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!