In My Kitchen: August 2023

Where did July go? It's only when the first of each month rolls around and it's time for IMK that I realise time is just flying past.. We are back in Paris now after spending most of July in Bonn, Germany. Let's have a look at my food adventures for July... 

Sausage and potatoes. How much more German does German food get? 

Love the little rectangular slices of cake from the local Konditorei. This one was an apple cake, light and fluffy with a beautiful almond topping. The bakeries in Germany are quite different to those in France and I enjoyed trying all the different things on offer. 

When I found a wombok at the local supermarket we knew we had to make dumplings!

Spicy fried noodles from the Tibet Imbiss - it was crazy how many Tibetan places there were in Bonn. 

The gelato is excellent and cheap in Germany, average of 1.50 euros per scoop. I tried quite a lot of flavours and this was one of my favourites - blueberry kefir. 

While in Germany I became quite obsessed with ratatouille, no idea why. Here I made it with quite a lot of kohlrabi, which was plentiful and delicious in Germany!

I went to Vienna for a few days to visit my music friend and of course had to try all the Austrian delicacies like this käsekrainer, oozy with cheese and served with copious amounts of mustard and tomato sauce. 

Her partner is quite the cook, so here he whipped up a southern German dish of Dampfnüdeln, a kind of spongy bun not unlike the Chinese Bao but made with butter and milk. We ate it with a side of gooseberries and blueberries. 

Apple strudel! This was truly delicious served warm, the pastry flaking at the slightest touch and the rich cinnamon-y filling studded with plump juicy sultanas and bits of walnuts. 

Here is the "original" schnitzel from Figlmüller, which claims to be the "Home of the Schnitzel" since 1905. It was pounded extremely thin and you can see here it was bigger than the plate! 

Continuing with all the S- foods (sausage, strudel, schnitzel..) I finished off the food tour of Vienna at the Sacher cafe, where the Sachertorte was allegedly invented. It was a rare decadent treat!

I would have loved to stay in Austria longer but I came back to Bonn just for my birthday and it was a big milestone one! S picked up this slice of cake for us to enjoy on video chat with my dad in Australia, a delicious light cheesecake with a topping of beautiful ripe raspberries. He is a sweetheart. 

Our last night in Germany we spent with new music friends! We had met through the ACMP directory a professional violinist who organised for us to play the Brahms sextet no. 1 in mid July at her friends' place. They were a lovely couple that we met again just before we left to play Mozart's Dissonance quartet, Beethoven's Op 95 quartet (really, I think the best string quartet of Beethoven) and two movements of the Ravel. It was challenging but also very satisfying to play with such excellent players! After our music we had these little laugenbrot with herbed creamed butter.

The curveball this month is also food related! Did you know that gummi bears were an invention of Bonn? The name "Haribo" is actually an abbreviation formed from Hans Riegel Bonn. There was the most unimaginably enormous gummi bear store selling everything you could possibly imagine!

I'm sending this to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings who hosts the monthly IMK event, thanks Sherry and have a great month everyone! 

In My Kitchen: July 2023

 So, June was another crazy month for us! We started the month off in Toronto... 

A simple strawberry cake - the berries were in strong supply this year in Ontario, deliciously juicy and sweet.  

Barney turned 6! Here was a mishmash of leftover frozen bananas & strawberries, pecans, teff flour, whatever was in the cupboard went into Barney's "birthday cake"!

This was a stunner challah I made for the fellows farewell party which we had on the sunny roof patio at Princess Margaret Hospital. I glazed it with maple syrup which worked out really well. 

And here my last meal in Toronto before going to the airport - Shanghainese style pan fried pork buns. These taste just like my childhood, my grandma used to go get these for a special treat or on days when she couldn't be bothered to cook. 

And voilà, we are in France! S has been doing an academic program in Bonn but he came back to Paris for the weekend to help me with my bags and to settle in. Here was our first meal together off the plane, of course including an excellent baguette from the boulangerie just downstairs. 

He also got me this lovely surprise from my favourite patisserie Cyril Lignac, titled Royal Chocolate - Dacquoise with almonds, praline feuillantine, chocolate mousse, crunchy dark chocolate sheet, confit of praline and chocolate icing. 

Doesn't it just make your mouth water reading it? 

I had to stay in Paris for an extra week for some appointments so S went back to Germany, and I made pancakes while reviving Barney. Just like last year, he had a lot of trouble adjusting to French water / flour!

Cute eschallots on a string bundle! 

And of course, croissants are everywhere in Paris... 

The French love apricots and I've come to adore their sweet - tartness. Here on a perfectly crisp pastry base with a scattering of pistachios. Delicious! 

Even the banh mis in Paris are excellent, served on a still-warm crusty baguette. 

And finally, the month of June came to an end in Germany. I came to Bonn just before S' birthday and we had a nice dinner at the aptly named Mr & Mrs Humus (Humus is where the heart is.. don't you love their logo!) followed by this little watermelon cake that I constructed out of watermelon. 

 

And here is the curve ball: 

I went to the World Cup of Aligro in Paris - it was quite the spectacle! Aligro is a dish from the region of Auvergne, which is made from mashed potatoes, cream and cheese. Now the cheese: potato ratio is 1:1, so you can imagine how stretchy/gooey it is! Here different teams competed to stretch their pots of aligro as tall as possible, using a cherry picker! The winner got to 4.9m (less than the previous world record, but it was a really hot day so the cheese was more prone to breaking... so the commentary went) It was actually an insane sight, only possible in France :) 

I'm sending this post to Sherry who hosts the In My Kitchen series, thanks Sherry!!

In My Kitchen, June 2023

We are in the middle of packing up in Toronto for the move to Paris! In fact we will be in Germany till the end of July as S is going to an important academic convention there which I've nicknamed Nerdfest... so there will be a lot of wurst and sauerkraut coming soon :)

Here, a quick look at what was in my kitchen in the last month... 

I continue my obsession with swirly breads.. this one made with dark cocoa powder, just a hint of chocolate in the final product. 

We continue with our Manga Monday tradition. Here the dish was Hiya Jiru, a cold summer soup with a base of sesame and dashi. It was not so much a soup more like a thick sauce! It was delicious with a bowl of rice and a pile of edamame..

I tried making sourdough injera again... it wasn't super effective since I didn't get as many holes as I would have liked, but the texture was nice and soft. I also bought some shiro powder from an Ethiopian shop (there are many in Toronto) and this made a delicious shiro! 

Sourdough banana and coconut pancakes. My dad always says life is boring and we have to find our own fun. 

Tortilla Thursdays are another fun tradition we have. We are just at the end of the tortilla flour now, the bag has lasted us a whole year! Here we had some mango salsa, leftover lentils, and grilled capsicums with cajun seasoning. 

We have been doing the rounds of visiting our friends for the last time (for now). Here I made this loaf for one of these parties. 

We made this cake with our friends' kids, it was an insane amount of sugar and the kids  both got super hyper. At one point they were licking the icing off the table! We called it the Neptune cake since the surface was covered by moon rocks of unmelted icing.

This was a tray of baked goodies I took to another farewell party. The loaf at the back was made with gluten free flour leftover from the failed croissant experiment, and the front is  normal gluten full pretzels which worked out pretty well. 

The farewells continue. This was a dinner we had at ours with wrap-your-own Vietnamese paper rolls. So fresh and delicious! 

I associate Toronto so much with roti, not the flat bread kind of roti we usually associate with Indian cuisine but Caribbean style roti, where the roti is huge and becomes a wrapper for delicious fillings. When I lived here in 2016-2017 I had a favourite place but it closed down and its chef has since moved to a fancier joint. The roti is still amazing! 

The curveball this month is the Infinity Room by Yayoi Kusama, which has been installed at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The reflective objects are placed all around the room and you are immediately surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands, reflections of yourself. It's also completely silent. Eerie but cool!

That's it for me this month, thanks to Sherry again for organising the IMK series. I'll see everyone next month from Germany!

In My Kitchen, May 2023

Can someone please tell me where, just where is the time going? It is flying past and our time in Toronto is coming to an end... at the end of June I will be finishing my fellowship and moving to Paris with S. So much change in our lives!

Let's take a look into my kitchen this month ... We've been travelling a lot!

First up I have some homemade ramen noodles from Oji Seichi, a ramen shop near where one of my previous workplaces. These noodles were really beautiful, springy with lots of bounce and a great mouth feel.  

We made our own veggie ramen with a shiitake mushroom & miso based broth. The toppings were shiitakes (they turned out so meaty!) black fungus, asparagus, carrot, seaweed and a just-set egg. It was pretty good!

Always a tradition for me at Easter time to make sourdough hot cross buns. Here was a batch for friends and a giant one for me. I glazed them with maple syrup. 

You could eat it like a cake! 

For Easter, S and I went away to stay in a tiny cabin on a farm. It was so beautiful - there were friendly goats that headbutted you, horses that would come up for a nuzzle, geese everywhere (I even saw a goose threesome, it was... incredible). The breakfast each day was very generous and came on a big tray like this. We also saw stars, such a rare treat when we live in a big busy city. 

We had a crazy week of heatwave in Toronto where the temperature almost got to 30 Celcius. We had a party on the patio at Princess Margaret Hospital, and I made this delicious vegemite cheese star. I didn't say anything about the vegemite till everyone had had a piece, because so many people here don't "like" Vegemite! 

Some Garrett popcorn I brought back from Chicago - this is a seriously addictive mix of cheesy and caramelised 

My friend from Australia visited for a week and we went up north for a long weekend. Algonquin Park is absolutely stunning at any time of the year, and we were amazed to see the ice in lakes melting. We also stopped by a maple farm to pick up some local maple syurp. These bottles look like Goldilocks!

S and I have a Tortilla Thursday tradition. When we first moved here I bought one of those giant bags of Maseca for making tortillas and we've been eating the same bag all year! He's now pretty good at flipping them. We usually have a pile of salad and some kind of salsa. Here it was with corn and orange capsicums - so good!  

The curveball this month... We were in New York for a long weekend and the cherry blossoms in Central Park were just stunning. 

There's something about natural things that come for a short season that make one feel a grand sense of awe - how is it possible that these cherry blossoms can be so beautiful, so delicate and so short lived? No wonder all of New York was out here walking amongst the cherry avenues, with a gentle shower of pink fluffy petals every time the wind sighs. (See, it even inspires poeticism..)

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

In My Kitchen: April 2023

Dear friends of IMK, welcome to my kitchen, have I got a story to share with you this month! 

Who would have thought you could make little dough lovebirds like this? I really enjoyed the process of making them. The males have their wings spread and the females are more demure. I also strangely enjoyed poking the cloves in to be their eyes... 

Here they are after baking! Aren't they beautiful? 

I had to store them out of sight because they were the first step in a big surprise project... 

I've never made such a giant dough (it was a simple challah dough), I couldn't find any bowl big enough so I put it inside my biggest IKEA pot. Obviously my sourdough was too active - the next morning I woke up to see that it had exploded in the fridge! 

Can you guess yet what I'm making..? I made my own wedding "cake" from sourdough! 

It was a base layer of braided challah (just because challah is delicious), a Chinese middle layer of a Chinese style babka with sesame, coriander, chilli and green onions, and an Italian top layer of tomato focaccia. It represents the coming together of our cultures. 

You may ask... but why is it on the balcony? Because I started making it 2 hours before the wedding and I needed it to cool down quickly. It was -5 outside so I put it outside to cool! We ended up putting it together just 7 minutes before the wedding started. Talk about cutting it close! 

The Italian focaccia layer 

Braiding the Chinese babka... 

Have a look at that Chinese layer, my friend E's flavour creation - she calls it crack babka because it is utterly addictive!

Here's the final wedding "cake" in all its glory. So much fun to make!

My bridal bouquet - the first time that I met S we ate artichokes that we bought from the market downstairs from his place in Paris

We also got ourselves a beautiful dozen roses 

S wanted to match the artichoke so he had a piece of cos lettuce for his pocket - so sweet

This is probably one of my favourite photos from my entire life! It was so special to celebrate our wedding with friends in Toronto, especially our music friends. We got married in the party room in our condo so that we could unplug the piano and take it downstairs.  It was so special that we could play a part of the second Brahms violin sonata during the ceremony - here is a video of the beginning. It was a really simple wedding, 20 people, a potluck dinner, and a music party - now how often do you get to play music in your wedding dress?? 

And now we drink our coffee from these cups :) 

Thanks to Sherry for hosting the IMK series - I don't know any of you in person but I feel like I know you all, thanks for all your words of encouragement and support!