breakfast of champions: chocolate sprinkles on bread and butter. what better to fuel a bout of saturday morning yoga.
it’s a frabjous day when you discover a new gelato place with a flavour you just want to lick straight out of the display tub, and then mere hours later your cousin txts, requesting a gelato date.
approaching lunch hour the next day, we fronted up at the counter and ordered, me stuttering c-c-c-c for long seconds as my brain short circuited between cup or cone. it ended up being cone, and what a cone. sam chose raspberry, no, butter pecan, um, no, raspberry. oh, actually butter pecan, with lovely patient scoopergirl hovering her gloved arm over one then the other. of course, white chocolate raspberry was the scoop of the bottom of both our cones.
and good lord, it was a milky feast, frozen raspberries unsurfaced with every lick. the butter pecan was buttery, and the pistachio slightly gritty on the tongue with that ground-up nut texture. …why are you still sitting there reading?
i’ve migrated to another server, which necessitated some alternative coding. which means nothing to me, only that the new pages looked crap until i changed something. um, but maybe now it looks crap to you. is the text little and grey with pink links? or is it ugly 12pt times roman, and black and blue with underlines on the links? please leave a horrified comment if it’s the latter. thank you. we apologise for any ugliness.
if yer walking through the scrum that is the underground passageway between town hall station and the queen victoria building (and beyond), and you inadvertantly look backward towards the space beneath the escalators that used to be a flower shop, you will be surprised (or not, seeing as this has been the current growth sector of the small portable food industry for the last couple of years, following sushi roll holes-in-the-walls and those goddamn city convenience stores) to find that it has become a gelato stand called, i think, “mondo”.
it’s one of those places where the gelato is piled high above the stainless steel tubs, with specimens of the raw product that is the main flavour base perched on the crest. in the front corner of the glass case is a milky white mountain studded through with red. it looks like alpine springtime, snow thinning to reveal new blossoms beneath. this is the flavour: white chocolate and raspberry. i want some.
i should be blogging more regularly, no? maybe you really want to know about the leftover fish congee that i had for dinner last night while watching last week’s “ER” on videotape, or the picnic embarked on, solo, last friday at cremorne point (cheese and tomato with seeded mustard and mayonnaise sandwich, a mandarin and two spicy fruit roll biscuits, on a rock, under a tree, watching the spirit of tasmania sail into the harbour).
you might think that being in the family way, as i am, would result in adventures in more and better eating, what with the crazy food cravings and the eating for two and all, but it’s all been very normal: no weird food has been desired, no extra portions dished out. i can’t even provide pitiful stories of throwing up and having to eat nothing but dry crackers and flat gingerbeer. i could blog about pregnancy in general, but really, everything is so… normal, and other people do it so well already.
slowly, though, i’m outgrowing all my clothes, and the speed at which my intestines fill up with gas is most alarming. a bit past halfway, if there’s one effect on good eating that being knocked up has had, it’s that i can’t fit as much food in my stomach at one go as i once could. here is last night’s conversation with my sister:
nellie: how’s the baboo?
bowb: good. umm. it’s growing. it’s taking up too much space in my belly.
nellie: hah! no space for food!
bowb: yah!
nellie: heh! resentful…
lordy, is that the time? i must go make some mushrooms on toast.
argh. my life seems to be happening faster than i can blog it. the thing is, i don’t seem to have anything to show for it and i suspect this may have to do with the number of naps being taken.
yesterday, though, no naps were had, and as a result i was able to make pizza (with flour and yeast and tepid water, and kneading and rising!), one with pumpkin, tomato, red onion, chili salami and fetta, and one with a hoisin sauce base topped with slivered ginger and spring onion, sesame oil-drizzled broccoli and some incredible, sweet and tender char siu, the best hostess gift ever, from ben.
so, i think that you must go see the film “control room“, a very non-propoganda documentary about behind the scenes of the media covering the um… war? in iraq. it’s full of charming, articulate, smart people — which you rarely get to see once the evening news goes to air with the rubble and people firing guns into the air and boiled-down soundbites — and then some really squirmy clips of misters bush and rumsfeld. mrngh.
if you see it at the valhalla, you can walk back up glebe point road after and pop into badde manors for a double scoop of pistachio gelato and sour cherry sorbet. or instead (and this necessitates a special trip back to glebe on my part) you can walk over to chinatown for yumcha. either way, it will be an excellent way to spend a sunny winter morning, packed with education, exercise, tasty treats and fun.
hurray for the queen; if not for her royal highness, there would be no public holiday to celebrate her birthday, in a land sorely lacking in public holidays. monday, given the choice between filing photocopies into a stack of new folders, and going for an excursion to cabramatta, the boy wisely chose not to file. that’s why he’s the school teacher. not too soon, we were on a good train — an express service with no stupid, reasonless stops inbetween stations, and airconditioned — whizzing our way out west.
a very short walk from cabramatta station, we fell into a small dimsum factory and found ourselves in possession of a small paper bag each of assorted dumplings. not ten minutes later, i was perched at a bakery counter, handing over $1.20 for a wedge of pandan chiffon cake. we decided we had to put a stop to this disgraceful behaviour by sitting down to lunch.
egg noodles, glisteny with garlicky oil, and an assortment of roast duck and porks.
something happens to the boy, where having eaten his fill, he is rendered incapable of thinking about and preparing for subsequent meals. fortunately i am free of this sad affliction, and despite our post-lunch activity being primarily the quest for a bamboo steamer (so much harder to find than you would expect in such an intense asian community), my cloth bag slowly (quickly) filled up with these:
an assortment from lawrence cake shop: green and red jelly cakes, a pandan slice and — oh happy nostalgia — a cream horn; and this:
the label says “sticky rice cake”, but in fact it is black sticky rice, and pandan flavour sticky rice, and sandwiched inbetween, mung bean paste and shredded coconut and ground-up peanuts, wrapped in a pancake. surprisingly, the rice is sweet, the mung bean salty, and it is all extremely flavoursome;
and a tub of ginger flavour tofu pudding, and bag of dried longans from thailand.
we were there only for two and a half hours, but it was freakishly warm for winter, and we were wilting. later that night, a dinner made up of a selection of exotic cakes revived us.
at the deli counter in david jones food hall, it is possible to get ham in a variety of serving portions. sure, there will always be a certain elegance to “sliced”, and a manic joy to “shredded”, but what i did end up with was “chunks”.
saturday afternoon, still a bit spacey from yoga and too many squatting exercises, i simmered half a bag of frozen peas with a potato and three chunks of ham. the fourth chunk had, minutes earlier, been finely chopped and sauteed with an onion. after a bit, everything but the chunks was blended into a mass of the most soothing pink-flecked green, and then there was this bowl of pea and ham soup, eaten maybe too quickly with pieces of sourdough.
mmm… soup… next i think it will be cauliflower and bacon.
after that last cherry-flavoured entry, i stumbled into the warehouse of wonder that is fratelli fresh, and emerged quite some time later with a sourdough loaf, a bunch of radishes, four little blocks of hazelnut chocolate that must have been made by little magic people, a jar of cherry jam, and a jar of cherries in syrup. “someone likes cherries,” opined the checkout girl. but, i mean, what a jar.
so far the jar has remained unmolested, but i have a feeling that if i were to rub it a little, a genie might pop out and grant me a lifetime of cherries and/or cherry-related treats. at the very least, he would expand on the label pasted on the lid, helpful with its instructions to “serve with ice cream, gateaux, whipped cream, desserts.”
these days i am quite enamoured of my new nivea cherry lipbalm — “daily care with a Cherry flavour” (their proper noun).
i was walking through priceline the other week, trying to ignore the aisle of discounted lindt chocolate bars, when it crossed my mind that my existing raspberry and vanilla lipbalm felt quite out of date. literally so, for when i put it on, my lips get a bit itchy. moments later i fronted up at the counter with a fresh supply of iron supplements, new lipbalm… and five lindt bars.
the lipbalm now sits by my keyboard, and throughout the day, even when my lips aren’t too crusty with sticky-out bits of dried winter skin, i can unscrew the cap just to inhale that sweet sweet cherry aroma.
ps. it was only after i bought my cherry lipbalm that i remembered i will soon be getting my hands on one of these, via new york, norway, stockholm, paris and singapore, on the wings of a nellie.
