In my kitchen: March 2021

Where goes the time? How can it be March already? 

In my garden... 

I have concluded that plants like having people around. Maybe they can sense that they are being loved when they are being watered, weeded or attended to?

A huge harvest of bitter melons 

I went away for a few days and a baby zucchini turned into my giant Zucchino of 1.431kg. I had so much fun taking photos with him! About a third went into roast zucchini with a drizzle of olive oil and balsalmic vinegar, which I ate plain and in salads. The next third went into a chocolate zucchini cake. The final third I put into a couple of stirfries. Lasted me a whole week! 

 

 

On the cooking front...

I had so much fun making these adorable sourdough hippos. A plain sourdough milk dough that was easy to shape, I kept their mouths open with little balls of foil that I removed later. A bit of the Zucchino was left and provided the perfect prop for the hippos. 

I couldn't resist the selection of beautiful stone fruit on the side of the road when we went on our South coast getaway...

A couple of the peaches went into this diabetic-friendly sponge cake for my dad's birthday. Glorious!

 

I had to take a photo of this loaf I made for the nurses, a perfect square hat!

Inspired by my sourdough hippo project, I made a sourdough lobster too... I did have the idea to stuff the bread lobster with actual lobster, but where does one get lobster from in Newcastle??

We made these glutinous rice dumplings to celebrate the end of Chinese New Year. My grandma used to make these every year but we never learned how to make it from her. My dad and I watched Youtube videos to cobble it together, and it was very successful for our first attempt!

Onto the Food and Music series....

I've been rather obsessed with the plating of salads. Here we have a colourful concoction of spinach, beetroot, feta, walnut and orange. My string quartet ate this with a few movements from the Beethoven Op 18 string quartets. 

I made this Indian themed dinner for my piano duet friend. The light and fluffy sourdough naan was just the best! I made potato and zucchini curry with fresh curry leaves gifted to me by one of my colleagues, and a tomato based chickpea curry. After dinner we played Mozart's D major violin concerto and Vivaldi's 4 seasons - lots of fun!

Did I say I was obsessed with salads? Here's one I made on the Gold Coast, charred corn wih tomato cucumber and red onion - we ate this with chilli garlic prawns and coconut rice. After dinner, we played the Franck violin sonata. What a feat that was! The music is bloody challenging for both the pianist and the violinist, comprising hopeless mashing of the notes (there are a lot of notes), random improvisation and aimless slides around the fingerboard. The canon of the last movement was both lost and beautiful. As L's husband remarked afterwards - you guys just didn't give up. It was a momentous occasion in my life! 

My greatest appreciation to Sherry for introducing the concept of the curveball. Here is a tiny spider I found in the chilli plant. Love to the little guy for hanging on and enjoying his corner of the world. 

I'm sending this to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings, thanks Sherry for hosting the IMK series!