ragingyoghurt » adventures in good eating etc.

i really never order a croissant. it’s just, you hear these french people talk about how nothing french outside of france tastes like it’s supposed to. and i know, the people who are not french roll their eyes and maybe make a rude gesture with their loosely-clasped fists. and i haven’t effectively been to france and eaten a real, live french croissant, so i have nothing with which to make a comparison. but i have eaten the odd croissant or two outside of france, and all they did was make me hope that the french ones were nothing like them.

outside of france i’ve had: pale, flaccid croissants; overly-browned croissants with a sugary glaze; flaky-mouthfuls-of-air croissants that leave your lips covered in bits; soggy almond croissants that taste of flour; and once, in a health ‘n’ golf spa resort high in the hills of east malaysia, a basket of mini croissants that weren’t flaky or buttery or puffy or whatever it is you think of when you think of croissants, plus they tasted strongly of freezer. which is a bit of a minus, really.

so i surprised myself at zumbo when i pointed out the chocolate croissant. i figured, if the pastry was lacking, at least i knew the chocolate would be good. but of course, the pastry wasn’t lacking at all. it was bold and crunchy on the outside, and just chewy enough on the inside. and the little slabs of dark chocolate tucked into its folds? just the right number. it made for a most enjoyable lull in springcleaning, with a cup of vanilla tea.

i don’t want to play favourites or anything, but i will eat this over and over again.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 5 September 2007 at 11:37 am

permalink | filed under cake, chocolate, snacks

“californication” eh? somehow i made it past the advertising blitz, the suntanned duchovny busstop posters, the pneumatic breasts of the first episode, the last-minute “mum, i want you to read me a story”… to watch episode two with a chocolate treat and a pot of mint tea by my side.

is hank moody the new carrie bradshaw? is this just sex in the other city? i much prefer new york, but i do like david duchovny. on tv. remember when he was on “the larry sanders show”? or when he did that episode of “dr katz“? a pan could not be deader. i’m pleased he’s not doing stoopid alien movies anymore.

at zumbo yesterday morning, i admitted my unease at the delicious way the cakes just melted away on my tongue. “you know why that is, don’t you?” asked counterboy.

“because they’re the fattest things on the planet?”

“yep.”

alas.

behold the chocadz. the salted butter caramel ganache melts away to nothing; so quickly, it is just a memory of a ribbon of salty-sweet. sitting on its crunchy hazelnut meringue biscuit base, it is draped in a thin coat of milk chocolate, and a dense sprinkle of rough-hewn hazelnuts. the first time i had this, i was on a plane, too early in the morning, up in the air somewhere between sydney and melbourne. i liked it then, hence the reprise, however it was much funner eating it in bed.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 September 2007 at 9:08 am

permalink | filed under chocolate, tv

the second day of spring felt like the first day of summer. me and the kid did silly walks across pyrmont bridge, to get to the pacific on a plate festival at the national maritime museum. according to the publicity guff, this event would “draw together the culinary traditions of people who have migrated to australia from communities right around the vast pacific basin”, and it did.

it was an eclectic little festival with a curiously disproportionate number of peruvian stalls. still, we managed to work out a pretty balanced menu for ourselves: a tall glass (plastic) of bandung while watching the taiko drummers; a serve of takoyaki while listening to the mariachi band; an appropriately-timed oranagey teja for the kid during the spectacle of the peruvian folkdancing — and a canadian sugar pie for me; and right at the end, a blini stuffed with farm cheese and raisins, with sour cream and strawberry jam on the side, mmm:

i’ll admit it was the sugar pie that drew me to darling harbour, on a sunday. it turned out to be a little — tiny –disc of crisp pastry, topped with a thin filling made of brown sugar, butter cream and maple syrup . the cardboard mountie out front beamed at me as the stallholder squirted the tiniest little splodge of aerosol cream onto the tart. in an instant, it had melted down into a streaky puddle. $3 for this?

in contrast, the $5 shougun selection at colo tako was a grand four-ball combination: two regular octopus, one prawn, and one dramatic crab,which turned out to be rather more style over substance. but it won the kid over, from “i don’t want to eat the crab thing” to a bout of pincer hijinx. she then ate the prawn, and a piece of octopus — dubiously — and most of the graceful bonito, and the golden-crusty, squishy-inside batter of an entire ball. oh a proud moment for a parent! ever enthusiastic about takoyaki, i came away with a smooth blister in that tender spot where the roof of your mouth meets your two middle teeth.

at the end of it all, we trudged back over the bridge, just in time to catch the ferry back to balmain. we were all sunned out, but we stopped in at zumbo on the way home, just to see if the spring cakes had arrived, and they had! the countergirl said they’d sold out of five new cakes already — it was about two in the afternoon — and behind the glass sat a single lovely moulded pink moussey thing adorned with a shard of spring green chocolate.

but that’s another story.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 September 2007 at 9:43 am

permalink | filed under around town, kid, snacks

from across the counter, before counterboy popped the lid onto the paper cup, i caught a glimpse of glossy dark brown and knew that this was a hot chocolate to be reckoned with. minutes earlier, the answer to the question, “do you make it with melted chocolate?” was a pause, and then, “it’s half cream and half chocolate.” i sipped it at the counter. it’s like drinking luxury.

but luxury which, a short time later, made me feel like my face was detaching from my head. i fear that my tolerance to good dark chocolate is decreasing; i would like to be able to eat more of it in one go before i start feeling strange. and this is really good dark chocolate: a rich… well, i can’t even say “liquid”, because it is on the verge of that next step up into… well, i can’t say “solid”, or even “goop” — like those cornstarchy concoctions that get sold as thick, european-style hot chocolate — because it glides so smoothly down my throat. what i did say, out loud, was that it was better than the lindt cafe hot chocolate, and those are big words, i know.

i kept up the steady sipping all the way home, and when i got there, with my loaf of soy linseed, and removed the lid, i was astounded to find that i hadn’t even made it halfway through the cup. i prepared myself a slice of buttered toast, and put the hot chocolate in the fridge for later.

which turned out to be much later, after dinner, when — because i am a wuss — i thinned it out on the stove with a dash of milk, and — because i am a wuss capable of diabolical and twisted reasoning — fashioned a sort of affogato with three kinds of ice cream. and look, one of them was even chocolate!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 2 September 2007 at 9:27 pm

permalink | filed under chocolate

i recently met this woman… ok, another mum in the kid’s tuesday music class, and this is what she said to me:

“my husband is away on business tonight, so i’ll be having a lean cuisine — pasta with salmon — and a glass of white wine. and watching “the bill”.”

i mean, in essence this is probably what i’d do too, except what i’d be pulling from my freezer is that braised lamb, mushroom, brandy and rosemary ravioli from peppe’s pasta. while that was boiling, i would saute diced onions, garlic and carrots in olive oil and butter, with a bay leaf and a few drops of water to keep it from drying out. towards the end, i’d add some small florets of broccoli. and then, probably, right at the end, i’d stir in a little extra bit of butter, i dunno, for shine?

by then the ravioli would be ready, and i’d add it to the sauce and swirl it all around just to get it all coated, and i would empty the pot into a large bowl, and it would be delicious, because there is real meat in the pasta, and none of that sawdust or breadcrumb filler you get in the $4 bags of tortellini at the supermarket.

i would eat, propped up with cushions on the blue sofa, and i’d be watching my season 1 DVD of “gilmore girls” with no commentary from the sidelines, and it would be great.

(and then later, while tidying up, i would try to open the fridge with the same hand i’d be using to hold my ceramic butter dish — the one with the cow moulding on the lid — and the fridge door would jerk open suddenly, and the butter dish would spring from my hands, and shatter into several pieces on the floor. which would not be so great, actually, but i would not be upset.)

this woman also said to me, “i don’t eat a lot of bread, because when you think about it, it’s just flour and water, and what is that? glue!”

i don’t know that we can be good friends, is all.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 September 2007 at 11:55 pm

permalink | filed under dinner, kitchen, tv

thursday night i stayed up late, working so that i wouldn’t have to friday. i had plans up my sleeve! plans that were almost scuttled friday morning, when the kid woke up a little later than usual, slightly dribbly in the nose, and announced that she was really ever so not well. it turned out (or, as i chose to see it) she was quoting “charlie and lola“, to which she has lately become addicted, and i figured (chose to) that the dribble was cosmetic, so we caught the slightly later bus and made it to playschool just as the kids were starting their morning snack.

i hightailed it to badde manors, and squeezed into the corner booth in the back. i like it here; it’s kinda rumpled, and the service is friendly-tinged surliness. i like it so much i didn’t even mind the freeform jazz dee-dee-dee-dee-dee on the stereo. even when they switched over to the tibetan chanting over a dancebeat that my yoga teacher used to play during class, it didn’t jar. well, ok, it jarred a little. when i first started coming here, over a decade ago, i didn’t realise it was vegetarian (although maybe the rumpled surliness should have been a clue?), because meat has never been the main event for me. but then i noticed that sometimes it was hard to get people to come along with.

the thing is, you would not feel like you were missing out if you ordered — as i did, yesterday — the mediterranean breakfast. when it arrived at the table, i think i may have gasped, or at least, inhaled audibly. the previously surly waitress caved in and smiled a little. “enjoy that,” she allowed.

and how can you not? four wedges of toasted turkish bread, topped with fried eggs, sprinkled with za’atar; fried haloumi; fried eggplant; pickles; olives; slices of tomato and cucumber. a veritable bazaar on a plate, and the only downside to such generosity is that if you try to work it such that you are alternating bites of everything, instead of say, eating all the lovely crunchy, salty, melty haloumi in one go, the cheese would have cooled down by the time you’re halfway through, and taken on the squeaky-between-the-teeth consistency which is less than ideal.

but it was otherwise perfect, perfect with a pot of actual, brewed chai. too many cafes serve damn chai lattes made up with too sweet flavoured syrup, but this handsome teapot is full of leaves and twigs, pours four glasses of spicy, not-too-sweet tea, and the last serve gives you a heartening gingery warmth in the back of your throat.

in a little over an hour i was well-fortified, though perhaps a little too distended in the belly, to try on a pair of $18 jeans at target up the street. i’d been looking forward to seeing the veronicas’ new fashion line, and although i liked the little chain with the dangly plastic punkrock charms hanging off a miniskirt… it was all just too red and black, and besides, everything was child-sized 7 to 14. well! just the jeans then.

things were going according to plan: i met up with an old flying monkey at the UTS gallery for the fun exhibition, + & – = X, 20 years of typo-graphics from the tokyo type directors club, before adjourning for long, long lunch at xic lo in chinatown. it’s not especially tasty here, but today at least, the summer rolls were fresh, and the “healthy drink” — barley, ginko nuts, dried longan, red dates and strips of seaweed in a sweet brown syrup, topped with a hillock of shaved ice — did a good job of pretending it wasn’t just a glass of sugar water.

and then suddenly the afternoon was mostly over, and it was time to spring the kid from playschool. i found her out back, shoeless and lightly dusted — like a cinnamon donut — with sand from the pit, and we headed back up broadway for an afternoon bun at breadtop with some good folk from a distant past. there are people with a grudging and uneasy relationship with facebook, but having orchestrated recent reunions with long-lost friends, over facebook, over baked goods no less, i cannot say that it is a bad thing.

nellie?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 1 September 2007 at 10:28 pm

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

my other weakness, you may know, is “the new yorker“. so i was pleased — acting on a sedaris tipoff — to stumble upon this slideshow of food-themed covers in the upcoming food issue. just look at that gorgeous wayne thiebaud painting!

(upcoming in sydney, i mean. i guess it’s already out across the pacific.)

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 August 2007 at 8:14 am

permalink | filed under bookshelf

the cakes they are a-changin’.

i was studying the jewelcase at zumbo when counterboy said, casually, “all the cakes are going.” i guess i’d known this for a couple of weeks, having heard it from the pastryman himself one afternoon — that he’d been working on the new spring menu — but being suddenly confronted with the news that i would not see these familiar cakes again before the week was through, it was a little too much to bear.

my immediate thoughts were, “i shall finally have to try the wheelie good” and “i shall finally have to try the houdini”. but this is the quandary i face every time i go in anyway; it’s just, now there was a deadline. “take the wheelie good,” counterboy said helpfully, “houdini will still be here on the weekend.”

the first question that you might ask yourself is, how does this cake stand up by itself? followed by, how do i eat this? and i can tell you that the entire white-chocolate-coated affair is held securely in place, on its little golden platform, with a dollop of said chocolate. i sliced through its middle — a belt of roughly chopped pistachios and macadamias — and ate it one half at a time.

when i first arrived in australia, in the very late 80s, my favourite after-school, petrol station-snacks were polly waffles and wagon wheels. it was the marshmallow that done it; marshmallows don’t do so well in the moist tropics, and this glut of biscuit-coated marshmallow was all a bit wonderful and new for a marshmallow-deprived immigrant.

but the wheelie good surpasses all fond memories of chocolate-covered jam-marshmallow-biscuit sandwich. sure, the engineering is the same, but the wagon wheel biscuits were never as crisp on the outside, chewy and light in the middle as this pistachio dacquoise. i may never again eat a marshmallow-and-jam confection, but i would not say no to more of this lemon-infused mascarpone creme, with its hidden chunks of stewed apples and apricots.

it looks like a hamster wheel, does it not, this cake?

here’s another story: remember back in february, when i returned from a trip to singapore with a pair of running shoes and an ipod shuffle? the shuffle held one song for months — “take on me” — and then some podcasts, and then i added “punk farm” for the kid… and the shoes were still pristine in their box, until last friday.

yes, i, who do not run, often not even for buses, ran. because, alas, the cake-eating business is a flabby old business. i ran for ten minutes, on a treadmill, and it was awful. and then four days later, i ran again. the second time, i’d finally put together a playlist on my ipod, called, “run run run”. it consists solely of up-tempo you am i and ratcat tunes, and it made a galaxy of difference. pounding along to “flagfall $1.80“, i didn’t even feel the pain so bad.

if you want to see the winter cakes at zumbo, you might have to run too.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 August 2007 at 10:56 pm

permalink | filed under cake, soundtrack

i’d been watching it take shape over the last month or so, this shell of a shop next to gleebooks, on glebe point road. i’d been watching it specifically because once when i went past, there was a sign taped to the dusty window, which said, “chocolateria san churro coming soon”.

and then, last friday, there it was. pretty much open for business as i walked by after dropping the kid off at playschool, except for a ladder right in the middle of the dining room and two freshly jigsawed holes in the plywood shelf in the window.

monday afternoon, because this is the way we are, deborah met me and the kid out front. the holes had been plugged with miniature chocolate fountains, and the ladder had been removed, but when we stepped inside, the first inhalation was all paint fumes rather than sweet chocolate. we sought to remedy that in a hurry.

this was supposed to be lunch; we had debated the issue for a couple of days, and decided that to do justice to the chocolate, we should make it the main course rather than just dessert (but it’s never just dessert anyway, is it? is it?). so instead of just chocolate shakes, we had the chocolate shakes with whipped cream, and the alfajore, and the fried chocolate truffles.

the classic chocolate shake, made with premium 60% cocoa ice cream, comes to the table one foot high, topped with another couple inches of whipped cream and a good scattering of chocolate shavings. it is wonderful. the alfajore is two light, crunchy biscuits with a rich chocolate flavour, sandwiching smooth-as dulce de leche, whipped cream, and a drizzle of chocolate. it may not be an authentic rendition of the south american confection, but it is nonetheless, um, wonderful. the fried chocolate i had to get, because it sounded just crazy — loco, really — and it was! crazy good! you bite into the freshly fried nuggets, all thin crunchy shell, and then suddenly, molten dark chocolate is running down your chin. it comes three to a serve, on a bed of milk chocolate flakes, and it was lucky there were three of us to share it, or someone would have died. (me.) if the batter hadn’t tasted so slightly of oil, meh, these would have been wonderful too.

we had only just begun, and then the kid started speaking very, very fast. you could not even make out the words she was saying; they were sounds involving the rolling of her tongue. perhaps she was speaking spanish? funnily, i started speaking very, very slowly. “oh, you are speaking quickly, ” said deborah, “it’s just that time is moving very quickly too.”

and then something, and something, and something. and there was giggling, that i remember, and some slumping. and at some point we had to stop the waitress from clearing the plates with the chocolate flakes and the caramel-smeared cookie pieces. well, i thought i had to stop the waitress; everyone else had stopped eating by then.

so, yeah. it was great. i had only managed to walk past the one on brunswick street the last time i was in melbourne, but the time before that, i had come out of there with a spicy hot chocolate in one hand and a tray of fat, crunchy churros and chocolate dipping sauce in the other, a fine balancing act all the way to the playground by the museum. and now, i will no longer have to fly south to OD on chocolate: it is only a busride away.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 August 2007 at 11:28 pm

permalink | filed under around town, chocolate

~~say, could you help me out?~~

how often do you visit ragingyoghurt?
– i come by every day.
– i drop in once a week.
– i pop in every now and then.
– this is my first time here… but it won’t be my last.
– this is my first time here and i’m never coming back.

would you like this blog better (and visit more) if it had permalinks and a feed?
– yes! embrace the new technology! it is 2007!
– no, i like it just fine the way it is, with its luddite charms.

do you care for zumbo?
– bloody hell. it’s all you write about. enough already.
– it’s all you write about, but i like it!
– zumbo? hadn’t noticed a skew. just keep doing whatever it was you were doing.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 August 2007 at 9:47 am

permalink | filed under blog

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