Travels via food (9): Digital detox in Leura

Last week, my friend J and I went up to the Blue Mountains for a midweek getaway. We met in February 2001 on our first day at medical school. We were taking the same 891 bus to UNSW - she sat down opposite me, we started chatting and as they say, the rest is history. We have lived through so much together in the last two decades, finishing medical school, specialty training, overseas fellowships, relationships and heartaches..

These days we both have busy lives as specialists, and plan our holidays around international trips. J usually travels around neurology conferences, while I usually meet up with friends for music. 2020 has chucked a spanner in the works with Covid and all our international trips have been cancelled. Australia has been running an ad promotion "This year, Holiday here." and it seeped into my consciousness. This trip to the mountains was inspired by an article I read on the bore baths at Lightning Ridge. But Lightning Ridge is so far away, so we thought of going to the Japanese baths in the Blue Mountains instead. 

We found a nice Airbnb in Leura and the hosts generously offered us an extra night when they heard that we were stressed out doctors. On the way out of Sydney, we discussed our plans to do a digital detox. We are both heavily reliant on our phones for work as well as keeping in touch with family and friends. But we know all about the deleterious effects of our phones - the conscious and unconscious distractions, the unaware passage of time, the ups and downs of dopamine. Every time we hear the "ding", our primitive brains start thinking Someone loves me! Who is it? What are they saying? It is extremely difficult to break out of this dopamine cycle, and I am not any different to the average person. Even though I don't have Facebook or Twitter, I still use Whatsapp constantly to talk to my friends, particularly those overseas who I cannot see in person. In the end, we agreed to try a digital detox and get away from emails and social media. What a blissful time it was! 

I packed a "Fun Bag" which reminded me of road trip holidays from pre smart phone days. It had a jigsaw, scrabble, magazines and books, sketching materials, my journal, an old school camera, and knitting. I think all these things bring a stronger tendency for me to actually focus on the moment, rather than being distracted and in three different places at once. 

After a long sleep in, we explored the gardens at the Airbnb full of beautiful flowers, a truly stunning garden. 

Later we went to Sublime Point and were blown away by the majestic view.  

While there, we got talking to some other visitors. Initially I thought they were a couple, but as they talked I realised that they were actually mother & son. How nice it is that a grown up 25 year old man still wants to go on a mid week holiday with his mother! We talked about our digital detox and they were amazed we were driving around the mountains with no navigation. The son was a newly graduated nurse at a major hospital where J had worked, a strange random connection. He told us stories about how his transition to nursing practice has opened his eyes to how life really works. One story was really quite striking. Being of Italian background, he had connected with an older Italian gentleman who he viewed as his "Nonno". One night, the patient died unexpectedly and he was utterly shocked to find this out when he arrived at work. One of the senior nurses took him aside and told him that they would look after the patient, that he should take a break from being responsible for taking care of the body. In retrospect he realised that the senior nurse had recognised the impact this would have on him and was trying to shield him from that sadness. It was an apt reminder that got me thinking back to my own junior years. 

Then we went out to Wentworth Falls for a short walk. The effects of the bushfire season over 2019-2020 summer are still quite evident. 

Everywhere we turned, the blackened trees still gave off the faint scent of smoke. Lots of green had emerged in the bush, leaves growing from crevices of burnt stumps. The fires must have been so devastating that much of the track was destroyed, and the main walk in the area (National Pass) is still partially closed. 

Cliffside on the National Pass

Wentworth Falls

We had dinner at the Yellow Deli cafe, run by a cult with a farm in the local area. I often drop by when I am in Katoomba because it is such a quaint place with beautiful furniture. 

I had a warming bowl of chili and a mug of mate latte to complete the hipsteriffic dinner. It was pretty cold and misty in the mountains. 

The next day we drove up to Medlow Bath for afternoon tea at the Hydro Majestic. This is an old hotel from the 19th century that has been recently refurbished. 

The views from the hotel are unparalleled, overlooking the expansive valley. 

We had a traditional afternoon tea - fluffy warm scones, traditional savoury sandwiches and dainty little sweets. I don't know of any better place for a high tea!

We went a little further up the mountain to Blackheath, where it was a beautiful clear day at Govett's Leap lookout. Here also, the bushfires had been quite bad last summer. Parts of the track were closed but we could descend to the first lookout over Bridal Veil falls. 

There was hardly any water in the falls, but the view over the valley was gorgeous and we soaked up a bit of sunshine. 

On the way back we gave a ride to a woman in her late 30s who we had met briefly at the lookout. She had screamed I'm free! some time after we had left the lookout, her voice echoing across the valley. It must have felt amazing to scream! We were still contemplating the view at the lookout when she approached us and asked if we could give her a ride. She explained that she had walked the 4km or so from the train station but a strange man had followed her along the way. He kept pestering her and asking where she was staying, and she was terrified. Being slightly out of town, she couldn't find an Uber to get back to the station. It was sobering to remember how vulnerable we can be as solo female travellers, and we were glad to be of some help to her. 

On our last day in the mountains we said goodbye to our lovely airbnb hosts and went up to Katoomba to visit the Lost Bear Gallery. I loved the collection here - an eclectic mix of Australian landscapes, photography, sculpture, blown glass and some modern art. We got talking to the gallery owner Geoff who shares the space with his gorgeous 11 year old dog Nugget. 

There was a beautiful old German grand piano there that had been restored, and the art gallery setting for this kind of piano was just perfect. 

Our final stop on the holiday was at the Japanese bath house in the upper mountains. 

Just short of Lithgow, the bath house is in a stunning location overlooking Lake Lyell. Unlike the original onsens, we were required to wear bathing suits and it was not gender segregated. Most of the baths were the same temp of 38 degrees, with one extra hot pool, a herbal steam room and associated cold pool. Some of the baths were set up in spectacular locations with panoramic lake views. What is it about water that is so calming? And of warm water in bath form, it must remind us of the amniotic fluid of the womb...

After the bath we made a quick stop in Katoomba for dinner at the trendy 8Things, a hipster street food joint with 8 dishes inspired from different countries around the world. The descent from the mountains was extremely foggy with visibility of less than one car at places. Nevertheless, we arrived home feeling relaxed. 

It was amazing to get away from our devices even just for 3 days. I experienced a kind of mental reset and an awareness of presence. It's been a long time since I had this time to just be with my friend, and not try to do a billion things at once. It really got me thinking about mindfulness. 

Travels via food (8): Burnout via Bagels

In June 2016, I moved to Toronto for a year long critical care fellowship at the University of Toronto. I was drawn to the program because it seemed to be an amazing opportunity to experience living and working in another country. I was particularly impressed by how half of the fellowship cohort would be local, and the other half would be international. My colleagues came from all over the world - UK, US, Argentina, Mexico, Singapore, Japan, Germany, Qatar, Iraq... a very impressive United Nations of Critical Care. I was excited by this kind of collaboration - where I trained in Sydney was an ivory tower, reputing itself as the "very best" but in reality quite isolated from other ICUs even within the same city. 

So much happened during my time in Toronto. A lot of it was wonderful - I made some incredible friends and we made some incredible memories together; I fell in love with chamber music; I learned about this thing called "sourdough" from my friend who was experimenting with her new starter we christened Priscilla (a la Fig Jam & Lime Cordial)... so much of what my life is now is influenced by the short time I spent there. 

But the most profound thing that happened during my critical care fellowship was my burnout, from which I learned that I am human. 

I cannot tell you exactly how my burnout started, but I can tell you about some of the factors that contributed to my burnout. 

First, I had already finished training in Australia and had been working for 10 years out of medical school. The North American system is vastly different and doctors speed through a compressed residency and fellowship. Thus many of my colleagues were just 4 or 5 years out of medical school and a significant proportion of my bosses were less experienced than I was in intensive care. I didn't think this would be a big deal, but it became frustrating when we had disagreements about patient care. The hierarchy in the hospital was stronger than anything I had ever experienced, and I found it disempowering that my clinical experience was less regarded because of my job title. 

One night, I called the attending about a patient that I was worried about. I thought the patient had an unusual procedural complication and was deteriorating rapidly. The boss disagreed with my assessment and dismissed my concerns. Unable to reach an agreement over the phone, I asked her to come in urgently and she refused. Half an hour later, I made a second phone call when the patient appeared to be dying. Soon after that second call and before the boss arrived at the hospital, the patient died. I wanted to inform the family about the procedural complication, but was told to keep quiet. I wanted to refer the patient to the coroner for investigation, and I was told to keep in line and write an alternative diagnosis on the death certificate. In hindsight, this disconnection from what I felt was morally acceptable was the first blow in the development of my burnout. 

Second, I found the medicolegal context of my work extremely challenging. There have been a number of challenging cases in Canada with regard to withdrawal of life support, and this was in full swing when I arrived in 2016. We would frequently be referred patients who were elderly and frail with multiple comorbidities, patients who had lost the ability to advocate for a peaceful natural death for themselves - these were the people we had to admit to ICU because the family insisted that we do "everything". Often, I would scream silently in my head that we ought to do "everything that is reasonable that would be of benefit to the patient". Instead, we were forced to put them on machines and do multiple painful procedures. I felt like I was participating in robbing them of their dignity at the end of their lives. 

One evening, I was called to the Emergency Department to see an elderly lady in her 90s who lived in a nursing home and had advanced dementia. She had had a "Do Not Resuscitate" order in place for several years, but the family decided that it should be rescinded on this particular occasion. She had severe pneumonia and her blood pressure was low. I rang the attending because I felt conflicted about the ethics of this case, but the attending told me to "not make trouble" and "do the usual". The fact that there is an expression of "do a slow code" (ie. you have to resuscitate technically, but don't try to resuscitate too hard) was astounding to me. 

I took this lady up to the ICU - she was clearly dying but I had been given instructions to put her on the ventilator. Her blood pressure was plummeting fast and the oxygen trace was abysmal. To get her blood pressure up before I put her on the ventilator, I had to put a central line in her neck. She was nearly unconscious but cried with pain when I poked her with needles. As I inserted the line, the alarms on the monitor went off. Her nurse had gone on her tea break and the nurse covering was busy elsewhere. No one else was in the room as this lady took her last breath, just as I finished inserting the central line. I took the drape off the patient and felt deeply ashamed that I had participated in this. Her last moment on this earth was one of pain and suffocation under a drape, robbed of the dignity she deserved in death. By then, the alarms had gone crazy because her heart had stopped and a bunch of nurses ran in with the crash cart. The patient looked peaceful, grey and inert. One of the nurses ran to do CPR on her, and the other attached her to the machine to give her electric shocks. The peace was broken by the hubble, and no one believed me when I said she had already died, because she was "full code".  

The crazy hours didn't help either with my burnout. Some weeks were "heavy weeks" -  24.5 hour shifts on Monday, Friday and Sunday, and a normal work day (7am to 5pm) on Wednesday and Thursday, a total of 93 hours in one week. I was told to be grateful to be given so much time off in between the long shifts. With the safe working hours regulations in Australia, I was not used to these hours but they were very much the "norm" in Canada. I was often run off my feet and too overwhelmed to sleep after the long shifts. Sometimes I would queue at the coffee shop and wonder if the lady at the coffee shop got paid more than $1000 for 93 hours. I had never been into money or materialism, but being paid below minimum wage was a demoralising addition to my burnout. 

I thought burnout was something that happened to old doctors - men in their 50s having their mid life crisis. But finally I realised that it can happen to anyone, and particularly young women are at risk. I had protective factors like supportive colleagues, a close group of friends, hobbies outside of work... but at that point in time, the pro-burnout factors were winning. I was far away from my family and my then-partner. Winter was descending, the days were short and I felt deprived of sun.

The final straw that broke the camel's back came in December, when I had a stretch of 17 days of continuous work. I was allocated to do six 24 hour shifts during the 17 days. These were some of the darkest days of my life. Though I remember some moments of joy like a friend dropping by treats she had saved from a party she went to, most of that time was a numb amorphous mass. I felt disengaged and unmotivated. I was embarrassed when I missed things at work, and afraid that others would look at me like I was incompetent. I was not aware that my state of burnout was responsible for these near-misses and misses. I felt like I could not say anything to anyone - how would anyone understand the state I was in? What if I got kicked out of the program? 

The fifth of the six 24-hour shifts started like any other. To look after the 30 bed ICU, I was paired with a disinterested PGY1 orthopaedic resident. I missed home like no other day because disinterested PGY1 orthopaedic residents would never be responsible for the care of critically ill patients in Australia. He was surly, and I was in an even surlier mood. I knew things were unravelling when one of the nurses asked me if I was OK, after I yelled at her for asking me about a blood test result. My heart was racing and I did not know why. 

Shortly after midnight, I was called to the transplant HDU where a patient with a recent lung transplant was deteriorating. As I was about to intubate the patient, another patient had a cardiac arrest and I had to run from the first patient to the second patient. By the time the second patient was stabilised, the first patient had deteriorated and no one had informed me. I ran between the two patients, feeling like I was losing control of the situation and it was all my fault. The first patient improved a little, but the second patient was dying despite all my efforts. As the night dragged on and both patients accumulated more machines by their bedside, I became convinced that a more competent doctor would be doing a better job. 

At 5am, I had the most surreal experience of my life. I was suddenly overwhelmed with an extreme anger that I had never felt before. My body was flooded with a red hot fury that was totally foreign to me. I was so angry at the second patient for being alive - clearly they were going to die anyway, why wouldn't they just die so I can get five minutes sleep? When I witnessed the emergence of this thought from the depths of my mind, I wondered who I had become. Who was this person who had this thought? I went to the on call room and cried. I called my boyfriend in Australia but he did not answer because he was at work. 

Just before the sun rose, the second patient died. The morning doctors arrived for rounds and unanimously shrugged - he was extremely ill so no one was surprised by his death. Nevertheless, I felt responsible for his death, I was scared I had somehow wished it upon him because I wanted to sleep. How could a doctor be so selfish as to wish death upon a patient? I was determined then that I should lose my medical licence, that I was not cut out for medicine. 

After the shift finished, I went to my supervisor and told her about the night. She was nonchalant and said that everyone wishes that sort of thing once in a while, so don't worry about it. I told her that I could not do the sixth on call shift, and she asked me incredulously - who was going to do it then? I told her that it didn't matter who was going to do it, but it wasn't going to be me. Then I walked out and went home. 

That was the beginning of the journey out of the darkness. It was the first time I acknowledged my burnout and the first step towards getting external help and helping myself. I needed to rest and ultimately, I needed to leave the environment that I was in. Everyone always talks about work life balance, but it is so much easier said than done. 

In late January, I had my mid-year assessment with the director of the critical care fellowship program. I tried to tell her about my burnout experience, and she responded with a request for me to consider and remember why I had come to Toronto. I went home and contemplated this - what was I trying to prove by being there? Did I just want the experience 'for my CV'? was it worth sacrificing my physical and mental well being? 

That night, I decided to look for a job back in Australia. Shortly after, I found one and quit the program. Fast forward to now, I have excellent work life balance and work 70% of the time. The rest of the time I play music, bake bread, go for walks, read and write. I have a job that I love and a life that I love - and a greater than ever awareness of self care. 

And so it is that I make these bagels, often the feature of brunches in Toronto. Is there anything better than fresh bagels? 

Bagels.. in Newcastle

(Adapted from the Emilie Raffa sourdough book, the best one there is...) 

120g sourdough starter 

250g water 

500g flour

20g sugar 

8g salt 

Mix into a dough and knead until smooth. This will take about 10 minutes. 

I did this in several bursts allowing the gluten to relax for about 5 minutes in between, it's much easier to bring the dough together this way (or you can use a stand mixer but I don't have one). 

Rise until doubled in size, approx 6 hours in Oz spring temperature. 

I then refridgerated the dough till the next day, but you can proceed on the same day. 

Divide the dough into 8 - 10 balls (depending on how large you want your bagels), shape into a ball shape by tucking the edges in and relax for 10 minutes. 

Poke a hole in the dough and gently stretch it out to a bagel shape (it will start to shrink inwards, so make the hole larger than you think)

Rest covered for 20 minutes 

Meanwhile, bring water to boil in a large pot and add 20g maple syrup to it

Boil 2 or 3 bagels at a time for 30 seconds each side, remove with a slotted spoon onto prepared baking sheets 

Once slightly cooled enough to touch, dip the still moist bagels into preferred seed mixture

Bake at 220 degrees for 25 minutes, flipping the pan half way 

Fresh out of the oven, these were incredibly soft and chewy with a blistery crust.

 

Rather handsome too!

Dream: the assassination

 (I tend to only dream when I am sleeping very deeply and well, which I haven't been for the last few months... so this is the first extremely vivid dream for quite a long time)

In this dream I am a spy. I think I may be James Bond (is there a girl version of James Bond?), a spectacular spy that will get the target with a lot of flair. My sidekick is my friend from real life W who is a very gentle, reserved and non-violent person. 

We are both fairly out of character in this dream. There's a gun strapped to my ankle under my jeans, and I'm wearing lace up boots like I'm in some terrible Western movie. I am driving a small car, which is fairly typical for us as W does not drive in real life. 

He is navigating through Google maps, flicking back and forth between the map view and the 'earth' view where you can see the buildings. He says that the map must be wrong because the address we are going to is not the same as the one in our brief. I look over at his phone, and all I see is a jumble of buildings. 

Just follow the instructions! I snap at him. 

He ignores me and scrolls through more buildings. We drive on in silence and I realise from the billboards we are driving past that we are in Japan. Finally we pull up to a hotel building across the road from the sea. Here the road rounds back on itself, and the hotel is the only building on the bend, as if it was actually jutting into the sea. 

I pull up at a parking spot just across the road from the hotel. I think to myself that we are lucky to have such a great getaway spot for when we have finished the job. 

We can't park here! W says suddenly. It's only 2 hour parking! 

I look at the sign and feel a twinge of irritation. 

It's not going to take us 2 hours to take out this guy, it'll be fine. I try to convince W.

What if we finish the job, come out and the cops have towed our car? He asks sullenly, arms crossed across his chest. 

We argue this point for a while, and in the end I agree to look for another spot. We drive around the bend and the hotel disappears from view. On the next block, we park under a deep shadow that is cast by the buildings. We walk in silence to the hotel, the tension thick between us. It is so unusual of us to fight that I feel displaced from the situation - why are we fighting? I wonder. 

We enter the hotel through the fancy doors, which a silent Japanese man open for us with a curt nod. 

Passing by the busy front desk, we stand under some chandeliers while waiting for the lift. The lift is one of those ancient contraptions that look like it's being pulled by gremlins in the basement. We enter the lift and the doors close. The wooden panels smell musty and we feel slightly suffocated. 

We emerge onto the 8th floor, where the dining room is situated. 

Why is the dining room on the 8th floor? I wonder to myself. 

We are greeted by a lady who waves us into the dining room. Inside there are a few tables of people, but it is easy to spot our target, a middle aged man in a suit reading a newspaper. 

We take a seat at a table far away from him and discuss how we will kill the man. There are families with children around, and it feels odd to kill someone in this kind of setting. 

The waiter comes by with a pitcher of water and glasses.  

You guys better get something to eat or drink, or it will look too suspicious. He says very quietly as he sets down the glasses. 

We get up and go to the buffet, but all the serving dishes are empty. We decide to get some coffee to at least pretend to drink coffee. The coffee machine is an extremely complicated affair with multiple dials and buttons behind a single pane of smooth glass. There is only one lever that can be manoeuvred from the front and it is titled Creaminess. Moving the dial from left to right increases the creaminess, allegedly, but how is this achieved? My eyes follow the complex circuitry and it leads to a dairy cow some metres away, chewing on grass. 

So increasing the Creaminess dial concentrates the milk from the cow? I wonder to myself. 

We start to have another argument about how creamy to make the coffee, and suddenly I feel very tired. I don't want to have W tripping up this assassination anymore. I tell him to leave but he just stands there with his hand on the Creaminess lever. He refuses to leave and we both fall to a silence. The waiter comes up to us and says something we don't understand. 

And that's how the dream ends. We never even end up assassinating the man! 

In my kitchen: October 2020

Spring is here! Whilst my dad has always been an avid gardener, I myself have never been "into it" until this year when Covid hit. Stuck in lockdown, I felt the urge to nurture something green, and now I am addicted!

Hello bitter melon seedling! 

I buried my first lot of Bokashi compost recently. Pumpkin started to sprout from seeds in the compost! I was amazed by the resilience of these seeds - they had survived for months in the bin, quietly decomposing and waiting for their chance to come back to life again. I don't have a huge amount of space in my backyard, but I'm hoping one of these lil pumpkins will make it. 

My dad has a little patch of bamboo on the hill above his house, and one day we went digging for these bamboo shoots. The dog also ate some of these, was he a panda in his last life?

We also ate the last of the loquats from my dad's tree. We had an extra amazing crop this year, probably close to a hundred fruits. 

On the cooking front, I have been doing my Travel via Food project which has been a fun way to revisit memories in my kitchen. In the last month we've been to challah, Myanmar and Sikkim! 

I am absolutely addicted to handmade noodles. They are so easy to make, a simple dough of flour, salt and water rested for an hour or so before rolling out and cutting into strips. It's also easy enough to divide the dough so that they can be freshly rolled the next day. 

This was a particularly beautiful slice of my sourdough. Is there possibly a better breakfast than bread and cheese (and loquat)?

Here are a couple of vegan challahs I made for the Rosh Hashanah celebrations as a present for my friend. 

Finally onto the Food and Music series, my quartet has been taking a break as the cellist was on holidays. 

The cellist and her husband usually go away in winter on a sailing boat race but they holidayed this year in Port Stephens instead. Being quite close to me, I went up for the day to go out on the boat with them. I made this rosemary focaccia (the smell of warm focaccia is like nothing else) - we ate it with smoked salmon and a salad, contemplating how we could squeeze our string quartet onto the boat!

We finally had a reunion towards the end of September and I made these chocolate eclairs. The first batch I made were ruined when I went to the garden to look for slugs and the eclairs literally went up in smoke! They were completely inedible and I had to throw them out. The second batch were much better. We ate these with a couple of favourites, the Beethoven Op 18. 4 and the Brahms piano quartet in C minor. 

Here is a loaf I baked to have with soup and the Beethoven project. Actually, I have two Beethoven projects on the go - my piano duet friend and I are playing all of Beethoven's string quartet arrangements for piano duet. Last month we played the Harp and the Serioso quartets. During Covid, we also started a project to play the Beethoven violin sonatas together, and we finished this project last month. What a feeling it was to play the last note of the last sonata - I never thought this would be possible, having started violin at the ripe old age of 27.

I'm going to finish with these gorgeous rainbow espresso cups that my friend S from Paris sent me. In an ordinary year, I would travel a couple of times overseas to meet up with music friends, but this year all our plans are on hold. It will be the first year that I have not travelled outside Australia for the last 14 years. Nevertheless, we continue to send each other encouragement in the form of words and music. S, a very talented violinist, has been recording all of Bach's solo partitas for violin one movement at a time - a remarkable achievement!

I'm sending this to Sherry, of Sherry's Pickings who hosts the monthly In My Kitchen event - Thanks Sherry! 

Travels via food (7): Shanghainese Mooncakes

This week we are making a short trip to my memories via the annual moon festival. 

I moved to Sydney when I was ten years old and I have spent every Moon Festival ever since outside China. It has been so long since my family has celebrated this festival in China that I have forgotten all the traditions. I know we are supposed to go outside and admire the full moon, on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunar calendar. Of course all good festivals have a food component too and we eat mooncakes on this day.

When I was growing up, mooncakes were a real delicacy. I grew up in Communist China in the 80s and early 90s, just at the beginning of China's economic revolution. While we still learned strong Communist dogmas at school, the reality was that the economy was opening up fast. Ration coupons had been in use for decades, but they were finally scrapped in the 80s. Still, the average Chinese family was poor. I remember eating chicken for the first time when I was seven and thinking that it was some sort of food from heaven. Most of the meat we ate was pork, in extremely small portions. My father says that in the old days, each person was allowed 50g pork per week. What could one cook with 50g of pork? He says that the family would usually pool their meat ration together and eat one or two meals containing meat, and eat mostly vegetables and rice the rest of the time. It is crazy sometimes when I think about the Chinese food depicted in the west, these were foods that I had never even heard of when I moved to the West! 

One of my strongest memories from my childhood was when I was six or so and my grandmother asked me to go get some vinegar from the shop. We used to have glass bottles for all the main condiments (oil, soy sauce, vinegar etc) and we would get a refill once we had run out. The shop was about 100m up the road, a tiny hole in the wall all-purpose grocery store with a grumpy man behind a single counter. I took the glass bottle there and the man refilled it, just like any other time I would have gone to the shop. On the way home, I tripped over an uneven part of the pavement and fell over. I grazed my knees badly, but worst of all, the vinegar bottle went flying and shattered all over the pavement. I tried to pick up the glass shards somehow to save some vinegar, anything at all. The sharp fragments of glass must have cut my hands too, but I don't remember that part. I just remember the frank desolation of my terrified six year old self, feeling too scared to go home without the vinegar. It was the first time in my life that I realised emotional pain could outweigh any form of physical suffering.

It's incredible to think of how life can transform so much with time and space. China has seen an incredible transformation in the decades since we left, and the standard of living has skyrocketed beyond imagination. I don't think any ordinary Chinese family would blink twice about buying a bottle of vinegar these days, but in the 80s it was a big deal. 

Since I don't have many memories of the moon festival as a child, I asked my father last week what we used to do to celebrate. He says my grandmother preferred the sweet Cantonese style mooncakes stuffed with lotus paste and salted duck egg yolks, but the men in the family preferred the traditional Shanghai style mooncakes. Outside of Shanghai and the Eastern states of China (Jiangsu and Zhejiang), this style of savoury pork mooncake is hardly eaten. Apparently the queues to buy these from the most famous shops in Shanghai are massive every year. 

So this year, I decided to try my hand at making these mooncakes. They were pretty fiddly, but a fun project to do with my dad. I'm looking forward to making them again with him at another moon festival, perhaps it could be even a new tradition for our family. 

Shanghai Style Mooncakes 

More instructional pics at this recipe (Unfortunately my hands were too oily to take more pics!)

This is an extremely short laminated crust which holds an incredible crunch and shatters into smithereens when you bite into it. The pork should be 2/3 lean, 1/3 fatty to achieve the perfect juicy inside. The recipe has three components - a water dough, an oil dough and the pork filling. The two doughs together form the lamination for the multi-layer effect.

For the water dough:

Plain flour 150g 

Sugar 5g (optional) 

Vegetable oil 60g (I used olive oil) 

Mix briefly together  

Add boiling water 75g (this activates the gluten)

Once cool enough to handle, turn onto floured surface and knead till smooth 

For the oil dough

Plain flour 135g 

Vegetable oil 65g 

Mix together till a dough ball forms, turn onto floured surface and knead till smooth

Rest both dough balls for 30min, covered with cling wrap 

For the filling

Pork mince 250g, preferably slightly fatty 

~1 tbsp each of light soy and Shaoxing cooking wine 

1 Spring onion, very finely shredded 

Combine all together and mix with chopsticks, turning in one direction only (must be superstition but it works) 

Keep turning the filling till it is well incorporated and well aerated, approx 5 minutes 

Use wet hands to shape the filling into 15 balls and place these on a platter 

To make the skins

Divide water dough into 15 portions (20g each), roll each portion into a ball 

Divide oil dough into 15 portions (13g each), roll each portion into a ball

Flatten the water dough into a disc and place the oil dough ball in the middle, then enclose

Repeat till you have 15 balls of oil dough wrapped within water dough, rest covered with cling wrap 10min 

Taking one ball at a time, 

Use a rolling pin to gently roll out to oval shape, then roll into a scroll from the top down 

Turn the scroll 90 degrees so it is vertically oriented, then roll out gently again 

Roll the scroll from top down again, and stand the final scroll up 

Repeat till you have 15 scrolls of laminated dough, rest for 10min 

Final assembly

Preheat oven to 180 degrees (fan forced) and line a baking tray with baking paper 

Taking one scroll at a time, 

Flatten the scroll into a disc and roll out roughly into a round shaped skin, not too thin (just has to be large enough to enclose around the filling)

Enclose a pork filling ball within the skin and pinch to close, placing seam down on the baking tray

(Ensure there are no cracks over the surface or the juice will ooze out during baking)

Repeat till all the mooncakes are made and rest for 10 minutes 

Brush with egg wash and scatter with sesame seeds

 

Bake at 180 degrees for 25 minutes till golden, turning the tray around half way through baking

For sure a special occasion treat, the dog was drooling while we ate too!