| GIRL
| ARCHIVE
| BEYOND
| SHOP
my breadbin is a large pink enamel trough (enamelled pale buttery yellow on the inside) with a wooden lid for slicing bread on (though i have not done so). i would not be surprised if it suddenly twisted itself up into a horn of plenty, because this is what it holds:
- 1 loaf of sourdough soy and linseed
- 2 blueberry bagels
- 1 muesli cookie
- 1 dark chocolate sour cherry cookie
- a bag and a half of japanese rice crackers
- and the last couple of slices of supermarket bread, several days old, on which i am now waiting to develop those furry green clumps of mould before i put them in the bin.
there would've been a macaron (or two. or three!) in there as well, but... well, you shall see.
yesterday was a busy day. before our 12.30 lunch date, we had already made acquaintances of the waterfowl (and single displaced pelican) on the victoria park pond; gone on everything at least once in the park's playground; and handed over $4 for the muesli cookie at toby's estate -- well, it is a pretty good cookie, large as a small bun, moist, packed full of brown sugar and wheaty bits and a harvest of dried fruit. after some hijinx in the shoe aisles of kmart, we bought two pairs of boots (child size 6) for the coming winter, and then settled in at tomodachi with deborah, for agedashi tofu, sashimi salad, and an assortment of exotic maki from the sushi train. a sizeable feast, though i think the kid came away best of all, having charmed herself all the cherry tomatoes in the salad, and more pieces of salmon sashimi than you'd think a two-and-a-half year old would want.
midweek, leading up to lunch, we had already discussed dessert. words like "macaron" and "chocolate tart" were bandied about the ether. beb patisserie on broadway, as you know, does a fine line of exotic macaron, and across the road, the bourke street bakery satellite beams you a full range of sweet tarts. alas. our worse fears were realised as we arrived at beb: those "for lease" signs i thought i'd seen whizzing past on the bus a couple weeks ago, they were indeed pasted up on the cold glass windows of the dark little shell. all the shop fittings were still there, but the sign on the door, unglamourously askew, said "CLOSED", even though the list of times posted right next to it indicated that it should be OPEN.
we grieved only the briefest moment before turning on our heels and crossing the street. at bourke street bakery, the chocolate tart beckoned, but after picking a sourdough soy and linseed loaf (eschewing the hot cross loaf -- a gigantic, craggy hot cross bun, which sounded very warm and spicy from the handwritten description, and which i will no doubt return for one of these days before easter, and make into slices of very buttery fruit toast) i found i no longer had a longing for dessert. the chocolate cookie, a sizeable disc of chewy black packed with chewy sour cherries, was almost an afterthought (but of course i had been thinking about it ever since the plan for lunch had been hatched).
and so that is why my breadbin is packed to capacity.
[ the blueberry bagels (by bagel house) were already there. i bought them at the supermarket on special, but for the last few weeks i have been seeing a bagel house cafe slowly take shape on darling street. i must investigate further. ]
Served on Saturday, March 31, 2007 at 04:51 p.m.
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a fillet of salmon meets its demise, surrounded by green: green peas, green mash, salsa verde.
bloody hell. has it been a week of freakish death or what? i started watching "look both ways" last year, and one of the characters, an artist, had moments where she saw random and violent ways in which she came to an end. these episodes -- being flattened by a train, or eaten by a shark -- were animated in the style of her painting... and were strangely similar to the fleeting glimpses i get from time to time: if i'm standing high up somewhere, i look down and imagine myself broken on the ground below; or if i'm waiting to cross the street on the corner, i might see a car riding the pavement and ploughing into me. which is what happened to those people in kogarah. did they ever think it would happen to them? i never did see what becomes of the movie; it was a rental, and halfway through it started sticking every few seconds. i returned it unfinished, and got a credit on my account, and eventually used it to borrow an instalment of the last season of "six feet under". me, obsessed with death? naw.
there were times in the last couple of weeks though, where i thought my unravelling would be due to the book i'm currently working on. i cannot describe to you the despair i felt as i opened each jpg, to find that it was yet another badly lit, out-of-focus snapshot, and that it had been scanned in at too low a resolution; a blessing or a curse -- that it could only be used small? by last weekend, the RSI had set in, and my eyes itched in revolt when i so much as glanced at my screen. still, i felt like i had finally broken the back of the beast. i knew where things lay; i knew what had to be done. and then the email came in:
"i am going to send you the book map that we changed around a bit too (minor) so maybe send the pagination once you have done your stuff."
you did not hear the screams, but they were so loud (major), in my head.
but it hasn't all been crap, even when my grandfather died last thursday. he'd been sliding into dementia for years, and had suffered a series of mini-strokes which left him increasingly placid and smiley. he no longer knew who i was, and i hardly saw him anyway. but when i was six, he taught us -- me and my cousins -- such things as not to point at people with our chopsticks, and not to sit at the dining table with our legs propped up on our chairs; only rickshaw drivers sat like that. he obsessively clipped stories from the chinese newspaper and pasted them into his scrapbooks, and sometimes he would test me by making me read headlines. he never really accepted the excuse that i only knew the simplified modern characters. he was admitted into hospital already halfway gone. my mum txted me while we were at the powerhouse on that day -- harmony day -- when all visitors wearing thongs (footwear, not bumfloss) got in for free: she was on the 7.30 bus to KL. barely twelve hours later, they shut off the machines. and off he went.
if you go to the powerhouse museum before april 22, you will get to see guan wei's splendid mural on the walls of the top floor, a "floating, poetic corridor in which history and memory, fact and fiction are blurred" [in his own words, from the powerhouse website]. it is great, and there is a stuffed wombat.
so there was that, and also, one day i made green mashed potatoes -- buttery mash with some improvised salsa verde swirled through (with extra salsa verde on the side) (and enough mash and salsa verde left over for two more meals consisting solely of mashed potato and salsa verde).
and yesterday, walking through pitt street mall, the kid and i simultaneously glanced over at the entrance to the myer food hall, and simultaneously registered that there was a pair of gigantic golden bunny ears popping up over the escalators. specifically it was the lindt gold easter bunny, ten feet tall, the best kind of inflated doll. we had just missed some sort of chocolate demonstration, but the lindt girl offered us a lindor easter egg and a little easter chicken from her easter basket. (and then while waiting for the bus, maeve insisted on unpeeling her chicken, and the whole body of it fell out onto the funky black ground, leaving her holding onto the tiny hollow head, still wrapped in foil, and she was rightfully traumatised, but there was funky black matter stuck to the chicken, though only on one side, so i broke off the tainted side and gave the rest of it back to her, and she ate it and was mostly fine except for a bit of a loose bowel today.)
and two sundays ago, we went to the playschool concert in tumbalong park, during which a purple paper birthday cake was unveiled, and everybody sang "happy birthday" to the sydney harbour bridge. the cake was nice and all, but nowhere quite as delicious as jay la'gaia.
and then later in the day, we walked over the bridge, and looked up into the steel arches, and down between the gaps in the roadway into the deep green harbour, and by the end, just as it began to drizzle, i hadn't fallen in, or been flattened by a girder.
Served on Thursday, March 29, 2007 at 09:47 p.m.
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i was passing by the deli counter at the supermarket the other day, and a guy was trying to buy some chicken breasts.
"they just aren't big enough," he said.
Served on Monday, March 12, 2007 at 04:21 p.m.
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i have just eaten too many mini daim candies in quick succession. eight, to be exact. i was pretty sure i'd stop at four, and then six... and now i feel a little tight in the throat, so eight it is. when i impulse-bought a sack of them at the duty free candy shop in the singapore airport, i thought that maybe i now had too many daims, and that it would be a struggle to get through them. but now i see that the cunning daims, with their thick, milky chocolate covering, and their crunchy, salty toffee caramel centers, will have no trouble getting eaten. at all.
i am about to be buried in an avalanche of werk, and will certainly need sustenance. i recently read about someone designing a 144-page exhibition catalogue in four weeks (via india, ink.), so perhaps it can be done after all; i think i have three weeks, for 124 pages.
i wonder, though, if the designer of that catalogue looks after a kid all morning, going to pirate storytime at the library, or two playgrounds on the way to the supermarket to buy watermelon, or like this morning, a meander through the tokyo fiesta in martin place followed by a quick look-in at the lindt shop followed by a sushi picnic at circular quay followed by a clamber up the opera house steps to buy tickets for the babies prom, "yummy in my tummy" in a couple of weeks followed by a trek through the botanical gardens (including somersaults in the grass and duck-chasing) followed by a busride through the city and home followed by stories and successful pottytime and tucking in for naps (followed by eight daims and procrastination reading about the riot at target for stella mccartney frocks. people are crazy.).
my mum has a friend in singapore -- her boss, really -- whose daughter had twins a little while ago, and worked out this arrangement: the babies stay over at the grandparents' house during the week, nights included, and then the parents retrieve them for the weekend, unless the boss's daughter has like, a dinner to go to, or an appointment for a facial or a massage or something, then the babies stay at the grandparents on the weekend too. nightfeeds, night wakings... all done by the grandparents. she's lucky that way.
because maeve is going through this phase at the moment, where her sippy cup has to be tucked in, and every last finger too, and if something should come untucked during the nap (or, even worse, during the night) then the keening begins.
"maybe her toes are cold," said my mother, mishearing, over the phone a couple nights ago. "maybe you should put socks on her so she won't feel the cold and wake up."
"no, not her toes. she wants her cup to be tucked in."
my mother is speechless for a time. "wha... her cup?"
"yah."
"that is sooo funny!"
"funny meh? why don't you come and tuck her in?"
anyway. so, mother's boss's daughter. works in the logistics department at apple. on a whim, i wrote to ask if she could do me an employee discount on an ipod shuffle. she said she had a spare one sitting on her desk, because they just give her one every few months and she's had so many that she didn't know who else to give them to anymore. and so she gave it to me. we picked it up on the way to haw par villa. i am lucky that way.
i christened it with "take on me". mostly, though, i've been using it to listen to the mr brown show while doing the dishes after dinner.
i wonder if that exhibition catalog designer has to do the dishes.
Served on Monday, March 12, 2007 at 03:05 p.m.
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after spending the night mostly awake and upright in my airplane seat, i stood in the red lane for about an hour as the one xray machine available was put to work (slowly) keeping australia's borders safe. as it turned out, my booty of dried mushrooms, dried scallops -- oh how i have missed you! --, chocolate, tea, biscuits and antihistamines was waved cheerily through.
ah... tea. a good cup of tea is hard to find, in singapore. no, wait. a great cup of tea can be found if you want a local teh c: a puddle of condensed milk in a thick china cup, topped with hot tea and swirled into a sweet caramely beverage. or a marsala chai pungent with spices, at the dosai place. but if you want a nice cup of normal tea, say for breakfast, you will pay $5 for a twinings english breakfast teabag swimming in a pot of hot water. the amount of water will be too much for a single measly tea bag, and you will spend all of breakfast time wondering why the hell tasteless brown water costs so much, eh? rivercafe? "modern australian style" indeed.
when i got home, i brewed a cup of toby's estate's strong and delicious australian breakfast tea, tempered with a good slosh of full-fat milk. it was perfect with the valrhona chocolate biscotti that i found (and which was bought for me, thanks frenchie!) at da paolo gastronomia, the deli arm of my new favourite place to eat (western food) in singapore: da paolo pizza bar.
the biscotti give a solid crunch of unexpected buttery saltiness. the plain version is served with your chocolate gelato in the restaurant. the chocolate chip (i use the word "chip" loosely; they are really just large chunks carved off the block, i'm sure) version is all sweet-salty mind-boggly good.
Served on Monday, March 5, 2007 at 08:27 p.m.
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[ a picture of a baked treat: a slab of pandan cake topped with a good smear of red bean paste, enveloped in puff pastry; it has been baked, in its entirety, with a sprinkling of polo topping, and then sliced down the middle and filled with buttercream. in the background, a steamed pork bun. ]
there you go.
'round about noon yesterday, after we had walked through the ten courts of hell, and climbed the winding path up the hill which culminated in a vibrant tableau of the journey to the west, it began to drizzle. we were damp and sticky from a moist, 34 degreed morning, so we took it as a sign to climb back into the car and leave the feral gorillas for the next trip.
the rain was pelting down by the time we got to crystal jade kitchen, and the queue for a lunchtime table was long. from the bakery annex, i put together a quick inflight care package for nellie; she was booked onto KLM, so she'd need all the help she could get.
CRYSTAL JADE CAKERY
(JUNCTION 8) PTE LTD
1 Cake Cup 1.05
1 BBQ Pineapple Bun 1.24
1 Pineapple Kaya Bun 1.33
and for myself, just to make me feel better,
1 R.Bean Pandan Cake 1.33
it worked, i think, though it hasn't stopped raining. everything around me, indoors even, is limp and damp.
Served on Thursday, March 1, 2007 at 11:39 p.m.
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this eating like pigs...
continues...
a. post-soba dessert at ajitei takashimaya
(maccha sundae anmitsu with warabi mochi, maccha jelly, tinned peaches, some strange salty beans and a tiny jug of raw honey.)
b. chocolate buffet at the fullerton hotel
(maccha and chocolate pudding with gold-leafed berries; followed by a hot chocolate made to order at the hot chocolate bar: select from bowls of single origin valrhona chocolate pieces to be melted down in a saucepan of hot milk by the hot chocolate flunkie, and served with two salted pretzels; followed by many, many little dishes and shot glasses to the point of unwellness.)
c. trip number two to the zoo
(feeding time for the piggies -- a great puddle of chopped up papaya, corn, bananas and gunk inhaled amidst constant low-pitched grunting -- after which we saw, close-up in the rainforest enclosure, bats eating watermelon, after which we had to make our way to the ben & jerry's at the exit for a tub of cherry garcia.)
Served on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 04:07 p.m.
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hui(2) niang(2) jia(1). traditionally, the second day of the chinese new year is when those daughters who've been married out return to their old family homes, bearing gifts for the parents they left behind. and so, my good mother bought us all bus tickets to KL, and we rode into town with a box of mandarins, a box of persimmons, a box of belgian chocolate truffles, and half a tub of plant fertiliser.
there is quite a range of buses to choose from doing the singapore-KL route; some have toilets in the back and karaoke lounges downstairs. some have a hostess who serves you a satisfying meal of dry-fried beehoon with nothing more than a few bean sprouts and a couple strips of thin egg omelette. based on the bargain price of $50 for the return trip, we rode the one which is known for nothing more than its on-board oreo snack. and it's true, behind the check-in counter at the depot office was a wall of cartons: classic oreo, and a new-fangled variant filled with an unholy (though strangely compelling) union of peanut butter and chocolate creme. krim kacang dan krim coklat!
at the pagoh reststop, i bought a beefburger and a bag of fries, solely on the basis that on the bus, it would be easier to eat than soupy noodles... and then many hours later, during the night, in the royale bintang damansara hotel, i had four dreams about vomitting before getting out of bed at 6am to make my dreams come true. twice.
the rest of the day was spent in bed, in the darkened room, while everyone else went about paying their respects and exploring the hot and dusty hellhole that is KL. nellicent was kind enough to bring me a $14 (ringgit) green tea frappucino, of which i only dared to drink half because i wasn't up to experimenting with verdant vomit... but it really is my favourite starbucks beverage.
the next morning i was healed enough to savour teh tarik and roti bakar from the greasy, greasy place next door. it turned out to be honey toast, with a bright yellow slick of what i'm sure could only have been planta margarine. mmm.
we ate at aunts' houses, and at indian eateries. at ikea (it was across the road from the hotel, really), we bought a packet of mild, milky cheese to supplement the pitiful hotel buffet breakfast. at the indian vegetarian place, the kid was plied with free pappadums. at my grandmother's, we feasted on such things as stuffed crabs (in which the crabmeat and minced pork and other things are put into the crabshells, and deepfried) and salted vegetable and duck soup, which we will never know how to make, and perhaps soon, will never have to chance to eat again.
sigh.
Served on Sunday, February 25, 2007 at 02:38 p.m.
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there is not so much eating between meals (she says, suddenly remembering yesterday's jalebi eaten on the walk between mrt station and home), but i am never hungry in this country. i will go as far as to say "always full", and i suspect it has something to do with the high protein content of the meals. it is not necessarily the way i wish to be, because really, i would like more snacks, but what can you do?
[ shrugs ]
we are getting brown, all of us, except monsieur olive, who diligently reapplies his 40+ spf at regular intervals. yesterday, around lunchtime, my mother accosted an indian woman in the street, and asked her the way to komala vilas. the lady asked where we were from, and laughed when we replied, "singapore". she gave us directions to mustafa's too, and sent us on our way to a dosai feast.
two dosai in two days, and still not quite the record set in crazy bangkok, where five papaya salads were consumed in as many days. one of these we bought from a stall outside a temple by a canal; it cost 20baht -- quite a bit less than a dollar.
three days later we chose to forgo the $18 papaya salad at indochine/forbidden city/cocoon/whatever the hell the name is along the singapore river. i expect it would have been as lacklustre and overwhelmingly disappointing as the duck and green (hah!) mango salad we had instead. tchk. indochine.
the days are passing quickly in a slow blur of blocked sinuses and ears, and heat-induced sleepiness. the other afternoon, we made plans to leave the house after a twenty-minute nap, but suddenly it was three hours later. we have been to the zoo, and the kid has ridden an elephant, and i have bought two pairs of fake crocs, so definitely, things are getting done, and objectives are being met... but there are still sweetcorn ice cream sandwiches on rainbow bread to be had, and the chocolate buffet at the fullerton, and perhaps a pair of running shoes.
[ shudder ]
in conclusion, i would like more snacks, and more naps; and indochine should change its name to "flavourless trendy tryhards".
Served on Saturday, February 17, 2007 at 02:42 p.m.
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after a month of print deadlines (it makes me feel alive, dammit!) for a month of arab films, i find myself in singapore. seven hours passes surprisingly quickly on a plane, with a wriggly kid who gamely stays awake for the first five hours, which is about five hours past her regular naptime. and now, here we are.
my parents' house is filled with a selection of german xmas gingerbread, and marks and spencer chocolate bisuits. last night i had a paper thosai the size of a newspaper -- and not just a tabloid; a broadsheet. so far so good.
we'll forget the screaming tantrum in which, over the course of twenty minutes or so on an otherwise tranquil sunday afternoon, a child pushes herself on her back, up the length of a department store elevator lobby floor. it can be done!
Served on Monday, February 5, 2007 at 03:04 p.m.
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we walk the tightrope constantly. the tension is all wrong. we pull and push at one another, and each time we fall it is harder to regain any balance.
i turned on my phone yesterday evening after recharging it, and a txt came through from 'round about lunchtime: i am staying with my parents until i decide where to go next.
a txt, for fuck's sake.
i decided not to call for thai home delivery; we had scrambled eggs and grilled tomatoes on toast instead.
Served on Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 04:15 p.m.
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i will scream my lungs out 'til it fills this room /
how much difference does it make?
- "indifference", pearl jam
Served on Monday, January 22, 2007 at 11:32 p.m.
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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.
Served on Monday, January 14, 2007 at 9:03 p.m.
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the peace and quiet continues...
Served on Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 07:22 p.m.
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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.
Served on Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 02:48 p.m.
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