In my kitchen: January 2020

I had a couple of weeks staycation in December which was just blissful, especially since I worked all through the holiday weeks after that.

The first week of my staycation, I got rather addicted to grilled cheese.

I've realised the secret for me is to put some mustard on the bread and topping it with both tasty and parmesan cheese - great texture and flavour!

I experimented with sourdough hoppers - a simple recipe of rice flour, coconut cream and a dollop of sourdough starter, fermented till ripe and fried up in a hopper pan.

The second week of my staycation, I got back into swimming. I didn't swim at all the summer of 2018-2019 since the car accident, so I was so very happy to be back in the water and painfree! It gave me such a fantastic appetite that I planned a challah party with all my childless friends. It was also a pseudo farewell party as I'm moving to Newcastle very soon.

We started out with the standard 3-strand challah. As a joke, each next guest had to make one more strand than the last.

They were all spectacular, but this one was particularly golden and burnished!

There was also a vegan challah for my dear friend B and this turned out super well. The honey is replaced by maple syrup, the eggs by aquafaba and the milk by olive oil. The colour is paler with a gentle goldenness. The texture was even more light and fluffy than the non-vegan version.

Finally the piece de resistance - a sourdough chocolate babka. Words could not describe how tenderly this pulled apart, softly oozing chocolate and entrancing every guest into a sugary delirium.

On the garden front, my dad has harvested so much bok choy this month.

We love this purple weed vegetable which takes over the whole garden in summer and seems to grow at an incredible rate.

Perfect in a stir fry with a bit of garlic. Also great eaten raw in salad and in soups.

Finally in the music & food series...

No pic, but it was extremely humbling to have a failed loaf for the first time in maybe 2 years! I went to the Christmas party for the Barbarians (a musical medical group in Newcastle) and promised a loaf of Barney but he over-rose the night before and sadly had no oomph left in him. I had worked during the day and had no time to get something else... so as we say in Chinese, I hardened my scalp and showed up with the hideous flat loaf. He still got eaten! Along with lots of increasingly drunk singing of Christmas carols and the Hallelujah chorus.

My regular string quartet has been busy for Christmas but I did catch my other semi-regular piano quartet for Brahms' piano quartet no. 3 in C minor, probably my favourite piano quartet of all time (it's either that one or the Faure, also in C minor). We also played some of the Schumann piano quartet afterwards but it was too much energetic. Here we ate Barney with cheeses, egg salad, a smoked trout salad and ricotta spinach rolls. A proper feast! The violinist announced that it may be our last Christmas together since she recently had a stroke, who knows what the future will bring..

On New Year's Eve I celebrated the arrival of the new decade with my piano duet buddy. We are doing the Beethoven project where we play 4 hand arrangements of the Beethoven string quartets, one at a time. We are still in the Op 18s and enjoying every moment of it.

Another month, another ode to carbs. I'm sending this to Sherry who hosts the In My Kitchen series, thanks Sherry!