Sunday Market

OK. Technically this is not part of the Sunday market, other than that I saw it walking home. The picture reminds me of one of my absolutely favourite childhood books - tile,author, long forgotten - in which a postman, so as to deliver the mail during a local flood, removes the tires from his bike so he can cycle along the power lines.

I haven't succumbed yet, but it's a cute idea. Actually, I did see one at the market, with a tow-along cart, the roof of which was constructed from photo-voltaic cells. Quite neat.  I don't know if the electric bikes convert the spare rotational energy (as in going downhill) into electricity. They should. Anyway, one way or another, Sunday markets bring out the locally ingenious.

We've been patronising this market for about, maybe, eight years? Since it started. It limped along for an awfully long time; failed to survive a few winters and then finally, in I think the hands of its third lot of entrepreneurs, has really kicked into gear. Most summer days it's absolutely packed and even in winter there is a pretty fair turnout. This is the middle of the food section. I think Sunday markets say something about the demographic of the neighbourhood. They are a luxury product, despite their down-at-heel charm. For example, dumplings at the Chinese dumpling stall cost more than any Ashfield restaurant. The meat prices would make my local butcher blush. But that isn't really the point. Charm is what's on sale, and there is plenty of it. Plus, undeniably, there are things you get here that you just can't get anywhere else.

Take the cheese man for example. It's pretty hard to find good cheese in Sydney; the Greek deli has some, but the range is pretty narrow and they don't really understand blue. This guy, on the other hand, is a fanatic. And he has some fantastic cheeses, from Australia, Spain, Italy, France, South America. It probably is expensive ($70 a kilo is about his minimum charge) but I have no idea where to get cheese this good, and I don't need a car to get it. I just buy $10 worth, big lump or small, and enjoy it. My favourite cheese story is the morning/afternoon cheese; in each round the bottom half is morning milk; then a layer of ash; then the top is filled up with evening milk.  I hope it's true, but I really don't care that much if it isn't. It's a fantastic cheese, irrespective of the story, sort of a mild Tilsit.

Liz is the mushroom connoisseur. I have to admit that they look fantastic - in salads maybe it's possible to tell the difference. The way I cook, I'm not sure that I'm doing them justice.  The only thing I know about mushrooms is that shiitake contain natural glutamate - which is allegedly the "fifth flavour", very "in" at the moment. Tomatoes contain it too; that's why everything made with tomatoes tastes good. Shiitake have replaced salt in my cooking.

It kind of reinforces the boutique luxury product ambiance, though. Think authentic.

Once you move beyond the food section - Mexican, Chinese, organic, Nepalese, Turkish, Malaysian, Chinese, three bakers, the bratwurst man, Indian, scone/muffin/cake stalls, cheese times 2, meat twice, pickles, nuts and finally olives: this is the winter list - you get to the stuff section, clothes and junk. This is my section of the junk, although I'm trying not to buy books at the moment. The patch of grass you can see in the background illustrates that the weather today is not encouraging. If the sun were shining there would be no grass un-stalled.


I've left out the picture of the fruit and vegie stall (there are three) where we do the weekly food shop. I get to practise Chinese; really, simple repetition is the best practise plus you actually learn useful things like the names of food in Chinese, stuff that is in no text books, but is so fundamentally basic you can't imagine why not.

Croissants

Among the many weaknesses in my character, the elevenses croissant is relatively recent, although the breakfast croissant stretches back to 1989 and La Cucina on Chapel St when I was working for the ANZ around the corner. Every morning I'd clock on at 8 & then duck out for an hour to read the paper, drink coffee & eat a croissant. That job was probably worth ten of the 100-odd kilos I used to cart around. Anyway, even 1989 is recent compared to the espresso coffee vice, which dates back to 1978 (it was an instant coffee vice before then).

The idea of elevenses (one of the great words) was pretty much absent from my life until I started eating breakfast in 2008, after about a 30-year gap. One of my objections to breakfast had always been that it made me hungry at 11, and curiously, despite being 20 kg overweight already, I was worried about putting on more. It's a kind of pseudo-logic; ignore the idea of a healthy eating pattern on the grounds that adding two meals into an unhealthy diet will only make things worse. Sort of like comparing apples and, say, lard.

Getting back to the main line, eating at 11 is a side-effect of eating breakfast and it just happened that when I was experimenting seriously with breakfast I was living in Guangzhou, and bizarrely Guangzhou is one of the best places in the world to buy croissants. Bread is pretty haut-moderne in big Chinese cities and as a luxury good they take making it very seriously, part of the justification of the unbelievable (in relative terms) price. A good croissant in Guangzhou costs as much as a cheap croissant in Marrickville, that is, around AUD $1.30. (Most food in Guangzhou costs about 1/3 to 1/2 of what it would cost here) But that Guangzhou croissant is a helluva thing. It's fantastic.  (This continues a trend of China supplying some of the best European-originated experiences I have had - three of the best four coffees, for example.) They're light, fluffy on the inside, crisp on the outside, a little bit flaky, an ambiance of butter, damn near perfect. Perhaps, carping, fractionally too small. You can in fact try one in Sydney (probably in Melbourne too) at one of the Breadtop franchises. Breadtop croissants tend to be a little overcooked, IMO, but it only affects the outside. It is an amazing tribute to their franchise quality control that this is as true in Sydney as it is in Guangzhou (at a total of about seven outlets altogether - I'm sure it would be true for all of them).

So, thanks to Guangzhou, I'm a croissant-at-11 addict. Now still, if I'm in Sydney CBD, Haymarket particularly, I'll go looking for a Breadtop croissant. But in the Marrickville/Enmore parts of Andrewsville, there are no Breadtops. But there are still croissants.

Peter's croissant on kitchen table

Peter's (the local milkbar) gets them in from somewhere, they're excellent and cheap. But he doesn't get in that many & if they're gone, I have to duck in to the newsagent. There, they're more expensive, and sometimes a day old. Beware a place that offers to microwave your croissants and looks surprised when you say no - a failing of 2204, the most local coffee shop (pretty much their only fault, other than expense) as well.


Moving on from the croissants that are less than 2 minutes away, there's a fork in the road at Victoria St. Left, up the hill to Enmore, and neither of the two bakeries up there that I frequent does an outstanding croissant (one does an outstanding donut, but I haven't eaten donuts for about three years). Adequate, so if I am there for other reasons I don't see any reason to forgo morning tea, but not at all outstanding. Right, down to Marrickville proper past Mitchell St and the Bourke St bakery (it's a franchise - guess where it started?). I'm a bit ambivalent about the Mitchell St croissants. On the good side, they are big and fluffy. On the other side, for me, they are a little bready, not as light as I like and they don't have enough butter, or, more accurately, they don't have the right butter taste. They tend a bit towards the Breadtop colour, which suggests overcooked, and they are, as befits an East Sydney franchise, the most expensive croissant for miles around, by some margin. Bourke St do a bunch of things - sourdough, tarts, bakery coffee - outstandingly well, but their croissants are only adequate by comparison.

Heading into Marrickville Rd you can easily walk past the first bakery, it's tiny. Whether or not they have croissants is random, but when they do they are very buttery, and cheap. They don't do service with a smile, but I guess if I was 70 and had to get up at 3am to start a 17-hour working day, I might be a bit grumpy from time to time.

Opposite them but a bit further up the hill is the Paris Bakery; the winners as far as I am concerned. Their croissants are not quite as light as the Breadtop version (really, those Chinese croissant bakers do magic on that score, it's not just Breadtop) but they are light, they don't feel like bread, they have plenty of butter & they are not burned. They are also cheap - sometimes I buy two.

Coffee Alchemy - breaking news

My local boutique coffee roaster and coffee shop went up several notches in my estimation this week.

 First, they have kept the great minimalist look and feel of the shop interior, which is tiny in fact, and somehow managed to get comfortable - repeat, yet minimalist - seating for seven. And there's a very nice mat laying on the floor. They're only small changes, but the miracle that is good interior design strikes again.

The other giant leap forward is they now do boutique espressos of three (on any given day) of their single estate blends; I had a big argument with them about eight months ago over this, when they didn't do it - crazy - you can't be serious about beans and simultaneously force all your customers to drink one blend, I don't care how good the blend is, so (don't know when this new policy started, but it's a major breakthrough) this now leapfrogs into top place by a country mile.

If they provide free chilled filtered water (I'll suggest it to them) it will be the perfect coffee shop, and it will still be only 200 metres from the front door!

Still, 9/10 isn't a bad score. 

*Update* They do provide fresh water with the boutique espresso! 9.5/10 (It isn't chilled)

Spiders

We have a new friend in the front garden; actually, we had another golden orb a few years ago and she was so well fed - our garden is a spiders paradise in terms of the number of insects we support - that I thought we'd be starting a colony of them. But no,the distribution system for baby spiders seems to be totally uninformed by historical information, so this is the first one we've had since then.




I haven't quite got the hang of this camera yet - it is auto focus only (but it has a great anti-shake mechanism, so I don't need to set out the tripod, which my serious camera demands) so sometimes it chooses to focus on not what I think is the point of the whole exercise.

Near and far

This is the new desk (detail, as they say) - recycled bluegum, sanded to within an inch of its life, oiled and sanded some more, and then oiled and sanded again. If I wasn't constitutionally lazy, I might have tried the 800-grain sandpaper, and the pumice powder. But I am, so I didn't - still, it's smooth enough to create an impression of unusual smoothness; it's more polished than our commercially finished pieces. I'm very pleased with it, although I have to admit that it doesn't quite match up to Liz' bathroom work.

We actually found a new recycled timber place in Rockdale (which is where this comes from) so we may end up with a house entirely full of timber, because they have just an endless supply of truly amazing pieces. Particularly taken with a fireplace surround that is bigger than our living room.

I haven't quite finished the desk yet; I want to put some shelving under it as well. Modern life, eh. Three laptops. The giant screen is my attempt to fight off eye strain while studying this year; I can read two documents on it in slightly magnified A4 size, and type on a third on the laptop screen. The little one is still going because it runs some software I haven't managed to get going on Microsoft's latest OS yet - the third one is Liz's, although I'm slowly colonising it.

There is a plan to reduce the clutter, but not yet a plan how to reduce the clutter. The original design brief for the table was somewhere to put the computers and paint!

This is the "far" of the title - about as far as I go really - Penrith whitewater rafting facility, leftover from the Olympics. I'm about to leap in a raft and see how wet one man can get without falling in the water. This is where Liz broke her wrist last year, so it's amazingly brave of her to be back. It's all part of training for the Yukon, which has whitewater, unlike the recent Murray trip. The Murray does have whitewater, but not on the marathon course.

The course is an eye-opener as to how strong the Olympic standard competitors need to be - they have to paddle upstream through half the gates, and let me tell you paddling downstream is extremely hard work. My arms ache today. And they don't really turn on the taps fully for us - it really is hard to believe that going upstream is even possible, let alone that you can steer through a "gate".

Pambula

Obviously Pambula is a pretty remote outlying area of Andrewsville, although, given childhood holidays, perhaps not as remote as might be thought at first glance. This time we stayed at Pambula Lake & I have a couple of nice photos. Otherwise, I doubt this entry would have happened.

A nice piece of rural humour (like the asking price for land around here!). It's one of the few elements of rural life that I have found myself in sympathy with down the years. Fake bishops as race marshals, Elvis Presley roads to nowhere.

Art, really. This is one of Liz' pictures; she has steady hands and a good eye. I see hundreds of ideas for what I think are good photographs, but not so many of them turn out. Even if I take 50 on the principle that one might be OK, it usually isn't. But this uses depth of field very nicely to take your eye across the page and create movement.

Well, this actually is the result of one of the take 50 pictures attempts. If you think it's easy getting butterflies to pose for you...

Having to manual focus didn't help the hand shake, either. But I am quite pleased with it, obviously, or it wouldn't be here. I tried taking pictures of butterflies in Malaysia, in a butterfly house, and the only decent pictures I could get there were of dead ones (there were plenty, I didn't have to kill them myself). This is a big improvement.

There's nothing wrong with cute animal pictures. 20% of all ducks have a different way of looking at things. Wonder if it works better for them than for me?

The region of Enmore

The boom in extremely local food/coffee plus the Sunday market has taken Enmore off the frequently visited list; it's shifted to the outskirts of Andrewsville while I was away. And I don't eat pizza, which eliminates the two Italian, two Turkish & one Lebanese pizza place. Although, in point of fact, I have been at war with one of the Italian places over their half-and-half pricing policy (which fluctuates randomly) for about five years & the other one is ordinary. I only ever ate pizza at one of the two Turkish places, because it was there first and I felt sorry for them when a bright shiny competitor opened next door. It (the competitor) is very good for all non-Turkish-pizza Turkish food, and that's where I would take you for lunch, so my pity hasn't really helped the original place that much. The Lebanese pizza is post my retiring from pizza eating, so I can only comment that it smells less offensive than pizza places generally do. And it's quite cheap.

I don't eat Thai food any more. It doesn't really bear repetition. Thai restaurants generally remind me of the 1960's Cantonese-Australian Chinese restaurant - still readily found in country towns, serving a kind of compromised, standardised hotchpotch. When I had Thai students they never stopped complaining how bad Australian Thai food was, and I had no trouble agreeing. There are good places, of course, but they are increasingly hard to find. Compromised standard hotchpotch is so popular that there is really no incentive to one-up it.

Years ago the first of the Enmore breakfast/coffee places was run by a couple of Greek guys & their mother cooking. It was next to the laundromat & newsagent so made itself compulsory during the prolonged renovation & on rainy weekends (we don't have a dryer). Those guys have moved on, there are four (five?) competitors within 400 metres, all of them failing to create a compelling space. Also the laundromat has been converted into a bakery, and the other laundromat is now a locksmith.

There is one Chinese-owned patisserie & coffee place that if I am having a stop in Enmore will be where you find me. They do great doughnuts (which I no longer eat) and their French pastry range is perfectly OK. Sadly the coffee isn't great, but they hang original art on the walls & conduct extremely loud Mandarin conversations in the kitchen so I can practice eavesdropping.

There's a new bakery but it's pretty expensive. None of the boutique bakers, apart from Bourke St, come even vaguely close to the Marrickville downmarket bakers, at least not for value & traditional French/Italian breads.

Enmore has my bank; there's a fair chance that if that closed I wouldn't come here at all.

Enmore Theater has a coffee shop/cafe that drips unrenovated-for-50-years atmosphere. It's only open at night (early evening, more precisely) though & we're generally too busy to go. And I don't eat muffins/cakes/tiramisu/strudel any more. Nor can I sensibly drink coffee and sleep within a 6 hour timeframe. Still, it's a pleasure to be able to be nostalgic about it. I love high-ceilinged places where, when empty, all the noise seems to disappear into the ceiling space making the booths unnaturally silent. The silence is strong enough to create privacy - words don't move sideways through it. When the place is crowded, the high space captures all the noise and blends it into accoustic padding; everything you say is muffled and your conversation never gets close to the next table.

Faheem's Fast Food ought to be more legendary that it is; they have a particular mastery over the Tandoor oven, and they do some dahl combinations that I have never seen anywhere else. Being a twelve year plus regular give me the peculiar privilege of fractionally less surly service than everyone else. They won't have enjoyed the last cricket season, being as they are, a Pakistani,rather than Indian, restaurant. This place used to be legendary with the subcontinental taxi-driving community & we were frequently to only Anglo's there; that was when they were on the downhill side of the Warrenview pub & there was plenty of parking. When they moved into the Newtown side of Enmore they lost the parking and a fair whack of their taxi trade, but they put their prices up by a couple of dollars (still cheap) and they are packed with low rent cool people (Enmore residents). A Bangladeshi restaurant opened next door - made absolutely zero impact & now FFF has taken over that space as well. To give you a vague idea of how good this place is, I have Melbourne friends who insist on being taken there when they come to visit.