Cat on the Bench

Love on Lygon Street

I like Valentines Day in theory and usually have big intentions of preparing a lavish feast for two or a pre-planned breakfast in bed.  This year, the plan was heart-shaped eggs on toast, using a cookie-cutter as an eggring, and something involving champagne for dinner.

But Barkly Square was all out of cookie cutters and a bottle of champagne the night before a day of articles interviews wasn’t the smartest move.  However, we thought we should celebrate the day somehow and the food on hand (frozen peas and oats) not being particularly love-inspiring, N and I turned to our favourite locals on the Brunswick stretch of Lygon Street.

For a quick weekday breakfast in East Brunswick (when time does not permit a trek to Ray in Victoria Street for baked eggs), I usually end up at Sugardough.  It has the same variety as Filou down the road in North Carlton, but it uses a sweeter and more eggy dough, which I associate with Italian pastries.  It doesn’t take itself as seriously as Filou either – duck-shaped biscuits sit alongside dainty hazelnut morsels, and the staff don’t mind if you dither over the selection.  On Valentines Day, I had my usual cornetto (a croissant-shaped pastry) with a long black, and N had a raspberry and ricotta muffin and a pot of ‘Tea-Party Tea’ served in crockery pinched straight from the pages of Alice in Wonderland.  We were given each other’s orders, but that’s inevitable when your boyfriend orders the girliest thing on the menu.

Love it.

We didn't have any dinner-related thoughts until 9:00, thanks to overtime and frantic exam study (or Mediterranean chic, depending on your perspective).  I was ready for frozen peas and sleep, but N thought dinner at Thaila Thai was in order.  I didn’t require much persuasion – Thaila Thai’s peanut sauce is perhaps the best (legal) mood-booster known to humankind.   

Love it, but so does everyone else. It was chockers with a queue down the street.  So was Matsumoto.  The frozen peas were calling me, but N thought we should try somewhere new. 

We found a half-empty Thai restaurant further down Lygon Street towards Brunswick Road called “Brown Sugar”. It was half-empty for a reason.  I tried to order and the waitress snapped she was too busy to take my order.  Eventually, we ordered some tom yum, a tamarind squid salad, a seafood grill, some rice and two beers.  The beers came immediately, but were warm.  The food didn’t arrive for two hours.  When it did, I got snapped at again when I asked for a spoon for the tom yum, and again when I asked if we could have the rice (she said no).    The tom yum was OK, albeit lukewarm.  N liked the seafood grill, especially the bits of deep-fried fish that looked like the gunk I used to strain out of the cooking oil in my fish and chip shop days.  I couldn’t eat the salad:  I like chilli but not when the salad consists of just that.  I couldn’t taste any tamarind, and the seafood wasn’t cooked through.

No love here.

My heart wasn’t on fire, but my mouth was.  Luckily the Gelobar was open and its passionfruit gelato sang a lullaby to my tastebuds.

Dan

A list of things I will remember about my mate Dan, whom the world was deprived of on 20 January 2006:

1. Our final meal together at the milk bar opposite the Law School  – a bag of chips and a potato cake for him and a double shot coffee for me. He was saving to travel to the Middle East in April with the lovely J and was living predominantly on rice and spuds in their various forms. We talked about the brave efforts of the Civil Lit lecturer to make the subject interesting, the effect of Whiskas on my cat, his new job writing submissions for the comparative constitutional law centre, how he had finally got round to reading the book I gave him for his birthday (“The Impressionist”) and the best live music we had seen last year. 

2. The last time I saw him – at a house party in Carlton. I was drinking red wine out of a camping mug and I poured him some into an empty glass jar that we found under the house’s sink (it was an all-male house who had compiled the music playlist for this party some three weeks before, yet overlooked the fact that their guests may require drinking vessels).  He had brought along two little bottles of cognac from a stash of mini-bottles that had been left at his house by the previous tenants. We talked about feeling older than the majority of the party’s attendees who were urinating and procreating in the alley, whether law firms would take offence to his increasingly Tintin-esque hairdo, J’s problems as an asthmatic getting a diving certificate and Dan's ambivalence towards frozen peas. 

3. The last meal he cooked for me – a rice pilaf based on Stephanie’s CC recipe (which Dan called “that big book”).  He omitted the saffron and almonds from the written recipe and instead used turmeric, ginger, cardamom and cumin seeds, sprinkled from little jars lovingly labelled by his housemate Hannah, who maintains the best-stocked pantry of any student house I’ve seen. 

4. The last meal I cooked for him – late night hot chocolate with cinnamon and nutmeg, whisked until frothy, and supped as we watched Napoleon Dynamite and he pretended not to detest my cat. 

5. India, 2003. By day, I would attend four-hour yoga classes and lectures, and Dan was taking tabla lessons and practising his almost fluent Hindi (he taught himself from a tape and was fluent after about three weeks in India so he started teaching himself Sanskrit). By night, we would feast on aloo gobi, various dahls, palak paneer, milk-skin pudding, curd, chapattis and endless cups of chai.

6. A conversation late last year:

To contextualise, during our time in India, I noticed that Dan either went without breakfast or would eat the same thing he had eaten for dinner the previous day.  He said that breakfast food was boring and it made more sense to skip directly to the more gastronomically interesting parts of the day if hunger required it. When we returned to Melbourne, I took him to my favourite breakfast haunts - Ici in Fitzroy, Gluttony on Smith Street (when it was still good) and Big Harvest in Carlton - hoping to convince him of the merits of my favourite meal of the day.

Last year, I called Dan late at night with yet another question about obscure legal theory as I attempted to construct an essay conclusion.  I thanked him profusely for his help and promised to bake him a cake as soon as everything was handed in, as it was very unlikely he would ever require me to teach him anything academic. 

He replied  “but you taught me how to love breakfast”.