ragingyoghurt » adventures in good eating etc.

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

i’d like to tell you i’ve been hanging out in all the best places, surrounded by beautiful, um, cakes… but instead i am crazy busy with the kid who has finally outgrown naptime (she has also become toilet-trained, in the same week, so i’m not complaining too much), the kids craft book, the “gilmore girls” dvds, and facebook.

sonya wrote on my wall: “when you don’t update your blog i wonder what you’re eating and if you’re eating at all.”

which is sweet, no? and of course, i have been eating. just a half hour ago i was demolishing a bowl of butterscotch and honeycomb ice cream, with strawberries…

(i love this time of year, when my fridge is full of berries: a punnet and a half of stawberries, two of blueberries, and one of raspberries.)

…and i’ve been making food: spanakopita and wontons and yoghurt cake. stories that i will tell you, one day, soon.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 October 2007 at 12:05 am

permalink | filed under cake, kid, kitchen, snacks

you know i love a sweet breakfast, oh yes i do. but my favourite could well be mushrooms on toast. i love it so much, sometimes i even have it for lunch.

i used to get it at cafes, but more and more it seemed an exercise so fraught with disappointment: sometimes the mushrooms were too small, or sliced too thin, or not cooked enough, or there were too few of them, or any combination or permutation of the above. now i make my own, and it is better because i get them cooked the way i like, and if i’m actually lucky enough to have a cafe breakfast these days (which generally i’m not), it frees me up to have something like french toast with maple syrup and berries and bacon.

the first rule of mushrooms on toast is that there have to be a lot of mushrooms. look at these pictures; you can barely see the toast.

i use regular medium-sized white button mushrooms, sliced about 5mm thick. sometimes i’ll buy a few bigger mushrooms as well, and mix them in for variations in bite. i chop much more garlic than you might think necessary. i use olive oil and butter. i cook them a long time.

once, at a cafe, i was presented with a few tiny flakes of dry, blackened mushrooms. problem compounded upon problem: too small, too finely-sliced mushrooms, cooked on too high a heat for too short a time. mushrooms really take some time to get going. they absorb the oil, and then sit there, dry, until you begin to wonder if you should add a bit of water to help them along (no, don’t), and then finally they seize up, and relax, and all the mushroom juices ooze out into the pan, ready to christen your toast…

(your toast should be a sturdy enough receptacle for the mushrooms and their juices. i like sonoma soy and linseed sourdough, sliced thick and salty-buttered.)

you can season with just salt and pepper and it will be fine. but you could also drizzle the lot with aioli [above], or stir through some pesto in the last minutes of cooking [below]. if you are lucky, the pesto will be parsley and fetta pesto, and the heat on the cheese will give you a sticky, salty crust which you can eat — gracefully — off your cooking implement.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 September 2007 at 9:50 am

permalink | filed under breakfast, kitchen

the blackened bananas, thawing all day on a plate on the kitchen counter, seep a thin brown puddle. if you make an incision at one end of the fruit, and apply gentle pressure to the other, the squishy inside glides out whole, and comes to rest curled up like an enormous grub. it is a squeamish and giggly moment, but it is a good thing, because we are one step closer to banana bread.

i’d been hearing about deborah‘s banana bread for a few days — magic loaves that disappeared over a weekend. with little prompting, she pointed me in the direction of the recipe, and offered a tip to swap self-raising flour for the plain with leaveners.

the original recipe is for banana maple bread, but when i tiptoed around the idea of swapping kithul treacle for the maple syrup, deb gave her blessings to go forth! truly the fairy godmother of homebaking, she even voiced the idea i’d had in my head, to sprinkle it in shredded coconut.

although the recipe comes with a warning that the bread “is not super sweet because it has no sugar”, it does ask for 3/4 cup of maple syrup. so i was surprised when it actually wasn’t anywhere as sweet as your typical banana bread. the other surprising thing was that it baked more like a bread than a cake.

i mean, sure it’s called “banana bread”, but it’s normally sweet and moist, and maybe even oily. this wasn’t. my loaf rose magnificently in the pan, almost doubling its height. the first slice i ate, plain and quite recently out of the oven, i was a little disappointed by how unmoist it was, and what a mild flavour it had. but then i realised that this was actually where it was perhaps better than regular banana bread (cake), because it allowed for toppings, without the threat of overwhelming sweetness.

toppings like yoghurt and treacle and toasted coconut. i’ve had this for breakfast four days straight and i’m not sick of it yet. pity the loaf is gone.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 September 2007 at 9:06 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, cake, kitchen

tonight i am celebrating the mooncake festival with a wedge of a two-yolk lotus paste mooncake and a pot of tea. the mooncake left an oily slick on my fingers when i removed it from its little tray, so i thought a mean, smoky tea would be good with. and it was: muji pu-erh tea with whole rosebuds — not quite so mean, then.

have you eaten the eggyolk in a mooncake? it is peculiar. unapologetically savoury. tough and dense, crumbly in some spots, and waxy in others. there is something wrong about it — i don’t actually enjoy eating this golden globe encased in the sweet lotus paste. but it is compelling.

anyway.

last night, finally, it was me, david duchovny and the throw-me-down. you know, the adriano zumbo tiramisu: layers on layers of mascarpone creme legere, savoiarde soaked in coffee syrup, and chocolate-coffee sauce. it certainly was saucy! the divine gloopiness of the sauce melding into the foamy mascarpone; the sodden biscuits sending an immediate buzz into my head.

(i know that “gloop” and “sodden” are not normally words that you associate with goodness, but listen: last night, they were!)

riding the crest, impossibly light chunks of crisp meringue that dissipated on my tongue. where does it all go?

actually, yes, i know where it goes. sigh.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 September 2007 at 9:35 pm

permalink | filed under candy

breakfast!

many weeks ago — you may remember — deborah gave me a bottle of sri lankan kithul treacle, along with helpful suggestions on how best to enjoy it. somehow i never got ’round to searching out fresh curds, or cooking up milk rice, and shamefaced i tell you that even buying a tub of plain, european-style yoghurt seemed beyond me.

and now i don’t know why i waited so long, because i could have eaten this slippery treat much sooner: a runny and intensely flavoursome syrup mingling with the velvety yoghurt. you can vary the treacle-to-yoghurt ratio with each spoonful, just to see how much of the roasted chestnutty flavour you can handle (quite a lot, it turns out). although it was suggested that i might shave chocolate onto it like they do in the old country, i think a generous sprinkle of toasted coconut makes it just about perfect.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 September 2007 at 9:12 am

permalink | filed under breakfast

i really put my eyes through the wringer over the weekend: one feels quite swollen, and the other is decidedly twitchy. there’s nothing like a looming deadline (which i’d cleverly been choosing to ignore, until it was too late to pretend it wasn’t looming) to keep me at the computer for all hours of the day, beyond blog and facebook.

[ nellicent! join! ]

i’ve been drawing on my real desktop, and shuffling little coloured boxes around my virtual one, and i have within easy reach too many chocolate bars and not quite enough bowls of berries. cups of tea are always on standby.

i’ve been drawing happy pots and perturbed sheep, know-it-all kitchen sponge people — the best enforced fun i’ve had in a long time. i’m helping to put together a real, live book for the real fun website, kids craft weekly, and at the moment we are pretending that it will all be done and sent out into the world in the next month.

HAHAHA.

i’ve just realised we must look exactly like this amiable saucepan, smiling blankly in the face of adversity.

anyway. buy a book? gaarn. you never know when you might want to turn your collection of wooden spoons into a family of puppets. or a paper bag into an owl.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 24 September 2007 at 6:01 pm

permalink | filed under drawn, snacks, werk

this past week, the kid has made heartening advances in the hand-eye coordination department. taking arky joe‘s lead, i handed her a blunt knife and half a banana at breakfast time, and by the third day, she was slicing perfectly uniform slices, and arranging them just so on her honey toast. but, oh, that glint in her eye when she took the knife from me that first morning!

so thursday morning, we delved into handling hot water. well, i poured it, and then she emptied the packet of jelly crystals, and stirred, and added cold water, and then filled a cluster of little gelato cups — without spilling a thing.

by the time we got back from library storytime, the jelly was ready! she poked her finger into it, and it sprang back, and her eyes were big at the magic! “but where is the other jelly?” she asked, bemused.

good children, today’s lesson in the state of matter: liquid, solid, gaseous and jelly!

me, i’ve been eating little food too (distinct, and very different from “a little food”). just look at these adorable ritter sport minis i got when i was last in singapore.

yes, i’m aware that was a good seven months ago, and i’d much rather think of this as “saving for a special occasion”, rather than “pathological hoarding”. and anyway, who says a special occasion can’t be, um, reading in bed?

i love ritter sport. it is so not sporty! pretty good chocolate with a huge variety of fillings like cornflakes or yoghurt or marzipan (or, yes, fruit and nut, if you’re that way inclined). the regular slabs are 16 squares; the minis, four, and you get an assortment in each pack.

of course, i liked the one with the whole sweet biscuit hidden within — just look at the cute wrapper, argh! — but even the old-skool hazelnut bar was very agreeable. here is the copy from the website, written with characteristically german precision and attention to detail:

…there are more nuts in ‘Ritter Sport Milk chocolate with Whole Hazelnuts’ than in other chocolates — and what is more, only the best hazelnuts will do: hand-picked and freshly roasted whole Turkish hazelnuts with precisely defined ideal dimensions — between 1.1 and 1.3 cm in diameter.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 23 September 2007 at 8:57 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate, kid

in the back of your pantry there are two bags of world rices in 90 seconds (!), a long-ago gift from an eccentric uncle. pre-cooked rice — basmati, in this instance — in a plastic pouch that you microwave on high for a minute and a half. maybe you were suspicious of them for the longest time, months they lay in the back of your pantry. good thing, then, that there was no expiry date on the package. because when your mid-week pasta plans are scuttled, the rices will come to your rescue.

really, there is no need to be afraid. even if the rice is a bit chalky straight out of the bag, you can fix it, hack it, even, with diced-up, fried-up eggplant and zucchini, a sprinkle of moroccan spice mix, a lot of garlic; raisins; toasted almond slivers; cubes of creamy fetta, tossed together on low heat and then left in the wok to develop a bit of a crust on the bottom.

if you top it with slices of fried chorizo and garlic-roasted cherry tomatoes, arranged like a big red flower, it will look like something out of a fancy cookbook — maybe even an international cookbook from the late-70s.

but, ok, really: rice in 90 seconds. is that ridiculous?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 September 2007 at 11:02 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen

good morning.

it is drizzly and grey, but we have a wholesome whitebread breakfast under our belts, and are about to embark on a cupcake expedition.

– – –

vegemite and apricot jam are very nice toppings for whitebread toast, but my favourite thing to do with fresh whitebread is to have it soft, buttered, and covered in chocolate sprinkles. oh, that waxy glaze!

i love breakfast. [ via deborah ]

posted by ragingyoghurt on 22 September 2007 at 8:48 am

permalink | filed under breakfast

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