In my kitchen: December 2019

I went to Toronto for 10 days in November for a conference and to catch up with friends. As always in Toronto, there was so much friendship and joy. Lots of people ask me how I cope with my job when they find out what I do for a living (even lots of my patients) - I think I cope predominantly by eating and playing music!


We visited the Big Apple just east of Toronto on the way out to visit Emily's childhood home.

The apples have such incredible flavour in Ontario, none of that tasteless floury stuff you get after months of refridgeration. We played a few cello-piano duets here, Granados' Orientale, the first Beethoven cello sonata in F and the first Brahms cello sonata. Em's childhood friend also was inspired by the music making and after a 20 year absence from the piano, was convinced to join us on 6-hand piano arrangement of Mozart's Alla Turca and Schubert's famous Military March. Lots of fun all around!

 

I also picked up some apple cider vinegar and apple cider from the Big Apple.

The weather was really quite cold in Toronto this time. The first couple of days I got some excellent photos of the autumn leaves, but then there was a huge snowstorm and I was distracted by all the white after that.

We were gifted this beautiful blackberry crostata by Em's friend Maria whose husband is a real green thumb and makes his own jam from backyard blackberries every year. We enjoyed this lovely introduction to crostatas, a soft eggy pastry with a filling of jam.

Also in Em's kitchen, we had a dumpling party with pork and Chinese cabbage dumplings. Making the dumpling dough is always the most fun. We also ate these with artichokes (becoming a bit of a joke theme for our travels to look for artichokes) and a simple bok choy stir fry. We ate these with a selection of wonderful pieces - Shostakovich's 3 pieces for 2 violins and piano, Bach's Double violin concerto and the Beethoven String trio no.1 in Eb.

One afternoon we also enjoyed this delicious truffle cheese with the heady scent of truffle, along with eggplant dip and Egyptian artichoke salad (because... artichokes) from Maha's, my new favourite brunch place in Toronto. And coffee in tiny Romanian cups, Maria's biscotti, fresh ricotta cannoli.. what an afternoon tea it was!

Organic fruit beer.. my friend's favourite. A weird citrus-y beer that is like a beer-cider cross.

Em is the queen of challah. She has now perfected the easiest method to form this beautiful plaited bread and she showed it to me this time.

We made a four strand challah first.

Then a five strand challah!

I really admire her ability in eyeballing such a complex dough - I always thought that bread had to be measured precisely, or at least that's what everyone told me until I started making my own bread. But she really takes it to the next level with her bread intuition.


Back in my own kitchen, one of our string quartets was cancelled due to the bushfires making it too hazy to drive. I had seen bread animals online but never tried to make one.

Here he is, I call him Pete the vegan crocodile. My scale battery also ran flat so I had to eyeball this dough but it turned out just fine. I must say he looks rather like a platypus..

After basically 6 straight weeks away Barney needed feeding, so I ate a lot of sourdough pancakes!

In more news from the music & food series...

We had these lovely zucchini flowers stuffed with haloumi. We were only three that night so we ended up playing a bit from the first Schubert piano trio, the Bach double violin concerto and the Debussy piano trio.

Our quartet had our Christmas party and I based this on Not Quite Nigella's Christmas tree wreath recipe. It was a fairly easy adaptation with sourdough which rose a bit like a pizza base but still had crunchy "fingers". We played Schubert's Death and the Maiden, Dvorak's American and a bit of the Brahms first piano quartet - though my thumbs gave up by then!

What a year of delicious food and wonderful music it has been!  I'm sending this to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings who hosts the monthly In My Kitchen events.

In my kitchen: November 2019

I have been on the road since last month's IMK! What a journey it has been.

First, I flew to Shanghai to visit my grandma who is still in hospital with her broken leg. It was a short stopover but of course my father threw a huge party and we ate these absolutely delightful fried dumplings.

There's something so anticipatory about rising dough and making little plump pockets to be fried.

My dad grows baby bok choy everywhere so he can add a bit of green to soups. Here it is doing very well in Shanghai.

We also had these 菱角 - apparently a type of water chestnut which come in a gorgeous star shape. The texture is a little like chestnut, soft and floury once they are boiled in a stock.

Then it was off to Paris to play music with Emily and her Italian friend who lives in such a trendy area - the Latin Quartier of Paris.

The fresh produce at the market on Place Monge was incredible. Everything had such vibrant colours and smelled like the real deal.

For some reason I am drawn to artichokes and our little trio rebranded ourselves Le Trio de Artichauts. We particularly enjoyed playing the rare combination of 2 violins + viola trio - Dvorak's Terzetto (a really wonderful and rich piece, rarely played), and his Miniatures (even less played!); and the string trio by Taneyev, a little known Russian composers.
 

How I adore the rustic baguettes in Paris, burnished with a crackly crust, but meltingly soft on the inside.

We had a selection of four cheeses from the market also, a fresh soft cheese, a small goat cheese and two orange smelly cheeses. We also met another friend's son to play string quartets and for his inaugural string quartet debut we rather bit off more than we could chew with a little Haydn, then Mozart's Dissonance, the Beethoven Razumovsky 1st quartet, and a little of the first Brahms string quartet.

Then it was off to Essaouira, a little town by the sea where we loved the fresh food market.

Look at all this glorious mint!

Beautiful orange pomegranates with tendrils that fall straight off and seeds that are so soft they are digestible.

We loved the fresh fruit & vegetables, all reminiscent of the earth.

Of course we ate so much tagine. I never knew it was so easy to cook in one - just layer the bottom with onions, a splash of oil and the spices, then arrange the vegetables on top to cook slowly.

We had a wonderful piano in our airbnb so we played lots of piano duets this time, including my old favourite Schubert's Fantasie in F minor. Other highlights included Chaminade's Romantic pieces, Arensky's 6 pieces enfantines, and a few great transcriptions (Beethoven's 7th symphony, the Raz 1 that we played in Paris, the Brahms piano quintet, the Mendelssohn Octet).

Traditional Khobz bread dusted with a coarse bran or semolina, eaten with every meal.

A lavish breakfast including Moroccan pancakes and the best freshest orange juice.

Then it was off to Berlin, where we attended the concert of a lifetime - three megastars Daniel Barenboim, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Yo-yo Ma playing the Beethoven triple concerto along with the East-West divan orchestra. What an experience that was!

We also ate some excellent baked products including this cherry streusel. My favourite bakery (possibly ever) was Brot ist Gold, a new bakery in the Schonberg area featuring some of the best bread I've ever eaten.

A breakfast of rye bread and cheese, with fruit and Speisequark, a thick extra creamy yoghurt. In Berlin we explored the music of Robert Fuchs, a basically unknown composer who was apparently respected by Brahms but hated the public eye. We played his string duets for violin & viola which were great fun then even discovered his super difficult viola sonata

So much bread in Germany. I wonder how they got this nutty loaf into this peculiar shape?

I stopped briefly in Paris on the way home, enough time to have a magnificent croissant from Le Maison d'Isabelle, which had won the best croissant in Paris award of 2018 - a pretty spectacular award!

Second stopover in Shanghai with my viola and baguette. Who knew that the baguette fits perfectly into the straps of the viola?

So much cooking in foreign kitchens this month. I'm sending this to Sherry who hosts IMK, thanks Sherry!

Brot ist Gold

In Berlin, we came across a wonderful sourdough bakery.

Brot ist Gold (Bread is Gold) is a newly opened bakery in the trendy area of Schönberg near the Winterfeldmarkt. We were walking down the street when the bread display caught my eye and we stopped to admire the beautiful bread.

At that very moment a lady, coming out of the shop stopped to tell us how much she loved the bread, and how it had quickly become the neighbourhood favourite. And hence we decided to go in.

The shop is tiny with a single display shelf of loaves, each one handmade and unique.

The first day, we got the plain wheat loaf Weizenbrot which is a long fermentation (40 hours) high hydration sourdough.

No words can convey how spectacular this loaf was. The crust was a burnished gold, perfectly caramelised and bubbly. Slicing it was like music to the ears. The crumb was tender and moist, full of open holes. The aroma was deeply earthy and reminiscent of man's connection to earth via bread. It was a truly memorable experience!

Here is our simple lunch that day in Berlin. A salad of rocket, radish and tomatoes (so fresh and juicy), and the delightful sourdough with a peppery cheese and garlic wurst.

The second day, we went back to try the rye bread Roggenbrot, which is baked in the afternoon. We were so lucky to get the last loaf around 2pm!

The crust is so heavy on this loaf that the crackle pattern is an artwork in itself. The rye itself is very dark and melancholic, as if it was dug out of the ground.

Even though rye is a traditionally dense bread, they still managed to produce am incredible crumb.

On this day we had the same salad and a simple stir fry of Swiss brown and forest mushrooms with the same garlic wurst. Washed down with a glass of apple wine.

The third day, we returned to get a loaf for our music friends in Berlin. This loaf we ate with cheeses and a Riesling from the Rhine region, after we had played some great string quartets (Bach's Art of the Fugue, Beethoven Op 18 No.4 and Mendelssohn Op.12).

We met all 3 members of staff in the bakery, all of whom were friendly and welcoming. We adored their passion for sourdough and hoped that the bakery would thrive in the modern age of too much commercialised yeast bread.

Sourdough used to be the standard bread in Europe, each family having a sourdough starter that was passed down through the generations. We learned this time that this is called Hermann in German (as in, can I borrow some of your Hermann?) What a sweet name! The art of sourdough is lost now, though it's making a comeback all over the world. We loved this bakery's commitment to the locality as well, all their ingredients being sourced from within a 100km radius.

The first two days we were there, we also saw an older lady hanging out in the shop. She looked real cosy on an armchair that the guys put out for her. I couldn't help but ask on the last day who she was - she's an older lady who's lived in the neighborhood for four decades and decided to be friends with the bakery because they were nice! She hangs out there and enjoys their company. She even crocheted some little breads to put in the window display, because she says the window is sad when the bread is sold out!

Sometimes one feels a strange connection to things that are not explainable with simple logic. Of course we were drawn to this bakery because the bread was wonderful, but also there was a warmth and human-ness to the place that was greatly attractive. Given the strong competition of bakeries in Berlin, we really, really hope it thrives!

Dreams in Europe, October 2019

The magic icecream store

In this dream Em and I are minding three kids who are clearly not our own. One is a teenager and the other two mid primary age. None of them seem to be related either.

We are having some trouble controlling the kids as they run around trying to escape from view. Finally we pull them together and tell them we are going to the ice cream store.

Yay! Ice cream! They erupt in cheers.

The ice cream store had an amazing number of flavours which traverse the stairs going up from the bottom floor. There are so many flavours it's kind boggling, each one has a miniature model of what the flavour is (a mango, a coconut etc) sitting on top and the display looks really adorable.

The kids choose their flavours and change their minds again and again. Em and I cannot keep up with their preferences and when we get to the head of the queue, she accidentally orders a Colgate flavour.

There's actually a Toothpaste flavoured ice cream? I wonder to myself. The other flavours we pick up are apple (served in a realistic apple cone) and matcha sludges. But the toothpaste? I wake up before it arrives.


Jocelyn Glove and the baguette


In this dream I am at a staff meeting with the other intensivists in my department. It looks so ordinary that it feels real. We are discussing mundane things like rosters and meetings.

Suddenly, the peace is disturbed. One of the intensivists comes into the room and tells us that we are about to be arrested, all of us. We gasp collectively and ask what we did wrong, but she cannot tell us.

We all react differently, just as we would in real life. Some are crying silently, others pavpac anxiously across the room.

The intensivist who announced the trouble turns to me and says that there are two things that may help me escape. The first thing is already lost, but the second one is a patient compliment from a patient I had cared for.

Do you remember her? She asks me.

I rack my brains but don't remember her name.

It was a big case, she was very badly burnt. She tells me, but it does not trigger any memory.

Her name is Jocelyn Glove. She says.

Jocelyn Glove, Jocelyn Glove. I repeat to myself but it doesn't ring any bells.

Then the director comes in and says that we must work as a team to overcome this hurdle. This is the typical kind of thing a director says and we all look at each other cluelessly.

He brings a tray of small segments of bread, all torn up.

You must put this back together. He says.
It used to be a baguette.

I stare at the bits of bread, wondering how we can reconstruct the baguette. Then I wake up.


The lost German grandma

In this dream I am standing inside a train station that looks like Town Hall. I look at the display and the next train to newy is in 40min time. I look around for something I can buy to eat.

At that moment I see an older lady maybe in her 70s, looking very lost.

When I approach her to ask if she needs help she is delighted that I spoke to her.

She shows me a picture of a walking stick, very elaborate and high tech looking.

I don't really understand her but she keeps saying ich brauche diese... (I need this)

I decide that she needs to go to Kathmandu to buy it since it looks like an outdoor walking pole. I offer to go with her, saying ich kann mit dir gehen, ich habe viel Zeit (I can go with you, I have lots of time). But she insists I draw her the directions on the back of the tourist brochure she is holding.

After I've drawn the instructions she says thanks and starts walking back towards the station entrance. I walk with her a few steps and hear her gasp loudly at her suitcase which has been opened nearby, its contents spilling out messily everywhere.

She wails and lurches towards it, but she misses the last step in the flight of stairs and falls down flat on her face.

She remains very very still after that and I am concerned. She does not seem to be breathing.

With some effort I turn her body over and there is a single puncture mark between her eyes.

How did she get shot? I wonder, and wake up.


Down jackets and eagles

In this dream I am in a reality TV show and feel very mindful that I am being filmed. I walk past a room where my maternal aunt and grandmother are sitting in relative darkness.

Wanting to get away from them, I duck into the nearest room. It is a challenge station and the challenge is to show people how to wash their down jackets without losing the puffiness.

I don't know anything about washing down jackets so I really struggle. Then I get a text from Em and I think, great I can ask her since Canadians must know about it!

The message is a picture of a cathedral dome. When I look at it closely, it is not possible for anyone to take a photo like this. It is so close to the dome that the picture must have been taken in flight.

Then I realise that she must have turned into one of the long distance eagles that racked up a huge phone bill due to unexpected adventures to Kazakhstan. I laugh in the dream, and wake up in real life.

In My Kitchen: October 2019

I have really enjoyed the last few weeks, emerging out of the chilly weather. I worked a lot in September but interspersed it with heaps of music and baking.

In the garden…

The very last of the baby bok choy was harvested.

On the day I pulled every last stalk out of the ground, the pile stood so high that I thought it was a man (the Bok Choy Man) sitting on the chair.

It took me ages but I stripped all the stalks of bok choy and ended up with a huge bag (maybe 1kg) of bok choy leaves that I ate shredded in salad every day (every meal, practically) for two weeks. 

Here it is with some simple but delicious dal. Sometimes the simplest things are the best in life.

The warming of the weather means the coriander is coming to an end too, though I did still eat a heap of coriander every day in September.


Baking projects...

It was moon festival this month, and I decided to have a go at making Shanghainese style moon cakes stuffed with a savoury pork filling.

The pastry was quite a pain (had to make two types of dough – an oil dough and a water dough to mix together) but in the end the flakiness was worth it. 

The insides were so juicy and hot that I burned my mouth when they first came out of the oven!

In more news from Barney, here is a beautiful loaf with particularly lovely holes.

I’m fortunate to have sourdough most mornings for breakfast. My friend who always sends me pictures of avo on toast from various cafes inspired me to make this one – avo, cheese and spicy beansprouts. If I may suggest, that is the best fusion avo toast ever.

These are just about the most adorable things I’ve made for a while – cute little sourdough pumpkin buns stuffed with dark chocolate chips. They came out of the oven soft and moreish, pulling apart to delicate strands. The string to get the pumpkin shape was pretty fiddly but it was well worth the effort!

Onto the Food and Music series…

I went with the Merewether ensemble up to the Gold Coast for a music weekend. What fun that was! We were just about the most eclectic collection of musicians ever. There were the traditional instruments like piano, violin, viola and cello. But we were joined by a variety of recorders, a saxophone, a trombone and random percussion instruments. Of course we all had a go on the didjeridoo cos that’s really traditional chamber music! One of us brought a piece for piano 8 hands (that’s 4 people sitting at the same time on the piano bench) which became the theme song for the weekend. We also had the rare opportunity to play 2 piano duets!

Our gracious hosts made this divine slow cooked lamb shoulder one night for dinner, filling the house with incredible smells as it roasted in the oven, served with a zingy salsa verde.

Of course Barney came for the ride too, here he is on the plane reading the safety instructions

These delicious parmesan scrolls were eaten one night with some wonderful piano duets – the Peer Gynt suites by Grieg (just about my favourite piano duet music), the incredible Fantasie in F minor by Schubert and a lesser known work – Lebensturme (Life’s Tempest), and for a dessert a sweet little sonata by CPE Bach.

My string quartet had a wonderful reunion sans Barney (I was working too much that week). We had the most succulent salmon and crispy roast potatoes, along with fresh veggies and salad. This feast was enjoyed with all the violist's favourites - the Beethoven string quartet Op 18. No.4  (probably the quartet for our group), a mash through the first movement of the Brahms String quartet Op 51 No.1 & No.2, and the other all time favourite, Schubert's Death and the Maiden.

It was the violist’s birthday and we took the chance to indulge in this wonderfully rich chocolate cake. I switched the candles around while the cellist was looking for matches… How do you know we are all getting old? The cellist thought she’d developed dementia and the violist thought her eyes needed checking. Only the other violinist picked up immediately that I’d been up to mischief! Who knew that we could sing Paphy Dirtybah instead?

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