Yep, this is a guilt post. (I’m hopeless, I know …)

I wanted to sort the traffic jam in my head into something coherent and bloggable but, with a case of start-of-week tireds, that seems unlikely …

So here is some eye candy. It’s a box of sugar – literally.

My very kind friends Tabitha and Nathan carefully transported it all the way back from Paris – the amazing aisle of decorative sugar at Le Bon Marche food hall (aka heaven), to be exact.

I was amazed that the box wasn’t ground-full of granules and confectionery dust; that the miniature sugar shapes had stayed perfectly intact across half the world.

But it turns out these sweet little buttons, hearts and trees are surprisingly tough. Drop them into a ceramic bowl and they make a satisfying clink as they hit the surface, undented and whole.

Here are three other food-related things to reward you for your moseying here:

1. The Time Out Sydney Food Awards issue is on sale right now. Even if you were a conscientious objector/non-voter-type or awards-phobic, it’s worth heading over just to check out Daniel Boud’s always amazing food photography.

2. Helena from Clipper Cafe is overseeing a gourmet game that runs throughout August, as part of Sydney Uni’s Epicurean Society: “You send us in your recipe, you receive one back and then you have one week to cook and create that dish, photograph it, document the process, and be your own food critic. Then send in the results via email (making sure that all photos are in jpeg. format) and what will result is a collectively concocted collection of recipes SLAMMED together.”

You know where to click to take part.

3. I am playing catch-up on New Yorker back-issues and I just finished reading an excellent short story by Lorrie Moore which, like all her work, starts off quietly and unassuming and completely had me fixed to the page after a few seemingly innocent paragraphs.

I especially loved these two food-related parts (which I’ll end this placeholding blog post with).

Firstly, her description of a local Chinese restaurant:

I had a handleless cup of hot, stale tea, poured and reheated from a pail stored in the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator, and one elegantly folded fortune cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.

I would tug the paper slip from the stiff clutches of the cookie and save it as a bookmark. All my books had fortunes protruding like tiny tails from their pages …

And, also … (about a completely different eatery altogether):

It was one of those expensive restaurants downtown, every entrée freshly hairy with dill, every soup and dessert dripped upon as preciously as a Pollock, fillets and cutlets sprinkled with lavender dust once owned by pixies — restaurants to which students never went, unless newly pinned to a fraternity boy or dating an assistant dean or hosting a visit from concerned suburban parents.

I had once tried to study the menu in its lit case near the entrance, and as I stared at the words the sting of my own exile had moistened my eyes. The lowest price for an entrée was twenty-two dollars, the highest, forty-five. Forty-five! You could get a Taiwanese oil-and-water bra for that price!

(That last part made me laugh, I had to look up “oil-and-water bra” because that phrase had never entered my vocab before. It sounds like something Madonna would wear, on a very bad day.)