ragingyoghurt » adventures in good eating etc.

as we walked that stretch of circular quay between the lego blocks and the cardboard cartons yesterday, we were stunned to see that a chocolate cafe had materialised in the toaster, right next to the dendy cinemas. mid-afternoon, after the rain had cleared, and a modest skyscraper had been constructed out of five cardboard boxes, we popped into the brand-spankin’-new guylian belgian chocolate cafe.

it was an impulsive move: we had eaten lunch not too long ago, and the kid was in that precarious mid-afternoon mood. but what do you do when 1. you stumble upon a new chocolate cafe and 2. you decide on a whim to enter said cafe? you can’t really have just a cup of tea and a biscuit.

can you?

well. we certainly couldn’t. as i read down the list in the menu (which took rather longer than necessary to be presented), the kid expressed her interest in certain items by repeating them back at me.

“cheesecake!” she said at one point. and then, “milkshake!”.

all right then. the dark chocolate buche filled with raspberry cream would just have to wait.

the dark chocolate raspberry cheesecake, though, appeared soon enough, a squat slice cut from a fat, round cake. it was surrounded by swirls and puddles — raspberry coulis and white chocolate sauce — and the kid went straight for the heart-shaped pool of red. the cake itself was dense and chocolatey, sitting on a base of slightly soggy, lemon-scented biscuit crumb, and there were clearly bits of real raspberries in it: we crunched on the seeds. although it seemed like a modest serve when it arrived, in the end it remained unvanquished. would this have been different if we had been less laden with lunch? or if the cake had been that bit more delicious?

perhaps it was the milkshake’s fault. though for something called “chocolate shake”, it wasn’t overly chocolatey. in fact, i wouldn’t even say it was chocolatish. what it was mostly, was a glass of cold milk, with a small, partially intact scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, and the inside of the glass had been zigzagged with molten chocolate, which, by virtue of sitting in a volume of cold milk, had solidified completely. how very strange to have to scrape these trails of hard chocolate off the surface of the glass.

i guess if it had been an actual chocolatey chocolate shake, we might have died. as it is, we didn’t even get to the bottom of the glass. there were a lot of milkshakes going round that afternoon, and trade in general seemed brisk. when i asked the guy behind the counter when they’d opened, he said, only a little agitatedly, “two days ago”.

i really must work on getting my tolerance for rich chocolate desserts back up to the levels they were five years ago. you must know by now, the adriano zumbo chocolate cafe opens at the end of the week.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 October 2008 at 10:45 pm

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

we looked the drizzle in the eye today, the kid and i, and we headed down to circular quay for the sydney architecture festival.

down in front of the opera house, the rain had stymied the cardboard city; a thousand paper cartons lay in wait under a giant sheet of green tarp. but over at customs house, beneath the tents that had sprung up overnight, another city was taking shape.

a megalopolis of lego!

there must have been millions of pieces of plastic there, spread out over a bunch of trestle tables. every person that showed up was given a little bumpy mat, pointed to an empty spot at one of the tables, and given free reign over the crates (and crates and crates) of lego.

there were some amazing creations, like the building made entirely of doors…

…and the one made entirely of heads.

and the kid wanted to touch everything…

but got bored surprisingly quickly when it came time to build her own.

drawing’s more her medium, i think. she’s in her mermaid phase.

though sparkly princess fairy shoes come a close second.

boy! it feels good to be walking about again.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 October 2008 at 11:37 pm

permalink | filed under around town, kid

back when i was deathly ill — well, i’ve finally taken the last antibiotic tonight, so really, the bugs could be back, stronger, tomorrow — my good sister called up to check that i was still alive. we had been talking for a little while, when she casually announced that she had just online-ordered me a box of groceries from fratelli fresh, and that these groceries would be with me the next day, and that maybe i shouldn’t buy a bunch of asparagus if i went out shopping before then.

and truly, the next afternoon, an enormous cardboard carton showed up, gleaming white and emblazoned with swirly gold script. it was like christmas come early, though of course, the packer had somehow forgotten to include the bunch of asparagus.

but what a bounty!

1x punnet tomatoes – cherry
1x 400g cannellini beans
1x 300g jam – homemade – conservi del padre – raspberry
1x 250g pasta – guiseppe cocco no. 15 egg papperdelle
1x 500g pasta – guiseppe cocco no. 59 orecchiette
1x 250g cheese – ricotta – paesanella
1x 1kg mandarins – imperial
1x punnet berries – blueberries
1x 150g peas – snow peas
1x 190g antipasti – mushroom fantasy in olive oil
1x 100g deli – mortadella – sliced
1x 500g sausage – lamb, rosemary and garlic
1x each bread – fruit loaf

you really can’t tell from the descriptions on a packing slip, and so you will be amazed that a kilo of mandarins numbers 30, and 100g of mortadella is but four slices (but still a magnificent offering packed on a golden board with a fancy sticker), and the lamb sausages are from a.c. butchery.

i expect nellie had already prepared the meal in her head — a couple of nights later we had orecchiette with sausages and snow peas.

of course, you must remove the meat from the casing, and fry it up with chopped garlic and a tin of tomatoes, and then later in the game you can add some broccoli florets, and roughly sliced snowpea pods, and a handful of frozen peas for good measure.

and while you are eating it, you will smile large, and toast the good name of your good sister, and curse the day and a half — and the halfway ’round the world — that separates you.

happy birthday, nellicent!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 October 2008 at 10:50 pm

permalink | filed under kitchen, nellie, shoping

well. since i can’t taste anything at the moment, i thought i’d show you these pictures from a while ago. like, march, when my sister was in town, and i still had money in the bank and a sister in town, and we traipsed around town and pretended to be the types of girls who have long, leisurely lunches at inner city hotspots like bentley.

oh wait, we really did.

although, twenty minutes to our noontime reservation (made that morning), we were twitching on the newtown station platform, realising we weren’t gonna make it. i called up the restaurant to let them know we were running late, and to please hold our table. and when we finally arrived, our table was truly still available. as were most of the other tables, for most of the time we were there. whoulda thunk it? you’d expect friday lunchtime to be packed to the rafters.

so hurrah, we took our time reading and re-reading the menu, and then took our time eating our meal, and it all unfurled slowly and delicately and quite beautifully, from the straighforward but delicious beginning of chewy bread and fruity oil.

we each ordered a white anchovy stick with pistachio praline; perhaps we should have gotten a couple more. a number of clean, salty fillets were rolled up and impaled on a skewer, and then coated in sweet crunch — a perfect balance of textures and flavours, none of which could be described as “fishy”.

we shared the gazpacho three ways, pristine, chilled soups of herbs, tomato and almond milk. my favourite one changed with each sip i took. in between, we picked at the colour-matched kingfish ceviche with pickled watermelon and coriander.

we did order cooked food as well of course, although the calamari served over squid ink rice and green chilli were so light and ethereal it seemed they must have been cooked by tiny sea nymphs. it certainly smelt of the ocean.

everything up until then had been from the tapas menu, plated to share. so we were surprised and impressed when our one item off the entree menu — caramelised pork cheek with beetroot and smoked salmon ravioli — came divided up into two perfectly art-directed miniature servings, one for each of us. we sat and gazed upon it for some time, our fingers poised quivering on our own cheeks.

i don’t know that i have ever used the phrase “melt-in-your-mouth” on this blog, but there you have it. and so rich and flavoursome. our plates were scraped clean by the time we were finished, not a tiny purple flower or paper-thin slice of beetroot “pasta” remained.

and then there was dessert. we may be the sort to share an entire lunch, but everyone gets their own dessert. nellie even had two. well, ok, she had two of the small sweets, because how much do you think $6 might buy you at a fancy restaurant these days? turns out, a lot. the hot ricotta dumplings (like eating fluffy little donuts) and the chocolate ganache with orange oil (like eating fancy nutella out of the jar) were more than enough to go round, even with my $16 black olive sorbet with carrot cake and coffee crunch.

i generally don’t pick coffee anything, and never ever carrot cake, but so strong was my interest in the black olive sorbet that i went boldly forth. i was rewarded with a quenelle of sweet and cold that burst on my tongue with intense salty olive flavour before melting away. the carrot cake was an orange sponge, mild and sweet, with a sort of steamed texture — if only all carrot cake could be like this. there was a rich carroty… i dunno, emulsion? and an unexpected, somewhat flavourless and colourless jelly. and the crunch, sweet and sandy, and not overly coffee-ish. not too shabby at all, by which i mean, really good.

it’s true, i’ve rolled my eyes when i’ve read about molecular gastronomy, and was mildly concerned before we rocked up to bentley that our lunch might be a bit ridiculous and gimicky. but bentley doesn’t go to quite the extremes of that spanish guy, and certainly nothing we ate bubbled or squeaked or foamed. (at one point, something vapoury did waft over from the next table.) in fact, this turned out to be one of the most enjoyable, exciting and unforgettable meals ever to pass my table, marred only by the service, which, though efficient, tended to err on the side of the waiters being way too cool. one of them corrected my pronunciation of “ceviche” in that passive-aggressive way of stressing his pronunciation — ceveesh — when repeating the order; the other asked us, “are you sure?” most disbelievingly when we pointed out that we’d only had one bottle of fizzy water rather than the two which had shown up on the bill.

grumble.

but yeah, waiters aside, bentley was lovely and amazing.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 September 2008 at 3:27 pm

permalink | filed under cake, lunch, nellie

the day after, i felt so much better that i suggested to the kid we go up the street for a treat. the evening before, i felt so much worse that i was slumped in a chair in the outpatient department, with a litre of saline being steadily dispensed into my arm from my very own drag-around drip. this after two days on the couch with a 39° fever, of drifting in and out of sleep, eating nothing more than a tub of yoghurt and a couple bits of toast — actually, no, the couple bits of crust off the kid’s toast –while the kid mostly attended to herself, watching kids’ tv and playing with a host of stuffed cats, the trouper.

so ordinarily, a treat might be a cake, or a sticky bun, but wednesday it was a pot of detox tea at circle cafe. yes, yes, i know i only just went, but i do love it so.

inside the squat pot was a veritable witch’s brew of fresh ginger, mint, lemon and thyme — the last of which gave the potion a somewhat unsettling meaty edge. without the thyme, it might have merely been pleasant. the tiny pot of honey which accompanied, i surrendered to the kid. i did not think it was possible to eat honey so quickly with a small finger, but there you go.

the food, when it arrived, made me think i was just about healed. just look at the wonderful pink risotto. nothing about it mushy and bland, from the rice, to the chunks of roasted pumpkin, the wedges of fresh beetroot, the wilted baby spinach.

but the walk up the street really set me back. by the time we made it back home, it was all i could do to propel myself back on the couch. my cough kicked in to the next level — the one where you think you might bring up a lung or two. my nose somehow become completely blocked up by something deep in my head which simply would not be budged. as a result, my sense of taste completely deserted me.

so i boiled up saturday’s leftover takeaway charcoal chicken with a knob of ginger, threw in some rice and broccoli, and ate it for the next couple of meals. ugly food for ugly times. it’s true you know, these bugs really are getting stronger.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 26 September 2008 at 10:23 pm

permalink | filed under lunch

my bank account is the lowest it’s ever been (she says, remembering back to a week ago when she threw caution to the wind and money at the dinosaur designs), but today, tossing up between bagels at bagel house and a nice cafe sitdown, we chose about life. actually, the kid did. it’s my fault, i suppose, but she has really developed a taste for “scrambled eggs at a cafe”.

“you know, i can make you scrambled eggs at home,” i’ll say.

“but i want scrambled eggs at a cafe.”

sometimes i play along.

so we hop-skip-jumped over the potholes of the backstreets, and sat ourselves down at a big wooden table. these days the kids’ scrambled eggs at about life come with a fat slice of lean bacon.

on the grownup menu there is cinnamon chocolate french toast, but i’d been burned by their regular french toast before — sure, it looks impressive, cut some two inches thick, but the egg only penetrates not quite enough to render palatable a great wodge of bready bread. this problem might have been fixed by a copious dousing of maple syrup, but there was only a small puddle of the stuff. which only confirms my suspicions that about life is not the place to get a delicious sweet thing.

instead, today, i got the about life vegan breakfast — scrambled tofu with red onion, spinach and roasted pumpkin relish, served on soy and linseed toast. it sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? in my head i saw a great mound of sauteed spinach, maybe another pile of pumpkin, and good wedges of grilled onions. instead, i got this:

it was all kind of scrambled together, and placed rather politely on a solitary slice of plain — and unbuttered, damn vegan breakfast — sourdough. which, you know, is fine. fine. because why should i be disappointed when the thing on my plate doesn’t match the thing in my head?

because it was $15.50, is why.

still, it was almost tasty, even. a good sprinkle of black pepper, and salt (and i never add salt) fixed that. as did a scraping of butter from the kid’s order, and a blistered and fatty bit off her bacon that she refused to eat.

i further sullied the vegan experience with a pot of chocolate chai, a wonderful, creamy mix of chocolate and spices brewed in frothy milk. it was particularly gingery — tingly on the tongue — and it looked like there was even real chocolate in there, and when i got to the bottom of the pot i encountered a veritable swamp of tangle leaves. so ok, the about life drinks, at least, are delicious sweet things.

but the virtue — vegan or otherwise — is overrated, and anyway, possibly too expensive to indulge in with any regularity.

– – –

last week, i spent $15.50 eight blocks down darling street, at circle cafe. there, it buys you the salad of the day. but what a salad! poached egg and bacon salad!

a perfectly cooked egg — glorious and runny inside — perched atop an enormous tumble of well-dressed leaves, and many slices of crunchysaltymoist bacon, and shards of parmesan. the accompanying bread basket held half a baguette and two pats of butter.

you see where i am going with this? if you have $15.50 earmarked for lunch, you should go there too.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 September 2008 at 10:26 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, kid, lunch

if you’re walking quickly between sydney town hall and the cinemas, you might almost miss, just next to the KFC, the great vertical slots in the slate grey walls of the new city building on the corner. but if you slip into one of these and walk down the narrow passageway, you will find yourself in an atrium of still empty shopshells. it’s dark, though not gloomy, and the harsh sounds of the street are muffled. through the narrow shaft of the escalator well, a bright oasis of small things, colourful and twinkly, might catch your eye. here is the subterranean wonderland of the newish maxim supermarket, and currently one of my favourite places for a cheap treat in the city.

there is a comprehensive inventory of japanese confectionary — all manner of crunchy, chewy, gummy, marshmallowy, [random unexpected texturey] goodness. exotic yoghurty beverages. instant noodles and umami seasonings — liquid, flakey and gritty. and the main attraction, for me: the bank of freezers packed with row after row of single serve japanese (and korean) novelty ice creams.

here’s one on a stick, resembling — and tasting like — a wedge of watermelon. a couple over, a wafer shell in the shape of a corn cob, filled with corn ice cream. there are perhaps a dozen variations on the theme of green tea – red bean, and one of them might be an ice cream-filled mochi, just the right size for nestling in your hand until it softens to the right consistency. if it’s all too much, you might just go the way of a simple icy pole… peach flavour!

saturday, when it was hot, the kid got a lurid mango popsicle, with little cubes of mango jelly embedded throughout. the comic drawings of hula-dancing mangos on the wrapper surely clinched the deal.

i got this handsome tub, in equal parts for the packaging and for the flavour, which was annin tofu, that milky almond jelly pudding you might find in a chinese restaurant. it was delicious — light and creamy, and not as sweet or frightening as you’d expect from something whose ingredients list begins: glucose syrup, sugar, palm oil, whole milk…

mmm… wholesome.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 15 September 2008 at 8:02 pm

permalink | filed under ice cream

here i am, riding the bus, the day after i queued two hours — two — to get into the dinosaur designs sample sale. i didn’t even queue five minutes to get my book signed at the david sedaris reading last month. ok, i didn’t even queue period; deborah held a place while i walked to the front of the line to count how many fans there were ahead of us. roughly 80 made it a quick decision to abandon our posts for a splendid dinner of pasta and chocolate cake. priorities eh?

but thursday morning was a lovely day to spend in the sun, reading “the new yorker” style issue while shuffling forward at a snail’s pace outside the dinosaur designs warehouse.

i’ve wanted one of their bangles for years, but i was always too cheap to spend the big retail bucks on these chunks of plastic, no matter how lovely and handcrafted they are. the warehouse — really, the one room within the warehouse into which a select few were permitted entry every fifteen minutes or so, was the size of an average classroom, with trestle tables set up around the perimeter and an island in the center. atop these were plastic crates, and within these were a jumble of bangles and rings and necklaces and dishes and bowls and platters and vases and jugs, and the sound of fifty or eighty or however many women in total had been admitted, the sound of rifling through these hunks of resin, was like entering a mahjong den. and the jumble was somewhat less lovely (but only a teensy bit less lovely).

and i got my bangle! a pale green, not quite translucent thing, wonky round the edges. it looks like it might glow in the dark, though it doesn’t.

and what does one do the day after partaking of a sample sale, laughing in the face of that resolution to not buy anything for the rest of the year that is not food?

you could buy just over a kilo of jelly belly beans, now 20% off at the david jones confectionary department, in a fetching selection of such matching hues as very cherry, cotton candy, coconut, cream soda and chocolate pudding.

or you could wander up to the newish hawkesbury harvest markets at cook + phillip park, where the sun beats down mercilessly, and there is no shady spot for respite.

what there is, is a dairy stand selling a lightly salted butter churned from the cream of real, live, grass-eating jersey cows. if you stop to have a chat, you’ll be offered a cup of cold milk, sweet and clean. the gympie lady’s been out of butter recently, problems with milk supply and all, so i thought i’d give this one a go.

it was rather good on a slice of soft white sourdough, with a dribble of red gum honey.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 14 September 2008 at 12:01 pm

permalink | filed under (after a) fashion, around town, candy, shoping

hem. i’ve been hiding.

you know how it is. you go away for a few days. and you come back, but don’t tell anyone, and over the next couple of weeks you realise how unfettered you feel without the blog attached. and then a couple more weeks go by, and then a couple of months apparently — some people have been counting, evidently, and leaving heartfelt secret messages on their blogs — and suddenly, you’ve even forgotten what size to crop your photos, necessitating some resaving of pictures so you can post them.

i really didn’t know if i’d be back. i hadn’t planned it, but along the way, as i luxuriated in this pocket of time that not writing afforded me — a pocket of time that i squandered finally finishing “gilmore girls” and starting “six feet under”… and laying out an annual report [note to self: send invoice] — becoming a reader of blogs rather than a writer of one became a very attractive option. (i also thought of maybe writing this as an anger blog rather than a food blog after an encounter with the ridiculous and exasperating seagull woman of darling harbour on an excursion to the aquarium a few weeks ago.)

well. it could still happen i suppose.

but not today. today, i bring you macaron! we stopped by the lindt cafe at cockle bay wharf after the aquarium, me and the kid, for a dark hot chocolate and a babycino. they had recently introduced a new macaron flavour — blackcurrant — and had organised a festival of delice to celebrate. the festival, as far as i could tell, consisted of a free third macaron for every two you bought. i think that perhaps stretches the conventional definition of “festival”, but at the same time, i wouldn’t turn down a free macaron. so, fine.

they look like fat, perfect specimens, don’t they, nestled in their fancy lindt-paper-lined box? but their shells were brittle and hollow, and their fillings unyielding, though undoubtedly quite tasty. tchk. i ate them during a workbreak the next afternoon, swiftly and joylessly. i wished they could all be zumbo rice pudding macaron.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 September 2008 at 10:42 pm

permalink | filed under around town, blog, cake

we are flying south for winter, just for a week, to melbourne.

these birds, on the other hand, have journeyed halfway across the world to rest on my walls. i was only recently introduced to geninne’s art blog, and by chance, right as she finished the last of a series of 20 birds in watercolour and collage.

i am thrilled to own a couple of the limited edition prints she sells in her etsy shop. one greets me each time i enter my green bedroom. and the other, because house-painting is so addictive and compelling, farewells me when i leave the apartment through my freshly painted scarlet vestibule.

see you in a bit.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 July 2008 at 7:55 am

permalink | filed under art, trip

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