| GIRL
| ARCHIVE
| BEYOND
| SHOP
oh nellie. stop this insane notion that you must leave tomorrow. what can we do but have a last hurrah.
a last hurrah at happy chef. a last hurrah with the fancy french pastries. a last hurrah folding up the sofabed, way too early in the morning. a last hurrah of a salty, vinegary potato scallop. a last hurrah singing call-and-answer showtunes. a last hurrah on a ferry, in the last (hurrah) winter sun.
Served on Tuesday, August 31, 2004 at 07:57 a.m.
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after yoga, after a long walk up to the main road, after a slow ride on the 380, after a time spent deciding what fish would be best battered and fried, and how many potato scallops to get, we finally sat down at a picnic bench facing the sea. it was just short of 4pm, lunchtime this saturday. between us and the view of sparkling bondi, a hefty blue eyed cod and a pile of chips, and two potato scallops.
something happens when chips are served up with anything. the anything is momentarily forgotten as you try to cram fat, hot, salty potato into your mouth. will you be so lucky (or restrained) this time that the delicate skin behind your front teeth will not end up scalded and hanging in painful little ribbons from the roof of your mouth?
and what of the batter? what of that last piece of crunchy brown that fell off the fish sometime during the eating?
"what shall i do with this batter?" i asked.
"leave it," said nellie.
"i know." i said this only because i thought she'd said "eat it".
i'm not sure how the misunderstanding was cleared up, but there were still chips on the greaseproof paper, and i knew what fate would befall me, and them, if i didn't throw them to the gulls.
my overarm was unstoppable, hurling chips one after the other at the horrible, beady-eyed things. the air was filled with birds and squawking and chips, and finally, that last piece of batter. my eyes were still filled with fire. i never felt so alive.
Served on Monday, August 23, 2004 at 06:29 p.m.
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following too much dimsum at kamfook in chatswood on friday, we waddled slowly and sleepily like fat little puppies (yet bouyantly and almost hysterically, what with the little bubbles of oxygen pumping through our veins -- this always happens in the situation i'm about to type) down the aisles of the asian supermarket next door.
ah, jusco. such a trevor trove of japanese candy (including a broad selection of yoghurt and calpis flavoured treats) and instant noodles and exotic beverages. and this: a little cup of biscuit fingers with a pot of chocolate and sprinkles for dipping. based on my highschool level reading of the chinese print on the label, it seems to have come out of the indonesian branch of arnotts, specifically for the hong kong and taiwan market, and the packaging is ocha-ken.
gasp! who is tea dog?
via jascii.net: ocha-ken is a really short anime about tea. it's about a little green puppy with tea-leaf ears named ryoku whose nose always tells him when there's tea made just right to be had. he has a lot of different-coloured dog friends who also seem to love tea and coffee. the first episode, "have you been making tea lately?" is about how hard it is to make the perfect tea, not too hot, cold, thin, thick, but just right. when ryoku smells that perfect tea, he calls all his friends and they go over to hana, the purple dog's place, where they see she's being a great hostess. tea is the best, isn't it? when you're drinking it, maybe you, too, can see the cute little tea puppy!
who doesn't like tea? and ok, i don't want to be all weird about this, but look! you can get a plastic teapot toy, and it opens up into some sort of onsen situation where you and your different-coloured dog friends can drink tea and chat and have a dip in the hot spring:
um. management would like to apologise for the inordinate number of plugs in that post.
Served on Sunday, August 22, 2004 at 07:37 a.m.
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this week's getting away from me again, but oh how good it feels to see the deadlines falling away. before the coming weekend tumbles unto me, i thought i'd just record for posterity the following facts about last weekend:
1. there was a drive beyond the blue mountains and up mount canobolas in orange, where capital W weather was experienced -- water fell from the sky, simultaneously, in three states (liquid, solid and um, flakey with six points), whited out the view in a fourth, and there was a windchill factor that made my skin break out in a welty rash not ten minutes out of the car.
2. there was, from a bakery in oberon, a wagon wheel as big as nellie's head.
Served on Thursday, August 19, 2004 at 04:28 p.m.
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i also just wanted to say that the cafe in the local shopping mall has pancakes with banana and maple syrup on the menu. except that the word "banana" has been crossed out and the word "bacon" written underneath.
that is all.
Served on Friday, August 13, 2004 at 12:35 p.m.
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i'm doing too much. i'm not doing enough. either way it seems to have resulted in this field of blog lying fallow.
aside from the nonstop happy rollercoaster of my sister being in town, i'm also working to a handful of print deadlines. this basically means that any given day involves moving between a pastry and a computer, maybe even three or four times a day. sometimes a great distance across inner-city suburbs is walked to get to a pastry, other times i only have to stumble downstairs to the kitchen. on these occasions, i hope the foetus is absorbing any extraneous kilojoules.
this morning, what awaits in brown paper bags strewn across the kitchen counter are: a blueberry brioche, a custard brioche, the biggest custard-filled, caramel-topped profiterole in the world (which the boy bought because of its resemblance to the enormous, pulsating, million calorie, poison-creme-filled dessert offered to homer in food critic mode), and a loaf of sourdough spelt fruit bread...
do your teeth hurt? a pot of strong black bush tea will help.
Served on Friday, August 13, 2004 at 08:04 a.m.
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electric bread machines? feh.
i have a boy who makes bread.
and then leaves three dough-streaked mixing bowls and a plethora of mixing utensils and a couple of baking trays in the sink. and a dusting of flour on the kitchen counter.
but still. bread.
Served on Thursday, July 29, 2004 at 08:43 a.m.
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you know what's weird? when you don't really go to a place -- say parramatta -- very often, and then a month or two after your last trip there you catch the train to a job-related meeting at said place, and you get there and bloody hell, the train station has moved! sure, it's only moved about 30m along the track, but when you descend the wide new escalators and exit the shiny new turnstiles and stand out on the street, facing unfamiliar buildings and streetscape, unfamiliar only by being 30m down from where you normally step out onto the footpath... you will be utterly confused.
ok, well *i* was confused.
but happily, i oriented myself in the end, made it to the meeting, had a salad, avocado and pesto wrap and cloudy lemonade lunch bought for me, and then found myself blissfully wandering the aisles of the wonderland that is harris farm market for half an hour. which is why i sit here now with a bag of sweet tart cherries in front of me, and a slab of triple cream brie downstairs in the fridge.
Served on Wednesday, July 28, 2004 at 04:20 p.m.
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crap. clearly, i have lost the ability to write. a whole week since getting back from whirlwind vacation jaunt, and alls i've had time for is to post a picture of a sugar-crusted apple turnover that was eaten on a sunny, grassy spot in narooma. a week gone by filled with werk to be done, dishes to be washed (and cups... so many cups), and um, actually that seems to be it. what the hell?
so, yvette, while that last "entry" may have appeared random, it was actually intended that a roundup of the fun and hijinx surrounding the pastry would soon follow.
alas. but look:
it was a short but intense roadtrip, bookended on one end by enormous and tasty fish and chips at summer-in-wintertime jervis bay, and on the other by a whole grilled trout with buttered almonds and three veg up in the wintery mountain town of adaminiby, "home of the giant trout". in the middle, aformentioned apple turnover, not quite enough baked treats from bakeries in small coastal towns, a cooler bag full of flavoursome mandarins that the boy had picked off his nanna's tree just the week before, a visit to the bega cheese factory...
...cheese samples, more breathtakingly gorgeous beaches than you could shake a bit of driftwood at, and -- two hours in from the sunny south coast -- alpine climes in the snowy mountains.
strange. we awoke in our toasty roadside motel, too early, to the sound of revving 4WDs and families setting off for the snowfields. watched the parade of beanies through the picture window, drinking motel tea and breakfasting on anzac biscuits. hot showered, dressed, stepped outside... and the snow had come to us. it was a just light dusting, and good lord! just like the books said! six points, and all unique! not quite an hour after driving past the statue of the trout in the town centre, there we were standing on the site of the old town of kiandra, except that kiandra was not visible under two feet of fresh powder snow.
well, i was surprised, anyway.
and now, bloody hell, a week's gone by, and what i've done is dishes, and scanning, and fixing up scans, and moving stuff around a page. this week coming up brings more (and more) of the same, but hurrah, culminates in the arrival of nellicent, who's been meeting, greeting and eating her way around the world, and finally, oh my god, makes it here.
yay a yay.
Served on Monday, July 26, 2004 at 09:38 a.m.
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Served on Wednesday, July 21, 2004 at 07:54 a.m.
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away... away... away down south in... um, dixie.
farewell!
Served on Wednesday, July 14, 2004 at 08:57 a.m.
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hmm. after a few hours of sleep, alternating left side, right side and on my back, i was awake at 3.30am, sitting up in bed with a tub of vanilla yoghurt, the "new yorker" summer fiction issue, and "rage" on in the background playing old silverchair videos, from back when they were a lowercase band.
i wasn't lucky enough to have the first "tomorrow" video included in the programming, where the band were little puppy boys loping across the screen (or even the second "tomorrow" video where mark pellington did a convincing job imitating his own "jeremy" video), but it sure was educational to see the progression over the years... as daniel grew his cheekbones and chris grew his neck and ben -- well, i guess ben just cut his hair -- and more significantly, how the music evolved, because i stopped really listening to the band after the second album.
a random line over at gempires: "grunge on the jukebox. we reminisce about pearl jam." made me think about how maybe i don't even have to reminisce about pearl jam because i frequently have them on the CD player, even the newer albums, especially at deadline time. i've seen both bands a bunch of times, the most memorable of which were: silverchair at their first big day out, where they played a little stage and the crowd to see them was so inversely big that you didn't have to stand up, you were just held up by everyone else; and being in the moshpit (twice!) at pearl jam, propped up against the security bar and looking up at eddie and feeling the voice just vibrate through me. how is it that i outgrew silverchair and not pearl jam?
watching the silverchair videos in the wee hours, it struck me that silverchair evolved in a way that pearl jam didn't: good old dependable three-guitar + bass + drum sound (and dammit, pearl jam even did the rock cliche of revolving door drummers) versus fancy orchestration and operatic tendencies. and thus, really, it was silverchair that had outgrown me.
this drivel was brought to you by the 3.30am waking hour, the tub of vanilla yoghurt and, oh bloody hell, ok, half a bag of sweet chili pretzels.
Served on Sunday, July 11, 2004 at 09:46 a.m.
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this skin just ain't big enough for the two of us.
Served on Saturday, July 10, 2004 at 05:41 p.m.
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so i could've spent today drawing a map of western sydney and delivering a bunch of artwork to a scanning place. instead i sat in a cafe in leichhardt, eating a plate of braised lentils pooled around a silverbeet-wrapped timbale of polenta and molten cheese. somewhat (completely) out of character (for me), my luncheon companion was mother-of-boy. this uncharacteristicness extended further into the afternoon, when sister-of-boy was met and an expedition launched to an eastern suburbs homeware emporium, where cake and coffee were had, and then somehow i managed to get everyone to each buy a pizza stone and cutter set. odd.
and then it started to rain. ^_^ aah.
perfect dvd-watching weather, really. the way this free DVD delivery trial works is you sign up and compile a list of DVDs from the database that you want to see, and they get sent out to you as they become available. it seems like maybe they also get sent out in alphabetical order, because so far what i've been sent are:
- 11'09"01 september 11
- 28 days later
- a mighty wind
then again, what showed up in my mailbox today was the "indiana jones" bonus material DVD, ahead of the "hulk" bonus material DVD.
[ what a thing to just be able to get the bonus material DVD and not the feature disc. i really do like the special features on a DVD, but they can't be just any old special features. like, if the package lists a particular film's special features as "theatrical trailer" or "subtitles", i get mildly irritated. did you ever watch the special features on "the man who wasn't there", and the deleted scenes included a sequence of billy bob thornton performing various curiously-named haircuts? that was cool. ]
is "raiders of the lost ark" a terrific movie or what? can anyone say they like steven spielberg (at least in the early days, before that unnecessary bit in "A.I." that began "and then a thousand years passed") without coming across all dawson leary? but damn they were fun films, and harrison ford was such a fine speciman of hero back then. mmm...
in "the making of..." you will see footage of tom selleck screentesting for the indiana role, and you will laugh out loud because really, it's magnum p.i.. and then you will learn that the sound effects guy made those squelchy snake noises down in the chamber by squelching his hands through his wife's cheese casserole.
what's a cheese casserole anyway?
i think i might want some.
Served on Wednesday, July 7, 2004 at 10:50 p.m.
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the mammoth task ahead of me this week, besides regular werk and meeting friends for luncheons, is culling my decade-old stash of magazines. i try and do this every few years, and it involves spending h o u r s sitting in front of the magazine shelf leafing through old spins and rolling stones and details and esquires and rayguns and bikinis, trying to decide which ones can be chucked out. remember that issue of details from 1991, with pretty young keanu all ted-like on the cover? that one is never even considered for the chuck pile. but the thing is, hardly any of the magazines seem to end up on the chuck pile. maybe, like, two.
so this is probably a really bad week to start my 30 day free dvd delivery trial; i don't know which will be more distracting, from each other as well as other werk at hand. but you, maybe you don't have such pressing matters as decade-old magazines to cull. if you live around these parts, you too could get free dvds for 30 days. i mean, when else is telstra gonna give you anything for free?
Served on Tuesday, July 6, 2004 at 04:28 p.m.
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breakfast of champions: chocolate sprinkles on bread and butter. what better to fuel a bout of saturday morning yoga.
Served on Saturday, July 3, 2004 at 10:59 a.m.
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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 [refer to previous entry], 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?
Served on Friday, July 2, 2004 at 10:02 a.m.
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achtung baby
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.
Served on Thursday, July 1, 2004 at 09:25 a.m.
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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.
Served on Wednesday, June 30, 2004 at 11:48 a.m.
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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.
Served on Tuesday, June 29, 2004 at 10:39 a.m.
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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.
Served on Monday, June 21, 2004 at 08:14 a.m.
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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.
Served on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 at 01:08 p.m.
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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.
Served on Tuesday, June 15, 2004 at 09:56 a.m.
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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."
Served on Friday, June 11, 2004 at 09:16 p.m.
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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.
Served on Thursday, June 10, 2004 at 08:51 a.m.
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have i become someone's browser's default homepage? the viewing pattern logged by my stats application seems to indicate so. who are you, mysterious denizen of IP address 211.31.1.x?
Served on Tuesday, June 8, 2004 at 04:46 p.m.
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the next best thing to being unemployed is being a freelancer at the end of a bunch of projects, where you can take half a day off and sit in the bastion of tranquility in the middle of the city -- the tea centre [specialists in tea of fine quality] -- sipping iced tea and nibbling on one of those dipped-in-chocolate, shortbread-and-jam sandwich biscuits, in the company of ...mmm... jake gyllenhaal. alas, it is only 2D jake on the cover of glossy airfreight GQ, so it turns out that the biscuit is much more enticing company.
when you buy loose leaf tea at the tea centre, the always smiley girls behind the counter measure it out of very large tins off the wall-to-wall shelving. if you are unsure, or confused, they are happy to shake the tin before lifting the lid just in front of your nose. inhale. if it is the stockholm blend, which is black tea with orange peel, vanilla pieces, apricot flavour, safflowers, calendula blossoms and rose petals, you will be overcome by the need to buy a packet. the shop girl will scoop the desired quantity into a blue or red cellophane-covered foil bag, sealed with one of those bendy wire thingys so that you can open it easily for another smell on the bus home.
i don't normally like fruity or flowery teas (and tisanes? pah!) but the vanilla (i guess) makes this smell like magic cake. magic! cake!
Served on Tuesday, June 8, 2004 at 04:14 p.m.
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oh it's winter. the sky is clear blue and there are birds chirping outside. if my washing machine wasn't broken i could be putting a load on and then spending the rest of the day smelling clean laundry ripening in the sun. the repairman is coming today "after twelve", which i got the friendly service desk lady to narrow down to "anywhere between twelve and three". sigh.
yesterday i queued for half an hour at medicare to claim $100, and then queued again (20 minutes) at medibank for another $100. i was just down the street from krispy kreme, but when i walked past all casual-like, the line was out the door and onto the street, and i just didn't think i could queue anymore, not even for donuts.
instead a brisk stroll brought me to il gianfornaio, where a slice of mushroom pizza was had, and two sicilian canoli packaged up to go: one with a dark chocolate custard and the other with fruit-and-chocolate-studded sweet ricotta. there was also a bottle of fanta, the remains of which i have just realised are still sitting in my mr friendly backpack next to my foot, instead of in the fridge for later.
[puts fanta in fridge]
so, the new fanta label says "now with 5% fruit". mysteriously there is not too discernable a difference in the taste of fruitless fanta and what is now described as a "fruit drink". i suppose it's 5%... what? healthier? i definitely didn't feel as ill as i normally do after drinking a bottle of fanta, but i suspect that has more to do with me just drinking a quarter of it.
i am rambling. why am i rambling? sleep deprivation? maybe i need some juice. or fanta.
Served on Tuesday, June 1, 2004 at 08:32 a.m.
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it's just that, the more hours i spend in front of mr computer doing actual werk, the less hours extra i want to spend sitting here writing. in addition, the volume of werk has an adverse effect on the type of adventures available to me.
want stories about me chasing up quotes from printers? it can cost between $300 to put a logo on 500 envelopes, and $1200. when you do show up at the $300 printer's premises after not hearing back from them regarding your questions about supplying artwork or payment, you will discover that their system can only accept eps files (but will be updated really soon to take pdfs too!), and their press can't print anything closer than 10mm from the edge. your client will not be too upset by this development, but he will ask that you make msword templates of envelope and letterhead so he can print them out as required. ugh, msword.
wurd.
fortunately there will still be days (a day) when you can disentangle from the mouse cable, and find yourself in granville sitting in a lebanese chicken shop by the train station, across the table from lena, overseeing a plate of half a grilled chicken, a dish of garlic puree, a dish of pickles, a shallow bowl of tabouli, a basket of flatbread and a little mound of chicken-salted chips, and everything will be eaten. after, she will take you on a tour of the main drag, including a stop at silly willy's, a $2 shop where you can get a pack of twelve multicoloured dishwashing sponges for... $2. and abla's, for a sitdown, a plate of sweet cheese and a cup of tea.
i believe i came away all culturally ignorant at abla's, walking along the counter of treats, pointing at each tray and asking the busy yet patient lady on the other side, "what's that? ...and um... what's that?". still, it yielded me a plastic platter (wih cut glass aspirations) of an assortment of pistachio pastries and a large custard-in-honeyed-filo contraption. it was meant to last for days, or, at least two days, but the boy ate his share before nightfall and the custard thing became school lunch the next day. a granville excursion is on the cards; the counter across the room had the rum babas and the chocolate cream cakes.
Served on Monday, May 31, 2004 at 08:19 a.m.
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a public service announcement: krispy kreme doughnuts opens its first city store at wynyard, 7am on tuesday. first person in line gets a year's supply of donuts. um. doughnuts.
a direct result of the impending opening as well as the enormous sugar-encrusted pastry wrapped in clingfilm and labelled "polish donut" i saw in a continental deli in randwick, was this dream i had two nights ago:
i was at a very large table in a hotel breakfast room watching my father have his morning coffee before he rushed off to a seminar. the coffee arrived at the table with an enormous sugar-encrusted donut. strewn across the table were the remains of breakfasts abandoned by other customers. these were all ornate silver trays, oval, about two feet long, bearing the crumbs and unfinished portions of a great variety of sugar-encrusted donuts. i walked my father to the lecture theatre, and it was clear that i would be returning to the breakfast room to have myself a tray of donuts too.
"and then i woke up, and it was all a dream."
Served on Friday, May 21, 2004 at 10:49 a.m.
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last night, after a large bowl of moonfish and calamari (and eggplant, zucchini, tomato, white bean, olive and parsley) stew on couscous --
no picture because i was so hungry it went just like that WHOOSH , and i only regretted the inhalation of dinner after it was all gone and i struggled, sitting straight, lying flat, perched cross-legged on a large cushion on the floor, pacing, pacing, to let the food find a balance in my bloated self
-- we sat (or perched or paced) and watched a documentary called "why planes fall", which included snippets of a play in which actors in the roles of cockpit crew recited actual lines recorded on doomed planes' blackboxes as they hurtled from the sky. i thought maybe it would make me never want to get on a plane again, but instead it was very reassuring. who woulda thought that something goes awry only once every one million flights, but there you go.
i have a cousin who is a commercial airline pilot, and we always suspected that he got into it so he'd have an excuse to wear aviator sunglasses.
the one thing two things i miss about airline travel is are emerging from the aeroplane and finding myself in new york, and airline food.
Served on Wednesday, May 19, 2004 at 07:29 a.m.
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i ate this recently: a beautiful pink heart-shaped lamington, twice the price of normal brown block-shaped lamingtons because it was made for mother's day. surely this is the best mother's day product ever. beats the ugg boots, the cosmetic gift sets, the DVDs of "something's gotta give", the discounted kitchen appliances...
actually i came thisclose to getting the braun blender with the glass jug and five speeds including one labelled with "icon of bowl of soup", which would be perfect for the impending broccoli soup experiment. but instead came away with special mother's day priced "lost in translation" DVD. woo!
trivial, soup-related distractions aside, i think i'm finally getting back into the merry swing of werk, four, maybe five months after returning from overseas. the last few weeks have been spent tweaking logos: working out kerning in extremely small increments, debating whether a milky chocolate brown is better than a rich coffee brown, nudging a graphic representation of a fig around a box trying to make it look less turd-like and more fig-like (unrelated to previously mentioned brown issue), wondering if 5pt type is too small...
oh it's been fun! and now the anticipation of getting it all back from the printers. crisp letterheads and lush, environmentally unfriendly, matt-celloglazed business cards. so i was quite horrified when amongst the penis enlargements (so many penis enlargements!) and cheap software i was offered in my inbox, there was this handy service. shudder, and sigh.
Served on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 at 05:00 p.m.
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sometimes i just fall off the blogging train, and even though it's just a week, it feels like much longer. it's not that there's been no good eating... there was, for example, the first spag bol i ever made which began with a large onion sauteed in a mound of sambal terasi. not so authentic, but damn it was flavoursome, and there was enough to last an extra four (pregressively smaller) meals. the best part was i didn't even have to touch the meat. just sliced the top of the pack open with a knife and prodded (with said knife) the block of mince into the pot.
and then last night there was the roast pumpkin, fetta and sage pizza that showed up at the door just in time to distract us from the nightly news footage of those photographs of the beaming brown-haired american girl soldier pointing at iraqi prisoners' genitals. home delivery rocks.
it's not that no adventures have been had. last week i got to go to kinko's three times! once, a print job that should have taken ten minutes evolved into an hour-long saga with a hapless employee who was really the wavery-voiced teenage boy who works at all the fast food restaurants on "the simpsons".
and the last couple of days i've spent scanning a stack of faint yet grubby colour pencil drawings for a book(let) of work by newly-arrived-in-australia teenagers. the fun, she does not end.
and just for the record, well, there's this:
Served on Friday, May 7, 2004 at 10:01 a.m.
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