i will scream my lungs out ’til it fills this room /
how much difference does it make?
– “indifference“, pearl jam
out in the western suburbs on thursday, during a lunchtime lebanese feast with the kids at ice, i received a txt which said: “maeve is hot and grumpy and wilt. we will come home.”
hungh.
they had only been gone two nights. i was midway through a bottle of intriguing tamarind fizzy, and reaching for my third helping of rice and lentils. i hadn’t been out to granville in about three years, but there were projects to discuss… and isn’t it nice sometimes to be more than an email address? and shouted lunch at the intern’s farewell luncheon? even when it’s crazy hot outside? yes!
after, ben walked me to the new cake shop in town, el sweetie, all shiny marble and wood panelling and boxy leather couches and as promised, a monster, flat-screen tv. of course, the monster trays of lebanese sweets were much more enticing, especially this one: kashta with pistachio.
a layer of crumbly cake, then crushed pistachios, then moist and delicately scented kashta, then more crumbs and a scattering of more nuts. you know how sometimes you have a piece of baklava, and it’s good and all, but you think that maybe it’s too cloying sweet or too nutty? this cake has none of those problems. my slice survived the train and bus rides home, and was divine with a cup of vanilla tea later that afternoon.
shortly after, the boy arrived back home too, with a limp child draped on his shoulder, and car, boots, clothes awash with vomit.
following hamfest 2006 in the dusty brown, we drove back to the green(ish) city, and i promptly fried up a wok of noodles with four kinds of green vegetables, to accompany fat fillets of salmon crusted with sesame furikake. not two days later i was thinking about what to make for lunch, and most unexpectedly, the thought that popped into my head was: ham and tomato sandwich.
that time, i think i settled for sliced tomatoes on bread-and-butter — they might even have been yellow tomatoes. but a few days ago, as i ate a pretty good sandwich, i said to the boy, “d’you know what would go really well with this turkish bread, hommous, baba ghanouj, tomato and rocket?”
he only hesitated the slightest moment before replying, “what?”
“lamb!” i said.
“that would be good,” he said, before heading into the kitchen and rummaging around the fridge. “and here’s a piece of grilled lamb right here, from last night!”
it was even dusted in cumin.
minutes later he sat on the couch taking large boy-bites out of his sandwich, constructed exactly as i had described. mine was still good, but maybe not quite as good. “is it delicious?” i asked.
“yes.”
he was kind enough to buy a packet of lamb chops the evening before his road trip, and we had them on the balcony — salted and peppered before being thrown on the barbeque — with fried rice, because i hadn’t known that he was bringing home the meat. there was enough left over for a lamb sandwich encore the next night, with a side of swedish dillchips that kind deborah brought me from ikea weeks ago.
i had been saving them for a special occasion; and here it was, with boy and kid somewhere in newcastle, and me on my balcony on a cool summer evening with the peace, quiet and a copy of “the new yorker” for company.
you know that episode of “friends”, where joey is halfway through reading “little women”, and it’s not looking too good for beth, so to spare joey any trauma, rachel puts the book in the freezer? i wish someone had taken the copy of “oscar and lucinda” i was reading, and shoved it deep, deep in the frosty depths of one of the three freezers in the old house at the rock.
but, no. and now, trauma. i’d thought it would be a good chronological following on from “the secret river”. how can a man, peter carey, invent such a story within the confines of an average-sized human head? my head tries to blog a lucky last entry for the year, and i get distracted on some other page, pondering the second chance to avail myself of the complete “sex and the city” boxset, with portable pink dvd player, now only $269.83… and an hour (and one fireworks display) later, i’m finishing paragraph number two.
tops.
i looked out the balcony earlier this afternoon, and saw the barge moored a little way off, and it struck me like a kick in the guts, that it had been a whole year since i posted pictures of the amazing fireworks display i’d seen, just me perched on the balcony railing, and i remembered it so clearly, like it was maybe just a couple of weeks ago. not fifty-two.
but so. a week in the parched country heart of new south wales, with not too much to do but read about new south wales a hundred and fifty years ago. midway through, i asked the boy, “i wonder, if all the migrants ever left tomorrow, would the aborigines go back to their dreamtime existence, or would they…” i wasn’t sure exactly how to continue: would they successfully take over the lifestyle shaped by this many years of white settlement? would they keep sniffing glue and petrol? would they embark on a crazy spree of looting and pillaging?
but the boy, being quick, seemed to pick up where i had trailed off. “well, the centrelink cheques would dry up pretty quickly, wouldn’t they?” which, i guess, still leaves the question unanswered. thinking, on the outside, is most unproductive.
but for the most part, in the last week, we sat around, moving from one room to another, trying to find the cool room on the hot days, and the warm room on the strange freezing ones. we ate ham, ham, ham over days and days, and then for a change we headed up (twice!) to the chinee restaurant at the rock bowling club, the only restaurant in town, and the only eating establishment (out of two) open over xmas.
short soup, honey king prawns, sizzling beef, prawn crackers, fried rice (with ham), vegetable omelette, combination chow mein, satay chicken, steamed dimsims, garlic king prawns, mongolian lamb, sizzling black pepper steak, deluxe combination. and a plate of hot chips, thanks.
we cut slabs out of the tray of baklava from the hellenic bakery, warmed them in the microwave and topped them with blue ribbon vanilla ice cream. we went through tins of beetroot. we sliced more ham off the bone. we devoured a festive pavlova, green in the base and crowned in a cloud of pink whipped cream. there were two birthdays, and four birthday cakes. there were boxes (and boxes) of lindt chocolates. on the last night, there was a magnificent sausage sizzle with fifty or so assorted snags, a large glass bowl holding two tins worth of whole baby beetroots, a small melanine bowl of buttered, salted corn. a pity, the salad from a couple nights before did not make a re-appearance: sliced hard boiled eggs and sliced celery, in mayonnaise. yum.
two hours now to the big fireworks display. the nine o’clock one — family fireworks — which this year could be seen from our balcony, and which must have cost an extra billion or so dollars, only succeeded in perplexing the kid. head buried in the boy’s shoulder while we two gasped and wowed, and really meant it! they can make pink fireworks which explode into the outline of lovehearts! and this new one, which quietly puffs out into clusters of golddust, just lovely.
happy new year. see you ’round.
passionflower, in chinatown, has a new set of menus. the clean white matt celloglazed foldouts are a sight to behold — quite the encyclopedia of exotic ice cream sundaes — but the hike in prices was a bit less pretty.
for example, i remember the eastern banana split that i had the last time cost around $12. it has been renamed eastern sunrise, and costs $13.50, which, fortunately, is about all that i’d want to pay for a waffle basket filled with green tea, taro and sticky rice ice cream, slices of banana and a lychee-orange compote. mmm…
as it was, the kid ate all but one of the banana slices, and then proceeded to dig into the big ice creamy mountain with her little plastic spoon that we had swiped earlier from the counter. (apparently if you ask the waitperson for an extra metal spoon, they charge you $1.25, so be warned.) i was torn between eating slowly to savour my $13.50 ice cream, and eating quickly so that i’d actually get any ice cream at all. in the end i was scooping great big spoonfulls, and then slowly devouring each one.
we were having sundaes on a sunday, because it was the boy’s birthday, and we’d gone out for early dimsum with a friend of the boy, whose birthday it was too. and now we know that early dimsum means not too many trolleys out, and an endless wait (in vain) for the stuffed, braised eggplant, and being back out on the street much earlier than planned with much less dumpling under the belt.
ah well, because just before 11.30 on a sunday morning is perhaps the best time to visit passionflower. no loud young people lolling about the booths, and no terrible young people’s music shouting out of the speakers. the only music we hear wafts down from the photo sticker machines upstairs. it is like a siren’s call, i tell you: we are halfway up the stairs before the table is cleared.
although we left the boys downstairs, of course. there’s something very stadler and waldorf about this, don’t you think?
the new and unexpected thing i discovered about my sister the other day, while i was telling her on the phone about how i had panfried ocean trout fillets with crispy salted skin, and made an enormous amount of buttery mash to go with, out of three mole-sized golden delight potatoes, and put together a large bowl of buttered and lightly salted steamed greens (broccoli, zucchini, peas and cabbage) to round it off… is that she does not care for buttered vegetables.
huh.
“but, green vegetables,” i explained, “with butter.”
“yeeeaaah… eh,” she confirmed.
tchk.
but the other thing i know she doesn’t so much care for, because she told me so maybe last year, is leftover pasta. like, not sauced or anything. just that extra tangle of noodles you find in the strainer at the end of dinner, because you can never judge how much dry pasta to put in the pot, because who knows how much a handful of dry pasta will expand in a body of rapidly boiling water.
well. probably jamie oliver knows.
do you like jamie oliver? i am still not sure. his food always looks delicious, but his tv persona is so tiresome. and even then, just that smartarse, jumping-about-the-kitchen, slightly spluttery cooking show persona, mind. the other jamie, the reality tv jamie, to whom bad things happen, is altogether much more likeable. i could not not watch “jamie’s kitchen”, or “school dinners” or, most recently, “jamie’s kichen australia”… which didn’t have so much jamie in it actually, and certainly not quite enough tobie.
i do not own any jamie oliver cookbooks, but when i recently came into possession of a 50% off voucher…
[ if you subscribe the the borders email newsletter, they send you discount vouchers every week. ]
…i was convinced i would have to finally buy “jamie’s dinners“, which i look at every now and again in a bookshop. apart from being a lively collection of fun typography and intensely colourful pictures, it is also full of the sort of food i make / would make. but standing in front of the wall of cookbooks, it occurred to me that since i already make this sort of food, i didn’t need to get a whole book on the subject. nevermind. perhaps i would get “jamie’s italy” instead. it was right there on the shelf, and i had not been able to not watch the tv show, and i really like italian food.
and then i remembered that i could not get any more cookbooks ever, least of all an italian one, because nellie had only the other week sent me, via amazon.de, “made in italy“, a weighty tome by giorgio locatelli. it is an engrossing read, this one, not just a stack of recipes, but a mix of history and culture and photographs of noble butchers and their meats.
so instead, the kid got that maisy book that folds out to become a 3D paper playhouse with a cut-out maisy doll and a closet full of paper clothes.
i tell you lots of stories! but there is a point, see. in the fridge, i had a box of leftover fettucine, which i had oiled to keep from clumping before i stored it. yesterday, lunchtime, the cold noodles separated agreeably to be tossed with a beaten egg, some finely-grated cheese, pepper and salt. i put oil in a frypan; i fried three rounds of noodle fritters. golden crunchy carbs, with salty cheesy bits and peppery bits, and brown crunchy bits where a stray noodle sat too long in a bit of oil. fried up cold pasta, who’d’ve thought. i saw this, in a jamie oliver cookbook.
and the locatelli? it has a whole chapter on gelato, but chapter risotto came in very handy last night, when i finally decided that i could probably omit the wine in the recipe to not so much detriment. (giorgio locatelli would probably disagree because every one of his risotto recipes called for a glass, but.) plus, i really needed to use up that expired arborio rice in the pantry, two huge tubs out of the many that my uncle swiped from his job at the rice company, more rice than he knew what to do with.
and i had sausages — chicken, rocket and tomato sausages. so sausage and pea risotto, from the book. it was a lot of stirring in a hot kitchen on a hot evening, longer than the recipe hinted at, but for the first risotto, after years of being intimidated, it was awright.
[ chris ware in “the new yorker” ]
and my favourite lunch? not the about life grilled haloumi salad. it is possible to have too much haloumi in a grilled haloumi salad. despite the best intentions of the well-dressed rocket, red capsicum and grilled zucchini to balance it out, every cheesy morsel will burn its way down your throat, leaving a salt trail that the icy mango-watermelon-vanilla-orange beverage will not wash away. and because it is not freshly grilled haloumi salad, but one picked from several large bowls in the glass case, each one of the six or seven slices will also be cold and rubbery.
on the plus side, the salt really disguised the coldness. as burning!
damn, that was salty.
we caught the bus to the newsagent, where the thanksgiving new yorker was not only the cartoon issue, but also came with four different chris ware covers. truly, today is the day where generousity becomes a curse. but i managed to buy just one. and now i see that you can download the series, with an online comic strip thrown in (so you can see the pie and sandwich in action). and a chris ware interview mp3.
well. it got me excited, anyway.
the boy has a different relationship to food than i have. in that he seems not to need it. sort of. case in point: on any given schoolday, he will break fast with a large mug of sweet, milky coffee, all the sustenance required for a day of beating (metaphorically) classrooms-full of disinterested, grunting teenage boys into submission. in theory, there is recess, and lunch, but apparently there is playground duty to be done at recess, and like, detention or something, everything, to attend to at lunch, so he goes all day without eating. he arrives home in the mid-afternoon, grumpy and hungry, and growling, “i haven’t eaten anything since last night.” but still, wearing this hunger like a badge of pride.
can it be that all the other teachers are not eating all day either? what is the teachers’ federation doing to earn their annual membership dues? what are they striking for if not for recess and lunchtimes for all?
yesterday, there was an extended period of rustling, organisational noises upon his return, and then he lumbered downstairs to announce, “i just bought $170 worth of groceries.” part of it, at least, had gone towards the 6-pack of toilet paper under his arm. “i bought us lots of treats,” he said. “i think it was because i was starving when i got to the supermarket.”
and so, there is a tower of tinned sardines in the pantry. there is bacon in the chiller, and vanilla coke; ice cream in the freezer; just one packet of timtams on the counter, because the other is already open, and stashed away in the fridge.
maybe the teachers’ union isn’t doing such a bad job after all. (oh yes you are, slackers!)
as for the rest of the household… you must have already surmised that we are obsessed with food. we build playdough cakes during the day. “this is pretend food,” i stress, “so we just pretend to eat it.” she holds a sticky bun a half centimetre from her mouth, and says, “eat, eat, eat.”
what is this? two posts in two days?
it’s just, work finally dried up enough for me to send my everyday computer to the shop (by sunday, when it went, it was shutting itself down after 40 minutes), and the flowerpower imac that sits, humming noisily, in the corner, is pretty much just good for one thing these days. well, two things, if you count the pixel painting kid pix studio deluxe. yeah, pitas is one of like, the five websites still accessible on OS9 IE5.
so, work, two months of vague unwellness and two weeks of intense, specific illness — i’m sure i have developed an infected sinus in the last few days, for the entire left side of my face feels like its being crushed in a vice — and now, time.
i am reading three books at once. three! which i’ve heard of people doing in the past, but always thought i’d be unable to. it’s not so hard; i suppose it helps that they are each quite different, so there’s no getting characters or storylines mixed up. and these days i’m getting better at switching on the different sections of my brain as the situation dictates: read a maisy book? sure! build a kind of a house out of blocks? yeah! hey, you kicked it over! build it again? why not! now you want some grapes? in a green bowl? ok!
the kid got me “the secret river” by kate grenville for my birthday. looks like she’s inherited the boy’s penchant for historical novels about early settlers to new south wales. i’m balancing that out with the kitchen capers of “julie and julia“, which i guess y’all know is the result of another blogger with a bookdeal.
the surprise entry into the mix, just arrived yesterday from my good sister, is “mammon inc.“, whose author, i’ve just read reviewed, “might not be in the class of maugham et al, but she is one of singapore’s recent literary successes.” quite. i much prefer nellie’s endorsement: “i read it with a troubled and furious avidity; there was much gnashing of teeth.”
not too much gnashing of teeth today. yet. it’s true: the twos are terrible. but by lunchtime, we’d been to two playgrounds, with starbucks inbetween. cleverly, she chose the fruit mince tart, festooned with a biscuit star. it was moist and sweet, a perfect accompaniment to a babycino wearing a chocolate smile in a festive xmas cup, and a gingerbread chocolate frappucino.
