In my kitchen: May 2019

It has been an absolutely hectic month of work for me, interspersed with lots of baking.

Barney had a mild near death experience just after Easter, where he went to sleep for 4 days and refused to bubble. Looking at his lifeless body twice a day made me terribly depressed, but I kept feeding him stubbornly. Fortunately he came back just in time for the celebration of the first anniversary of my string quartet on Anzac day.

He made a very fine Turkish style pide stuffed with spinach, mushrooms and cheese. We also made some little Turkish breads with Barry, Barney's son who lives with our cellist. We ate these in the intermission between our anniversary program of the Schubert string quintet in C and the Dohnanyi piano quintet Op. 1.

We are yet unnamed but since 3 of us now have Barney in some variation (and we always have some type of bread when we play), I suggested we call ourselves the Barney quartet. However I don't think the others are so chuffed with the name!

Here he is in hot cross bun form. The ones on the right are from Barney the original and the ones on the left from Barry his son. Glazed and warm out of the oven, we scoffed a bunch of these lovely fruity buns to accompany Schubert's Death and the Maiden.

I had some spectacular loaves this month, but I particularly loved this one which seemed to be smiling.

Sourdough bagels also worked quite well, dense and chewy with a crisp crust. I made some cream cheese to go with it too - amazingly simple, just milk boiled, lemon juice added then strained and the curds pureed till smooth with a sprinkle of salt. We ate these with Mendelssohn's string quartet Op. 13 and Brahms' piano quartet Op. 25.

Last weekend my lovely violinist mathematician friend Tanja was visiting from Canberra. These sourdough croissants were a great weekend project for us, and in between laminations of dough we played Bach's Double violin concerto.

Before I started making bread, I never even dreamed I would one day make croissants. It seemed as about far away as going to the moon. The fact that we managed to pull it off is pretty incredible! Though we didn't have a scale to weigh the ingredients (or a ruler to measure the length of the dough), which drove Tanja crazy.

Words cannot describe the aroma that filled the house as this baked in the oven. Wonderfully flaky and crispy, yet buttery and soft on the inside with all those layers. Pengy and Barney really outdid themselves!

To finish, a few snaps from my dad's garden where the summer veg season is coming to an end.   

The mint has had a few near death experiences but recently started growing well again.

We have had so many chokos we don't know what to do with them! Mostly we eat them thinly julienned in a Chinese style salad with rice vinegar and chilli.

A baby pumpkin - there are a few more on the vine now waiting to be eaten.

A few chillies that we don't know the species of, but boy the green ones were hot!

And the last of the tomatoes, best eaten straight from the vine.

I'm sending this to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings, who hosts the monthly In My Kitchen event.

A super vivid dream: the lagoon and the sea

In this dream, I am with a man that does not look familiar to me. We are standing on the edge of a lagoon. Looking into the distance, there are different shades of turqouise and green that indicate the varying depths of the lagoon. Mountains surround us on all sides and we cannot see the edge of the lagoon.

We wade into the lagoon, laughing and chatting. He tells me that if we keep going across the lagoon, the sea is on the other side. This seems improbable to me because of how far it looks, but we wade in deeper until the water is up to our chests.

He reaches out to me and tells me gently we must swim now. He says we don’t have to swim very fast, and that we will get there in good time. We continue to chat as we paddle leisurely into the distance. I cannot see any end to the lagoon, and at several moments feel slightly panicky that I will not be able to last the distance.

My arms and legs start to burn and I feel like I’m running out of energy. I look down and the lagoon seems impossibly deep at that point – no bottom is visible and there is no chance of stopping. The man is somewhat ahead of me now, calling out encouragements for me to keep going.

Just when I feel like I cannot swim anymore, I see the green lighten up and a sandy bottom comes into view. I step down and feel the soft firmness of the ground with much relief. When I look up, it is indeed as he promised – the ocean is not far, the waves lapping at a sandy beach.

Along the beach is a small and quiet road, on which there are no vehicles. He leads me into a shack, which serves as a restaurant. A few tables and chairs are scattered around, but there is no one else there except us.

A lady comes out from the kitchen and greets the man warmly. He seems to have been here before. We sit dripping on the chairs, watching the waves crash onto the beach right in front of us. Soon the lady brings a platter of fried fish and two big schooners of beer. I bite into the fish and the batter is extremely thin and crisp. With the shattering of batter in my mouth, I taste the freshest fish I have ever tasted. It is something utterly indescribable. The white flesh simply melts onto my tongue and I am filled with an overwhelming sensation of bliss.

We finish our platter, gobbling down the fillets hungrily and drinking the extra refreshing beer. The lady comes out again and smiles at us. Without a word, we stand up and walk across the road to the beach. Standing on the sand, the man tells me that we must swim across the ocean to the next lagoon.

Trust me, he says, the ocean ends in a lagoon.

I ask him if it is the same lagoon we came from, and he says no. At that moment I realise that the man has aged, perhaps by about a decade from his 40s into his 50s.

I ask him if there is another option, whether we could stay on this beach for a while. He looks extremely solemn for a moment, then says gently that there is no option but to continue.

People are following us now, he says.

We step into the ocean and it feels totally different to the lagoon. Where the water had been still and warm, the waves of the ocean are cold and moving. The water laps at us constantly, almost violent in its saltiness.

We are no longer chatting as we swim against the current. I feel my lungs burn as I struggle. I cannot keep up with the man as he swims further ahead. When I look back briefly, the shore is no longer in view – how could we have swum so far already?

I almost lose sight of the man, but somehow always manage to keep track of his back, bobbing up and down in the waves.

Don’t waves get more gentle as you get away from the sand? I think to myself, but I am struggling too much to even contemplate the answer to this question.

Then, as suddenly as the ocean had come into view, the water changes all around us and we are in a lagoon again. The waves vanish abruptly and the world is completely silent. Even the sound of our arms and legs moving in water disappears. All is still.

I am absolutely exhausted, but again just as I feel like I am taking my last stroke, the water lightens and I recognise it as the edge of the lagoon approaching. I stand up in the shallow water, barely able to walk.

I stumble across the last few dozen metres till I am standing on land again. The man is waiting, facing me as I take those steps. As I get closer I realise he is older again, perhaps in his 60s now.

If he has aged like this across the water, what age am I now? I think to myself.

He takes my hand and lets me lean on him a little as we walk down a dirt path, till we come to an identical shack to the one on the beach. Is it actually the same shack? I wonder to myself.

We sit down again, the tables and chairs arranged in a different fashion in this shack. The same lady comes out and serves us fish and beer. This fish tastes different to the phenomenal fish we ate at the beach though. The wonders of the crisp batter and the soft flesh fail to strike me as strongly as the previous time. 

It is as if, the glitz has been lost.

The man is silent now, and all that fills the shack is the sound of our eating. I suddenly see something out of the corner of my eye, and it is a musical phrase written on the placemat.

It goes something like, 2 quavers (slurred), 2 quavers, minim, 2 quavers (slurred). I realise that this is a significant motif, but I cannot figure it out. The minim must be where we are now, I decide.

Then I wake up.

Two dreams: Home invaders, and marble steps to another world

Home invaders

(I had this dream whilst staying in my childhood home in Shanghai)

Two of my Canadian friends came to visit on our street, getting off at a bus stop that does not exist in real life. I am puzzled in the dream because our street is so narrow it doesn’t really accommodate buses, but nevertheless there they are.

They are excited by the old colonial style buildings in the French concession and snap pics of roofs and walls, doors and windows. Actually in real life many tourists do come to the neighbourhood for exactly this reason. They are so engrossed in this exploration that we almost miss the entrance to our place.

We walk inside and I know immediately that something is wrong. The door is slightly ajar, definitely not the way I would have left it when I was locking up. The hallway is dark and I push it open. Inside it looks completely still, and my friends follow me inside still happily chattering away.

Then I cast my eyes to the right and see the television has been smashed face down on the ground with little bits of glass everywhere. My friends fall silent and the general silence in the apartment is suffocatingly overwhelming.

Suddenly two guys dash out of the room to our left and run across the living room. The three of us are blocking the front door so they dash into the kitchen (on our right). I run after them and slam the door shut. There is an external lock on the door that does not exist in real life, but I lock it with some relief. They bang on the door to no avail. By then the neighbours have arrived and said they called the police.

We sit down on the couch, feeling shaken up but temporarily safe. The invaders have stopped banging on the door and it is all quiet again. The police arrive and we explain what has happened. They step gingerly around all the broken glass and one of them says, you girls really know how to enjoy life, drinking tea while the invaders are just a few metres away?

I look down at the tea, a deep murky brown, and wake up.

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Marble steps to another world

This is a really strange dream, because I never confirm who the other person is.

I am standing on a street in front of a large window. The shutters are wooden and look sort of European. It is dark inside and impossible to see from the street level what is inside. I open the window and the shutter clang clumsily. I climb onto the windowsill and dangle my legs over the other side, just barely touching the ground.

The ground feels totally cool and smooth, perhaps some sort of marble. I jump off the windowsill and both my feet are on the ground now – I’m not wearing socks or shoes. My eyes adjust to the room slightly and the dark feels less dark, but it is still quite overwhelming. The air feels still and musty.

I take a step forward and realise that there is a step there. I hold instinctively onto the windowsill, not wanting to lose touch with it. I take the step down and it is extremely steep. My feet reach the bottom of the step and I realise there are even more steps. I reluctantly let go of the windowsill, keeping the pale wedge of light within sight, my connection with the outside world. Then I take a few more steps down.

The window is so small now that it looks like a comical moon. I feel afraid, but then I am aware that someone is ahead of me in the stairwell. I cannot see them or feel them, but I know they are there. The steps curve to the left, and with this curve I lose sight of the window.

My heart races and I go back up one step, to the exact point where the curve is. I can still see the outside world and I calm down a little. Descending further into the darkness feels scary, and I cannot will myself to do it.

Eventually I catch my breath and ascend the smooth marble steps again, till I am gripping the wooden windowsill. I open the window and step out. Outside it’s Belmore Rd, Randwick, something that occurred to me only as I emerged (not as I went into the window). I re-arrange the shutters so that they are slightly ajar, just in case the other person actually wants to come out as well?

I have a strong sense that some time has been lost, but I am not sure how much.

I walk down Belmore Rd and realise all the shops are in Chinese. It must be a Shanghai version of Belmore Rd, I think to myself. I go into a shop and ask for sticky rice cakes with deep fried pork chop and sweet sauce, something I ate in Shanghai recently. The lady says that they are all sold out and the door is closed. I am indeed unable to get out of the shop until a security guard lets me out.

Back in the sunshine, I have another wave of feeling that some time has been lost. I feel lost now, in this strange world that I do not recognise, and then I wake up.

In my kitchen: March 2019

My father's garden is a treasure trove and we all look forward to the harvest every year. Last spring he was away and planting was delayed, but his Green thumbs more than made up for it.

When we moved to our family home over 20 years ago

 

my dad took a cactus cutting from our neighbours and finally this year it yielded an incredible amount of fruit. These purplish wonders are sweet tender and juicy! 

I have been making quite lovely loaves recently. Discovering the fridge proof method has really made it even easier to whip up bread in the morning. There's nothing like dawn with a softly awakening dough, gathering one's thoughts while the aroma of fresh bread fills the house.

I took Barney to China where he struggled with the terrible Chinese flour (perhaps not real flour..) One loaf was a total flop.

These steamed buns were soft and fluffy though.

We had a lot of fun making these sourdough BBQ pork buns! No idea till this wintery miserable day that my dad is an expert bun maker

And last but not least, a rice cooker cake because we have no oven in Shanghai but I wanted to make my grandma a cake. It looks more like an overgrown egg tart but it was fluffy and delicious! Who knew one can make a cake in the rice cooker?!

I'm sending this to In My Kitchen hosted by Sherry. How 2019 is flying by!

Two Dreams: Very Berry and the connection between two worlds

Very Berry

In this dream Em and I had just bought a farm, but at the start of the dream I am not entirely sure what the farm is like. We get the keys and drive to the farm, pulling up at the farmhouse in the late afternoon. The light is gentle and it’s not too hot (unlike recent times!)

The farmhouse is quite old – a greyish wooden house with a triangular roof, not unlike those rustic barns one sees in lifestyle magazines. Inside it is slightly musty but quite clean. We drop our bags on the counter and run out into the field.

What will we discover? I think as we run into the field.

Strawberries. We are surrounded by strawberries as far as the eye can see. Neat rows of strawberry vines stretch marvelously in all directions. The fruit they bear are an incredible hue of mature red, glistening in the low sun and inviting us to eat them. We pick one after the other, stuffing them into our mouths and relishing their sweetness. They have such an intense concentrated flavour like those supermaret strawberries could never have. Each berry bursts in the mouth filling us with ecstasy. Red juices run down our chins and stain our shirts, but we don’t care. In a moment we have eaten countless strawberries.

What a fantastic idea it is to buy a strawberry farm!

We return to the farmhouse on a high and congratulate ourselves on our excellent purchase. On the big wooden table is a stack of stationery, and we see that the stationery is for the farm. The name of the farm is Very Berry (what a great name for a farm! We marvel) but the spelling is quite different with varying numbers of Ys

Veryyy Berryyyy

Veryyyyy Berryyyyyyyy

Veryy Berryy

Any number of conflicting Ys are on all the stationery and we ponder which one is the real one. Then I wake up.

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Between Two Worlds

This is a deep, dark and dense dream.

At the beginning, I am in a carpark with P. We have driven there in a car that neither of us own, and that I don’t recognise. We get out of the car and the air is eerily still. For a carpark, there seem to be no cars coming or going.

A thought flashes across my mind that we are here to look for the entrance to the other world. (Possibly I have been reading too much Murakami again)

We look for this entrance but neither of us have any idea what it looks like. We walk up and down the ramps, but other than a few cars parked here and there resting silently, there is no clue to the other world. Suddenly we hear a big group of people coming down the ramp from the level above us, and we crouch down behind a ute to observe them.

The leader calls out Everyone! Join hands and call out your numbers!

There are perhaps 30 people there, and they come from all corners of the carpark towards us. We step out from behind the ute and try to blend in as leisurely as we can manage. Paul is on my left and I join hands with him, and with another man on my right. Each person in the circle says out a random number, and we both make up numbers (I can’t remember what I said)

Then, as suddenly as they came, the group dispersed and it is just the two of us again in the carpark. The silence is still eerie but the density of the atmosphere has changed, and that is when I know we have already crossed into the other world.

We walk out of the carpark, keen to explore the world. There is a fence just in front so we jump it – I am surprised by my own strength as I would never be able to jump a fence in real life. I look back at the 2m-ish fence, wondering how I got to the other side. I jump several more fences and realise that we are in a highly suburban area, most of the houses having neat lawns and trampolines or playsets. Some of the fences have sharp edges but that doesn’t seem to bother me either.

I jump a dozen fences or so and realise that in the meantime I have lost P. In the distance I can hear a throng of people again, though I can’t see them or which direction they are coming from. I am filled with this sense of dread that they are the same people who have realised that we are invading their world.

I jump another fence and see a huge house with a single huge rectangular window at the rear of the house. It seems to be a huge glass window which has been concertinaed so that Em is sitting on the wooden ledge. The aperture the window leaves draws one to it. I get closer to it and can see that it is an ordinary house inside – a row of hooks with coats are by the front door.

She is sitting with her legs drawn up on the ledge, and she says to me with some sense of urgency: You must come back into this world, quick! This window is the way!

The wooden ledge is only chest height, and I would be able to reach it easily in real life. But no matter how hard I try and how much she tries to help me, I cannot get my feet off the ground more than a few seconds at a time. I try to run up to it, jump up to it, sidle up on my rear… no matter what I try, I cannot get onto the windowsill, the connection to the real world.

The voices come closer, and for a moment I wonder, which is the real world?

Then I wake up.

Dream: Beans and bean sprouts

I have had a lot of vivid dreams recently, and this is one of them.

The dream starts off in a small town. I don’t quite recognise the town, but it is very neat and orderly. At first I think we must be in Europe, with tidy streets and pockets of gardens. After a while I start to get this sense of déjà vu – there is another dream that I have had in the past which took place in this very town. Somehow the flowers and the statues are the same. I think that place was in Newfoundland or somewhere equally cold in Canadia.

The Doofus Trio are wandering the streets of this town together. We don’t have our instruments but we must be at some sort of musical meetup. We see a big church and decide to go inside.

It is dark and musty inside, the air bordering on damp. We can smell food being cooked over charcoal, that profound earthy smell that comes with that type of primitive grilling. All around there are central Asian appearing people, fanning their meat skewers perched on tiny grills.

I wonder why they don’t centralise the grilling process. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have one giant fire instead of so many small ones?

Doof draws our attention to a beautiful façade, the details of which are difficult to make out in the dim light. Amongst the gargoyles and angels, it feels like we are in Europe again – is there any building this old in Canadia?

He is trying to take a picture of the most beautiful arch in the church, positioning pengy underneath it. It’s hard to get the entire arch into the frame of his picture, and pengy keeps falling. When he finally takes the picture we realise that some of the ornamental detail actually comes from bean sprouts, meticulously laid out individually on the wall.

Why are there bean sprouts in a church?

We exit the church back into the light, but the light has faded dramatically since we entered the church and I wonder if we have lost time in some sort of time warp.

I am holding pengy and wondering why my hands are a bit sticky – it’s because pengy’s seams have somehow burst while we were inside the church, and I am covered in the beads that are inside pengy. Em says that she has a sewing kit and that she’s going to repair pengy.

Beans, and bean sprouts? What is the meaning of this? I wonder and wake up.

In my kitchen: September 2018

It has been an utterly hectic few weeks for me with five back to back clinical weeks (way too much work!) and not enough time to relax or to eat.


It was such a nice mid-winter escape to Darwin. Though I had to work, I was really happy to catch up with friends and enjoy the warm weather.

I brought some of Barney up and made several loaves in the week. A nice one pound loaf of sourdough is just the perfect size for post handover sharing with the team. There is nothing like warm bread fresh out of the oven with good quality butter.

I also left several children of Barney in Darwin - I've lost count of how many children he has now, probably around 15!

My friend made this excellent bread & butter pudding with some brioche along the perfect wobble of  custard.

It was also wonderful to just catch the beginning of the mango season in Darwin. Most of the mangoes were small and green (and very pricey too!) but I really delighted in having the first taste. What a novelty it was to eat a mango in freezing Orange right after I left Darwin!

I delighted in looking for eggs by my friend's chickens Suppehuhn and Fliegehun (Soup chicken and flying chicken). They had amazing flavour with almost the entire egg filled with yolk and very little white.

I really love the Fresh Fodder brand which is made in Orange. The last time I had their smoky taramasalata, I was blown away! This variety was also quite good, here pictured with some whole wheat sourdough from the lovely Racine bakery.

Our string quartet enjoyed another roasted cauliflower which I decorated with glee at the last minute. Even if one is not young in age, being young at heart is still fun!

Pengy also made his way to his 6th country, accompanying me to visit my grandma in Shanghai. Here he is enjoying a traditional Shanghainese snack, lotus root slices filled with gingery pork and lightly panfried - utterly crunchy and moreish!

Traditional breakfast tofu (with shallot, dried prawns, seaweed and and pickles) and deep fried rice cakes.

Another traditional Shanghainese breakfast featuring the four stars - deep fried dough sticks, sesame sweet pancakes, sticky rice stuffed with dough sticks, and curdled salty soy milk. I know it all sounds strange but it is delicious! I really enjoy the breakfast with Pengy series.


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