tragedy on black friday.
cleveland street, abercrombie, parramatta road. these are awful, awful streets along which to walk, urban grit to the extreme. but last thursday, i walked up to the cleveland end of abercrombie, and friday, i walked a good way down parramatta road, all on the promise of a good breakfast.
i’d heard about cafe giulia from a couple of people: one who’d just walked past and peeped in, and one who goes there lots — both had only good things to say. so on thursday i found myself sitting across from the little matchbox girl (the one who goes lots), across from the counter running the length of the old butcher’s shop. the handwritten menu board behind it was about as long too, and had so many options scribbled onto it as to be unhelpful (but, y’know, in a good way).
i saw a plate of waffles go by — tall slabs of ’em, crowned in bananas and doused in syrup. on the menu, there was a version that came with stewed rhubarb and mascarpone. i wanted it! but, it turned out, not as much as i wanted the breakfast special that morning:
shimeji mushrooms with sage butter, fava beans and home-made sourdough toast. “the special,” announced the waiter when he finally brought them to the table, quite some time after matchbox girl’s had arrived, “…because you’re special.”
and truly, i did feel special. the mushrooms were wonderful — whole clusters, cooked so that they were caramelised and crunchy on the edges, and slippery, salty and buttery everywhere else. the fava beans, surprise! came as a mound of well-seasoned mushy peas. it was all the kind of delicious that makes you (me) want to weep with joy.
i didn’t, though. just poured myself another cup of house-blended chai. all the clatter and chatter reverberating off the white tiled walls was doing my head in.
the next day, it was only slightly less noisy at deus cafe, the overwhelmingly art-directed sidecar to the deus ex machina bike shop. it’s a huge space, dark and moody, with a dramatic wall of painted numerals, and lots of wood, and more than a handful of young professionals in black plastic-framed spectacles having business meetings, or working on their shiny macbook pros. right in the center of the room, at the plywood table shaped like a giant O, there was me, waiting for singapore girl to amble her way down missendon road.
it was about 10.15, when i asked the guy behind the counter if it was too early for the lunchtime menu. “it depends,” he said, “on which items… and who’s asking. go on… charm me.”
but it was too early for charm, and it turns out, too early too for the poached salmon salad with fennel, potatoes and roquette, and for the deus dog — lamb sausage with tzaziki and tomato confit and chips (too early, specifically, for the chips). i resigned myself to the breakfast crepes with caramelised bananas, mascarpone and maple syrup.
so. good.
i’m guessing the crepes were made with buckwheat flour. they were slightly chewy, with a lovely nutty flavour, and alas, there were too few of them. four, if you must know, but i’d rather it had been six. singapore girl had warned me that she thought the serving too small when she’d ordered them previously; meanwhile, her deus breakfast — fried eggs, sausages, bacon, spinach, mushrooms, toast — threatened to spill onto the table and engulf us all. she left her googy yolks, but i scraped my plate clean.
weekend teacup blogging
i think this is starting to become an affliction. i was at the rozelle markets yesterday, and when i said, “i think i’m going to buy that pink teacup”, the kid responded immediately, “but you already have the green teacup”. that’s how bad it is.
but it was $15, less than half the price of the ones i saw in the dusty window of a dusty antique shop in glebe. this (and, ok, a couple of orphaned saucers) were from a woman who said she had moved on to other things, and was purging her personal collection. she had wild hair and a crazy rainbow wooly jumper. bloody hell. i could become that woman.
so no more teacups.
the biscuits, on the other hand… these beauties were from christopher’s cake shop at taylor square. delicate shortbread sandwiched with sugary icing and dipped in coloured chocolate. the pink one is strawberry flavoured, and the yellow one a most engaging lemon.
these i will be back for, oh yes.
i finally got the anabanana today. it’s just, i’d gone savoury at breakfast, and around lunchtime, i found myself needing something sweet, and i peeped into zumbo just to see… and i’d never seen anabanana looking like this before. actually i don’t think anyone’s ever seen anything look like this before.
it’s like one of the happy little elves back at the workshop went postal, and dumped the entire sack of brown sugar over the lot of ’em.
i’m not complaining, mind. in fact, i’m quite in awe of the bold, sugary statement. there is no finesse in this pastry — not today anyway — but there are roughly chopped walnuts buried in the sweet avalanche, and a stream of cinnamon running through the light and crunchy brioche feulletine. (yes! there is pastry beneath the sugar!)
there are no bananas though. weird, huh?
[edit: a source close to the cakebox has informed me that the bananas are rolled in between the layers of pastry.]
i like it quite a bit. i expect i will like it tomorrow too, and possibly the day after, for that is how long i expect it will take me to get through it.
singapore girl finally made it to balmain last week; she’d heard about a particular cake shop i like to go to. so there we were, thinking we were safe by going for lunch beforehand, to line our stomachs, but we left zumbo with two cakes for now and a bag of macaron for later.
reading it off the little plaque in the shop, charlotte o’hara sounds like one of those eccentric ladies with too many voices in her head: biscuit cuillere, ginger and vanilla bavarois, lime creme, fig, basil and pistachio jelly… and if you were to eat each element one at a time, as i did to start, then you might think the bavarois too gingery, or the jelly too figgy. but i’ve heard more than one person say it — including the countergirl — that all the flavours come together into one great superflavour, and it’s true.
truly, this is alchemy at work. i could not decide if i should eat it fast, or slow. it was light and delicate, and certainly could’ve been inhaled. but that would only have brought matters to an end much too quickly.
after all, she got all gussied up for us: see her bonnet of bright raspberries, plump and bursting with tart flavour. the neat ring of meringue, the fine ribbons of lime zest and white chocolate. the finery on the outside, though, belied a primness within. we took our time with her.
the pace slowed even more for essaouira. turns out that charlotte o’hara is all sweetness and light — but only while you’re eating it. once it’s down your gullet, all the richness of the cream and butter remind you how debauched your time together really was.
but try and stop. try and say no to the slim plaques of dark chocolate that break with such a satisfying crack. try and resist the piped rows of dark chocolate chantilly creme, and the ones beneath of orange ganache. the base of cakey hazelnut dacquoise and crunchy praline feulletine were most persuasive. all up, essaouira reminded me of the chocolate-covered, orange-flavoured wafers of my childhood — which only made me love it more.
and i did stop eating it after all, for i feared that i might die. i left the smallest little corner for quite a way after dinner. i ate it in the dark.
another saturday, another $10 teacup. this one at least i can drink tea out of.
friday, after a couple of weeks of half-hearted to-and-froing, deborah and i met upstairs at fratelli fresh. please understand, there was no reticence about meeting for eating. it’s just, we couldn’t decide if we’d rather eat at danks street depot or sopra… so you see, we did not really mind which way the day went.
the plan was to read the menu board at sopra, and if nothing took our fancy (as if!) we would head across the road. as it turned out, the 1 o’clock lunch crush was so impenetrable that our decision was made for us before we were even within reading range.
i used to go to danks street depot fairly regularly, usually when an invoice got paid. it was just up the street from where i used to live, and it was a great space in which to eat… well, anything really. back then it was just starting up, and you could see into the kitchen from the big central table. back then the kitchen wasn’t even in a different room; the only thing separating it from the diners was a bench on which produce sat and chopping happened. once i was there, and the chef himself came up and cleared our table. then at some point, the service started to get a little surlier, and sopra opened up across the road, and i moved away… and i reckon it’s been about four years since i was last in there.
and gosh — gawsh — is it fancy now: swirly room dividers, precision seating, shiny bar extension. no more that warm, fuzzy, sunlit feeling of sitting in uncle jared’s kitchen. it was a high-powered, well-dressed lunch crowd, and very, very noisy.
so. the decision had been made for us about where to eat, but we still faced the quandary of what to eat. the wild rabbit and pork terrine was a definite, but we spent many minutes trying to figure out its complementary companion. i was leaning quite severely towards the slow-cooked broccoli and eggs, and eventually i fell over at its feet.
because it was great! who would think of garnishing a serve of golden, buttery scrambled eggs on toast… with broccoli? it had been roasted, i think, with chili, garlic and white wine, an enormous stalk of it in a most appealing shade of olive green. and on top of that, chunks of salty and creamy fetta. i would eat this at least once a week.
it would be harder to eat the rabbit and pork terrine that often; such a solid, meaty slab. deceptively so, for it is mild pink striations with pale green pistachios and seedy figs peeping through the layers. still, the flavour was at once clean and rich, and just gamey enough. it came with a tidy stack of figgy toast triangles, a tangle of perfectly dressed rocket, and some paper-thin slices of sweet pear, none of which helped to overcome that porky feeling at the end of the meal.
you will not be shocked to know that at this point, we got up, paid our bill, and high-tailed it back across the street to sopra. almost 2.30, there were just enough empty tables that we did not feel bad about ordering just dessert. the waitresses, though surprised, were most supportive.
and truly, i had just been thinking banoffee pie, but suddenly, there we were, with that and the biggest fat bastard of a tiramisu to ever belly flop onto a plate. it really was the most obscene looking thing, and we fell upon it with gusto. gusto which soon turned into confusion, because — what were those raisins and bits of orange peel doing in there? does sopra really make their tiramisu with panettone? the cakey bits certainly had that bizarre stringy texture of panettone soaked in an alcohol bath.
(the creamy bits, on the other hand, were sheer perfection.)
the banoffee pie was pretty good, although there could have been a few extra bananas beneath the gorgeous blanket of freshly piped cream — you’d think bananas were still $13 a kilo. tchk. but aside from all that, and aside from the twinings tea bag that passes for an order of tea, sopra is still possibly my favourite place to eat.
(by which i mean, i get out here only two or three times a year, but i love it when i do.)
we sat for a while, fighting the good fight, woefully distracted by the men at the next table and their antipasto platter, and tray of cured meats, and, ahem, seafood basket. but eventually the cakes won. well, the tiramisu did anyway.
the kind and patient waitress commiserated, and pointed the way to the cash register.
it was just gone four o’clock.
the pistachio crumble topping from “the sweet melissa baking book” resurfaced yesterday, the crunchy golden eiderdown on a bed of tart rhubarb and bosc pears.
leftover rhubarb crumble makes a glorious breakfast the morning after, gives you the energy to leave a tearful and protesting kid at playschool, where she will spend most of the day crying. it was a smooth trip into glebe today; normally the bus crawls down the clogged artery of victoria road, packed full of feral schoolchildren. but today we had our pick of seats, and we were there in a flash.
weird.
i walked to the cinema then — because honestly, that’s why i put the kid in school — and it became clear why the streets were so empty: everyone and their kid was at the movies. this is the thought that went through my head: what, all these people sprung their children from school so they could come see “indiana jones“?
but then amidst all the squealing and shrieking i heard a tired parental voice say “teachers’ strike” and “nim’s island”, and i knew that it would all be ok.
the movie was great fun, even though indy’s not quite so hot anymore. oh, saggy indy in baggy trousers, we are all getting so old and creaky. still i left the cinema with a spring in my step and the raider’s theme in my head. in fact, it’s still in here!
the next time i see a film, remind me not to have rhubarb crumble beforehand, no matter how delicious. it only gets in the way of having a banana choc top during the proceedings.
i love ruby red grapefruit. look at it! the colour, amazing. the taste, pretty good — just astringent enough that no one else wants to share. but the one i got at woolies the other day was a revelation. it was full of flavour, yet mild, with a soft sweetness. it was wet and juicy. the kid, with whom grapefruit has disagreed in the past, took a most tentative suck, her lips already puckered up in anticipation. and then… she wanted more.
back in my childhood, my mum sometimes brought grapefruit back from the supermarket. it was exotic then, in the tropics, the regular, dour, yellow grapefruit. and we would only eat it if it were sprinkled, heavily, in brown sugar. i thought i’d carry on the tradition, just for kicks.
aside from the 21 bars of chocolate i brought back from europe over the summer (you’d be surprised at how long it takes to consume them at a steady though not compulsive pace; i think i have just begun my fifth bar), i also made space in my suitcase for a handsome canister of sugar. not just any old sugar, mind. this one i found in la grande epicerie de paris, in an aisle of fancy sugars. i spent too long gawking, almost fell into a sugar-coma just by being in close proximity. and then, i guess because it was xmas time, i chose the saveur de no’91l, from terre exotique.
here’s the guff, run through babelfish:
this sugar especially was concocté and lovingly prepared for the happiness of all. c’ is while thinking of the crackling d’a chimney, with its soft heat and by evoking the sugar refineries enjoyed at that time l’year that we imagined this “sweeten of noël”. it combines the softness of cane sugar and the savours traditionally used in the receipt of the bread d’spices.”
the savours include cinnamon, green anise, ginger, cardamom, and girole… which seems to translate as a kind of mushroom? wha? it smells particularly anisey, but the flavours of everything could be much stronger. it’s only 5% spices after all, mixed into €6.5 of raw cane sugar. no match, in this case, for the magnificent grapefruit.
over the weekend, saturday, we had second breakfast —
oh no, wait. third breakfast. at two in the afternoon.
this was after first breakfast of tea and toast, and yoghurt and berries, at home.
and after second breakfast at the orange grove markets; i had been on a long-overdue mission to procure some gympie butter, and all of a sudden, there we were, watching the ponies, with a cherry danish for the kid, and a bacon, egg and chimichurri roll for me (the chorizo guy is capitalising on the extremely long queue in front of the honey-cured bacon and egg roll guy), and a raspberry-orange juice in-between.
yes. so, third breakfast was had, because we were barreling down oxford street after partaking of the giddy merry-go-round that is the hope street markets, and the kid wanted scrambled eggs. but where o where does one find scrambled eggs in that section of oxford street, between the uppity paddington end, and the trashy darlinghurst end? is there somewhere not too trendy, or too gay, or too derelict? no, really, i want to know!
well. because i saw the sign for the $13 vegetarian breakfast outside BD’s foodhall, i can at least recommend this place to you. even though BD is short for “body development”, and one of the guys behind the counter had very large muscles squeezed into a very small black t-shirt. i’d been in here once, a few years ago, to buy a bottle of water. it’s the shopfront for a catering outfit, and the counters are packed with large bowls of bright salads, and a vast array of baked things and sandwiches.
but we wanted breakfast. we split it, the kid and i — she had the eggs, and i had the mushrooms and hashbrown, and there was more than enough toast, avocado and baked beans to go around. and you know what? when you least expect it, possibly the best mushrooms ever show up on your plate. an enormous tumble of whole mushrooms, larger than your regular button ones, cooked dark and slightly caramelised, with crunchy bits and a hint of balsamic vinegar. they must have been roasted, they had such a rich, smoky flavour.
but my cup of tea, poured from a large teapot in which a single teabag floated forlornly, was no match for the rather wonderful ring i found at the candy hand stand at the hope street markets. look at it! wonderful!
possibly the best little plastic thing ever to be stuck onto a ring and sold for 10 bucks, my precioussss.
a couple of months ago, i volunteered to put together the newsletter of the kid’s playschool’s parents’ committee. i didn’t really think it through at the time, just figured it would be a catalyst to get some non-work-related design done. however, what it actually meant was that we had to make a special trip into school the other evening to attend a meeting. and i had to take minutes! because i also had to write the darn thing!!
it also meant a couple of trays of flaccid sandwiches — plastic cheese and vegemite, and plastic cheese and ham — and tepid water drunk out of the children’s regulation red plastic tumblers, but let’s forget that ever happened.
after it was all over, we caught the bus back to balmain with our fingers crossed, and got off the bus right opposite the new sushi place that’s just opened on darling street. it threw a welcoming golden light out into the night, and we stepped through the door to find the last two empty stools at the counter.
it’s a small room, seats about twenty. one waitress in front, two or three chefs out back. and a sushi train! sugoi! which, incidentally, is the name of the restaurant.
you probably already know this, but i l o v e sushi train: all those possibilities going ’round and ’round on colourful little plates. sure, there is that stressful element — similar to when you go for dimsum — where you can’t really relax and enjoy the eats because you are always keeping watch for something (better) that might come along, but sometimes you find a place where everything looks good, and none of it has the dehydrated edges of something that’s been riding the conveyer belt carousel for two hours…
and sugoi could be one of those places. we fished a plate of sashimi off the train; the temperature and texture of the fish was perfect. there was a pretty roll of tempura vegetables wrapped up in a delicate pea-green crepe, and topped with a dab of salad cream and a sprig of loveliness. there was spider roll! which i really do quite like. and at the end, there was no red bean mochi topped in whipped cream and strawberries and syrup like they do at tomodachi, but there was a fruit salad of melons, grapes, tinned pineapple and a slice of strawberry, in a glass goblet, on a red plate.
the newsletter has so far been well-received by the committee.
