Tuesday, July 18, 2006

It's just not right

The David Jones Food Hall is a wonderful place, but I saw something in it today that I found, well, disturbing.

I'm a purist about quiche. The most adventurous I'm prepared to get about quiche is something involving smoked salmon; anything wilder than that is just sad. Asparagus and spinach, two of my favourite veg when properly cooked (ie steamed for a minute and then eaten with a small amount of butter), are disgusting in quiche.

But this one was even worse. I mean, I believe in fusion, and in imaginative combinations, but ... roast chicken and leek curry quiche???

When I saw that sign on the sad little pie in the refrigerator cabinet I went all faint and had to go get a macchiato in a hurry.

11 comments:

ThirdCat said...

As wrong as pizza with roast pumpkin and pinenuts (which I actually quite liked, but that doesn't make it right).

I hate to be all 'it isn't like it used to be, but what do you expect they let Johnnies close', but I really liked it when the first thing you could smell was the cookies. And on a good day, the smell of the cookies got up to the ground floor.

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Precisely. Pizza is about cheese and tomato.

The only good thing about them letting Johnnies close was the sale. I got a new bed for visitors for a third of the original price.

I considered whining at length about how much better it used to be when you could smell the cookies, but somebody said on the radio yesterday 'Whining: it's the new conversation' so I decided not to.

ThirdCat said...

Was that Peter Goers said that? Sounds like a Peter Goers thing. Anyway - and this is not to cast nasturtiums on your hearing - but I think they probably said 'wining: it's the new conversation'.

Which is probably just as bad, but at least leaves the field open for the odd whinge.

And they still have the piano player sometimes. Do you know when I was about 12 I aspired to be that piano player?

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Nope, definitely whining -- there was lots of context -- on Carol(e?) Whitelock, some time in the last fifteen minutes before four o'clock, as I drove south down the Stretch of Death along Bonython Park past the brewery.

Re piano player, oh me too. He was there yesterday. But what about the staff Christmas choir, do they still have carols? Or did they sack so many people they can no longer raise four decent voice groups?

Anonymous said...

I used to think a balfours pie in their caff on school holidays was sophisticated and daring.

But that was back when we thought a cookie was something a cannibal caught in a raid on a boarding school.

- barista

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Barista, I didn't know you were an Adelaide boy!

And as for Balfour's pies ... what, no frog cakes?

(Mmmmmm frog cakes)

ThirdCat said...

I never, not once ever went into the Balfours Cafe. My mother always went to the Harris Scarfe cafe for her cappuccino, and I was always following her. And I have never, not once ever eaten a frog cake and now it seems too late.

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Thirdcat, Thirdcat. It is never too late to eat a frog cake.

Anonymous said...

what i really miss is the yiros from sammms on the parade.. have eaten all the variations of schwarma around the world and nothing has ever come even close.

Do you realise that yeast buns, in all their forms, are a particular Adelaide thing? Just as is the squeeze of the sauce bottle into the pie. I really, really hate those little cube/tray/sachet things.

am I showing my age when I say when I was little I used to be taken to the coles cafe for a balfours pie, chips and gravy?

hmmm think I may need to start planning a quick trip home..

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Careful, next you'll be reading the John Morrison story about the smell of burning gumleaves in the upstairs London flat, and weeping into your tea.

Re yeast: I once bought a yeast bun in Moonta (Kadina? Wallaroo?) called an Elephant's Foot, which looked as you'd expect it to. It was a Price's Bakery, and the bun was still a little bit warm so the white icing was really soft and the coconut sort of sank into it a bit.

Not that I'm trying to make you rush to the airport and get waitlisted or anything.

ThirdCat said...

Price's Bakery. That's it. I'm taking the weekend off to go back to my Cornish roots.