In My Kitchen: July 2021

June was just a terrible month - S' father was diagnosed with a terminal illness, we got more travel exemption rejections and rode the waves of hopelessness.. 

Thankfully I had already started doing The Apple Project, where I bake something different featuring apple every week. So let's go first to the apples this month... 

Vegan apple upside-down cake, served with a splosh of maple syrup that I brought back from Toronto (flashback to the days we could travel!) 

How can one go past apple pie? Latticing a pie crust is one of my favourite activities of all time

Apple cinnamon sourdough scroll 

Classic Australian apple shortbread slice thanks to Not Quite Nigella's recipe 

Non Apple things in my kitchen...

I'm loving Asian style breads at the moment - sometimes you just want something soft and pull-apartable. This bread I made with a tangzhong milk sourdough - split into a plain milk dough, stuffed with salted coconut; and a matcha dough, stuffed with red beans. They were pillowy and fluffy, just a dream texture! 

My mahjong group hosted an elaborate Hainanese chicken rice dinner - I think every Malaysian doctor in Newcastle was at this party! The rice cooked in chicken fat was a real treat. 

I got these gorgeous lemons from a friend's tree... 

When life gives you lemons, make a lemon tart. Making the lemon curd was unbelievable, I could just eat that stuff by the spoonful. I took it to work, melted the dark chocolate in the microwave for 30 seconds and scooped it into a 20mL syringe (sterile of course) - amazingly easy to drizzle! I guess you gotta use the tools that you have...

This was probably the most pretty thing I baked this month, a sourdough focaccia. I posted some of my sourdough starter Barney to S' mother in Italy, and she has been baking with him for the last 7 months. This was a focaccia that we made in tandem and in solidarity. 

Onto the Food and Music series... 

These soft garlic scrolls were served up with goulash soup and a few Mozart violin sonatas. With my piano duet friend, we've moved onto the Mozart project - last year we did the Beethoven project where we played all of his violin sonatas. 

And with my string quartet group, we had goat tagine with couscous, the slow cooking infusing delicious spices throughout the tagine. It's a quartet favourite for a reason! We played Mozart's Divertimento for string trio in E flat, and a bit of the Mendelssohn D minor piano trio. Sadly my hands are not in great shape at the moment and I can barely manage on the piano. 

And the curveball...

I finally got Murakami's new book, a collection of short stories. Murakami is probably the "thing" that I  have been obsessed with for the longest time - I started reading his works in high school and haven't stopped for two decades! I can't wait to read this one. 

I'm sending this to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings - as always, thanks for hosting Sherry!