and half of mail, comprised mainly of bills and kmart catalogs:

it was red and velvety, with a very sugary frosting — so sugary i contemplated not actually finishing it, though in the end nothing remained, not even the superfluous compund chocolate button. in short, it was a tasty cake, and i should have saved it for the horrible chore of wading through the week and half of email, which totalled 767, and out of which only one was not smutty, or an offer of pain relief, or a newsletter. thanks mum!

so there you go: the cakes of my recent past. somewhere in between there was the mammoth slice of mars bar cake that i somehow forgot to photograph. well. you know how it is… the cake frenzy.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 January 2005 at 7:19 am

permalink | filed under boy, cake, dinner, snacks, trip

on the road again…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 9 January 2005 at 11:33 am

permalink | filed under trip

it was marvelous and mesmerising, but i managed to tear myself away. we have a new washing machine, see, after finally giving up on the seven-year old beast that for the last year and a half has never quite made it through the final spin cycle, especially when a towel is involved, instead making groaning noises for fifteen minutes before opening the door to a sodden pile of tangled clothes. on tuesday it valiantly rattled and clunked through the spin… and then the little laundry enclave quickly filled with a smoke that smelt of industry burning.

so now. there’s me, crouching in front of our shiny new appliance, watching towels and other bits being gaily tossed about. when it reaches the final spin, it sounds like an airplane preparing to takeoff. tops.

but what i dragged myself away from the laundry for, what i really wanted to tell you about was a flyer i found on a rack in the visitor information center in young (as you will remember from a previous post, the cherry capital of australia). so without further ado, and verbatim:

Cherries
History Sweet cherries were named after the town where they were first grown, Cerasu in Asia Minor (Turkey). They’ve always been a favourite fruit with the stones found in many Stone age caves in Europe and cliff dwellings in America. In Australia cherries were brought in by European migrants and grown. Cherries were first grown in the Young District in 1847. They realised that the Young district was ideally suited to the growing of the high quality sweet cherries and today the district produces about 60% of Australia’s cherries, producing approximately 4500 tonne. The cherries are shipped throughout Australia, Asia, Middle East and Europe.

Handling and storage Cherries are picked in the cool of the day and cooled as quick as possible, packed and sent to market. Most cherries are in the market within 24 hours as the fruit is best eaten fresh. Cherries if stored should be kept at 0-2 deg and with very high humidity, they must also be mature, as it’s the sugars that keep fruit. Immature fruit or green fruit will not keep and like all stonefruit doesn’t ripen after picking.

Varieties There is a large number of varieties to choose from to extend the season. There is Red, Black and White varieties of which are all sweet to eat. It is the late season varieties that are sort after being larger, sweeter and harvested around Christmas. Although a smaller cherry is sometimes sweeter than the larger ones. The Rons seedling has always been a favourite for people, and is on the market end of November, early December.

Nutrition Cherries are low in kilojoules and contain many vitamins, minerals and are high in potassium helping with cramps. In the U.S they have been putting a cherry powder in with hamburger meat to help lower cholesterol and it has been known for many years that cherries are an aphrodisiac and have been sought after for that reason.

How to choose the right cherry Cherries must be firm, shiny, well coloured and most of all have a fresh green stem as this is a sign of well looked after cheries in the orchard, packhouse, and retail outlet.

Cherries are a fruit that has always been admired and sort after by people for 1000’s of years. It is one of the few fruits that are truly seasonal and are better value per weight than chocolate.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 January 2005 at 8:58 am

permalink | filed under bookshelf, trip

happy new year breakfast.

xmas came early, on the twenty-second, with the arrival of nellie, who in a fit of human endurance, rode the terrible air canada route between new york and sydney via vancouver and honolulu. as if that weren’t enough, she arrived bearing gifts: the new satrapi (which in its original french is already the old satrapi), a just-read-on-the-plane sedaris, the bumper hardcover compendium of american elf (which is so bumper that its 500 pages have wrenched themselves from the binding), and an assortment of condiments including beets and cherry jam (according to the flowery italian label, 170% fruit content).

with the baby and the copious end-of-year meat consumption worked into the routine, everything fell into place. post-christmas we took it as far as the rock, on a road trip into those parts of the brown country where it’s normal for a day to be 36°. squatting in the boy’s grandmother’s retirement flat, we kickstarted each morning with a breakfast made up of any combination of bacon and sausage and egg and beans and white toast, or all at once. and then ended each day at the old family home with the kitchen table a smorgasbord of barnyard meats and an assortment of coleslaws.

along the way was young, cherry capital of australia, where the best meal was not the cherry pie — pastry all sodden and doughy — in the tearoom of a reknowned jam factory, but the $7.95 roast lamb special at the young services club, with help-yourself, all-you-can-eat hot vegetable and salad bar; the lamb was moist, tender and gravied, the hot vegetables included corn on the cob, and one of the salads was whole pickled beetroot. nor did the town yield the best cherries of the trip; these came from a fruitshop in a mall in wagga wagga, and for a whole cent cheaper per kilo.

incidentally, the cheesymite scrolls at the wagga baker’s delight are at least twice the size of the ones from the surry hills bakers delight, and the custard scrolls much more custardy. which makes one think that wagga is where it all happens. whoulda thunk?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 January 2005 at 6:22 pm

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

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