Dream: crab gratin vs soba

This is quite a hyper vivid and very interesting dream, though the symbolism is not apparent.

(We stayed in an old Japanese house in suburban Osaka recently, where there was a piano belonging to the airbnb host's sister. The room in this dream is directly taken from the sitting room of that house)

In this dream the sitting room has turned into a small noodle bar, with a set of Japanese style two fold curtains at one end. It looks like the kitchen is on the other side of the curtains, but one cannot be sure.

There is a U-shaped bar table inside and I am the only customer sitting directly facing the curtains. There is a middle aged Japanese hostess with rather non-descript features. She serves me a dish with a heavy blue coloured ceramic lid. When she lifts the lid of the dish off, I am brought to another place - the crab restaurant where we had our recent crab degustation in Kobe. The aroma is exactly as it is in my memory, and I immediately know this is my favourite dish from that degustation - the crab gratin.

In this dish, the ever slightly savoury crab is set against the creaminess of the sauce and the softness of the pasta. It has a slightly bronzed crust, as if the cheese there had decidedly taken on a more delicious character. I savour the aroma of this dish, and I can barely wait to eat it again.

The hostess bows to me and I take a single bite. As my tastebuds process the bite, the intense flavours rush into my soul and I feel a wave of immense pleasure. I come to realise that M is sitting at a bar stool on my left, with nothing in front of him, watching me eat. I put my chopsticks and stare at him as if he were an apparition, but he says nothing.

Suddenly a young man enters the noodle bar, though we did not hear the rustle of any door or curtain. He is perhaps 20, a university student? He asks the hostess for the menu and peruses it with much enthusiasm. He starts asking about the dishes, but with each and every dish M deflects the attention with rejections like the spinach is not in season right now, and we have run out of this type of fish. The boy does not give up and keeps asking after various items. After a while, M says look, the restaurant is pretty much closed, come back another day.

The student looks crestfallen and leaves. M also disappears behind the blue curtains into the kitchen and it is just me and the hostess left in the restaurant. She stares at me sullenly, as if she was wishing I would go as well.

I take another bite of the gratin, and it is just as delicious as the very first bite. I am totally absorbed into the crab gratin and wish it would never end.

The curtains open and at that moment I strain to see inside, but I cannot see anything. M comes out with a large bowl of noodles, and I feel myself think in the dream - he doesn't eat noodles! It is distinctly soba, there is no other noodle it could be. The bowl is pretty much bare, with just a few green leaves floating in the clear broth.

He sits down on my left, in the position where he was. He starts to eat the noodles wordlessly and I continue to eat my gratin but it no longer tastes the same. I am looking at my dish when suddenly, he deposits a single strand of soba onto my plate. It is coiled up perfectly as if someone has drawn it. The soba is so hot that there is an impossible amount of steam pouring off the single noodle, as if it was being boiled from below.

You should eat this. he says to me.

I contemplate the soba, the contrast between my dish and his dish so apparent. Mine is so decadent, rich and succulent. His is so clean and pared back, devoid of any excess. I poke the single noodle with my chopstick and it lets off a little jet of steam.

You know, I say to him very slowly and intently, we are not so good at changing direction once we have gone somewhere.

Then I wake up.

3 dreams in Japan

The first dream: Unresponsive ghosts 

In this dream Emily and I are the violinists in a quartet with a middle aged violist called Miriam and an older cellist whose name I cannot remember. We are staying in an old majestic house with creaky floors and tall ceilings.

The cellist says she must leave early to help with making dinner before the performance but the rest of us go to the front of the house to do some impromptu playing before the performance. We discuss what we could play with 2 violins and a viola, and in the end we decide on the Mozart Kegelstatt.

I sit down at the piano which is next to a large bay window with light streaming through it. The sunshine is bright and illuminates the room with much warmth. As I get ready to play the very first chord, I see something reflected in the window. I ask the others to look too but they see nothing. I see several people but they are going about their own business not paying any attention to us. I go up to the ghosts but they seem to be transparent.

I sit back down at the piano and we try the opening again, but we are disjointed and not together. Then Emily has this idea to take a selfie. We get together in front of the window, with the light illuminating our faces perfectly. I see in the screen of her phone that the ghosts are visible. Both Emily and Miriam see them this time and they are impressed the ghosts are there.

Emily adjusts the angle of the phone to get a good picture of them and as she presses the capture button, I wake up.


The second dream: Inside a stocking 

In this dream I'm staying in a big old house run by a cranky housekeeper. There are a lot of people milling around the different parts of the house, with lots of living corners. I am wearing a long black dress with lacey sleeves, something I would not usually wear in real life.

Then two of my high school friends come in and the housekeeper tells them that the house is full. I plead with her to try and help them. I notice that my dress seems to be longer than it had been. She takes them up some side stairs to a different part of the house, one she says has only been done up recently.

I go into the kitchen and notice that my dress is a lot longer now, maybe ankle length now. Emily is in the fridge and she is very angry at a fridge magnet. I go closer and see that the fridge magnet is a cartoon scene of a few people sitting around a table. She says the person wearing a red shirt in the cartoon is her and that my friend drew her into the cartoon without her permission. I cannot see any similarity between her and the magnet at all, but nevertheless she is very upset.

My dress is longer yet again. I go into a room next to the kitchen and as the door closes, total darkness descends. It is so black that it feels like the world has stopped. I am really scared and my heart pounds. Slowly the darkness lifts a little and I can make out some light. The light seems to follow some pattern and I wonder if I am hallucinating it.

As the light arranges itself into rows, the answer is apparent. I am inside a stocking.
Then I wake up.


The third dream: Beaveroos on Darby St

In this dream I am driving down a street towards the sea. I have a distinct feeling I'm in Cooks Hill but it does not look very familiar.

The sky is blue and the sea is an incredible shade of deep dark blue. A perfect crescent of sand awaits me at the end of the street, fringed by some neat greenery. As I get closer, I see some kangaroos hopping around.

What an idyllic scene. I think to myself.

Then I see the kangaroos have beaver heads. They look really strange with round blobby heads and big buck teeth, but their bodies are sleek and muscular like kangaroos. They seem bigger than the usual kangaroo as well, their bounce comically high.

I take a video of them thinking I would send it to my friends, then turn left onto Darby St. Soon I come to a pedestrian section which does not exist in real life. The road gets narrower and narrower till I am stuck in front of a Greek Taverna. Where I am stuck is so close to the end of the pedestrian zone that I can see my building, but I cannot get to it.

I try to turn around but after many direction changes I am still stuck. In my rear view mirror I see a green bin and I wonder if I could get out if I knock it over. I contemplate this for a while but I don't want to ruin the dinners of those eating on the footpath nearby. But I am stuck.. what to do? Before I reach any resolution, I wake up.

In my kitchen: June 2019

It hasn’t been so hectic this last month with a lot more time for leisure and music. I went away for a few days with the Australian Doctors Orchestra and on the preceding chamber day fulfilled a long time wish of playing the Brahms piano quintet – an amazing effort on everyone’s part to come together en spec and pull it off!

With the cold weather, the garden is really winding up. Whatever vegetables are left are really for entertainment value, like this peanut sized bitter melon. 

On the baking front I have been making a few plain loaves for my quartet.

A beautiful olive loaf that was eaten with the Mozart String quintet in C minor, Mendelssohn String quintet Op. 12 and the Beethoven Gassenhauer piano trio. I love the text for the lively last movement of the Beethoven, which goes something like..

I’m going to work!

But first,

I must have a little something

To eat!

Here is another walnutty loaf we ate with an interesting assortment of music. I’ve been playing the viola recently, and we struggled through the Mozart Kegelstatt trio with me mashing up all the notes. We also played some Bach 3 part inventions arranged for string trio and finally the Debussy Piano trio – a lovely early impressionist work.

On this occasion, it was sourdough naan that we had with a feast of curries and veggies. Softened by Greek yoghurt, this dough is a pillowy delight to knead and puffs up nicely in the pan. They were all gone in a flash! 

We ate this with the Bach Goldberg variations for string trio and the Beethoven String trio Op 3.

My friend was also visiting from China for a week and she brought me some goodies.

The best instant noodles from her city Wuhan. They are called “Hot dry noodles”, and after cooking the liquid is discarded before mixing with three sauces (soy, chilli and peanut). 

A hotpot base from the Chongqing area, where hotpot is very famous. The label reads “Medium heat, 45 degrees” - wonder how many degrees it is out of?

I’ve been rather obsessed with turning leftover milk into a soft ricotta just by heating and curdling it with lemon juice or white vinegar. The whey I use instead of water in my sourdough, and the cheese I scoff down on bread or in this particular case in a simple pasta with kale and cherry tomatoes. 

I’m sending this to Sherry, who hosts the In My Kitchen series. Thanks Sherry!