Dream: Gunshot in a pseudo night club

In this dream, I'm in the nightclub district of a city that I do not recognise. But I think somehow it must be in Germany? I am there with Em and her ex, and the three of us are looking for a particular nightclub.


The first thing we must do is pick up some cash, and the cash is dispensed from a shop with no ATM in sight. The cash comes in the form of a stack of bills, nestled neatly inside a cardboard box. We pick them up, feeling the gentle rustle of ancient currency - is it possibly cash from another age?


We find the shop that we are looking for, and it actually looks like a card shop. Outside are large turning displays that show a wide array of cards each in their plastic sleeves - but the cash is from an age before plastic perhaps? I want to stop and look at the cards but the other two are in a hurry, so I glance longingly at their bright colours and move on.


Inside there are more cards displayed on magazine racks, and also an assortment of clothes. We are still looking for the entrance to the nightclub, and I deduce that the entrance must be hidden somewhere inside the shop. I look around for more clues, but it seems like an ordinary shop selling knickknacks. There are lots of people around, but they all appear to be shopping.


Suddenly the lights go out, and it is almost completely dark even though it was a fading evening light outside. There is some dim blue fluorescence that illuminates people's faces, somewhat like the lighting of a nightclub. I feel confused by this sudden change in lighting.


Then just as suddenly as the darkness descended, the sound started. First it sounded like popcorn popping, discrete short staccato bursts. Then the sound comes even closer, and it is so loud my eardrums are hurting. I turn around and see Em holding a gun, and it looks like a fake gun.


I watch in slow motion as she raises the gun and points it at her ex. A real bullet (or at least it looks like a real one) comes out of the gun ever so slowly and hits him in the shoulder. He is frozen and time slows down so much that it seems like he could have dodged the bullet, but he doesn't and falls to the ground.


Next she turns towards me and there is a menacing glint in her eyes. I do not recognise this person, I think to myself. I hear the pop as the bullet is released from the gun, coming straight towards me. Again it is going in super slow motion, an elongated cylindrical copper bullet that looks almost comically like a lolly. I watch it come towards me with some kind of fascination. I lean back instinctively, hoping to miss the course of the bullet.


At that moment I glance up at the time and it is 1:30am.


Then I wake up. Did I get hit by the bullet? I don't know.

In my kitchen: February 2020

I have had a super busy month with the move to Newcastle, end of the clinical year and the chamber music society annual camp. It has just flown past, how could it be February already?

A couple of gorgeous loaves from my sourdough Barney to start 2020

So many snake beans from my dad's garden

A few chocolates my friend brought back from Russia

The last of the local beer from a brewery in Orange.

Since the dumpling master (my dad's partner) has returned to town, we have been having so many dumplings. She is truly the master of making the perfect dough (with sourdough too), the perfect filling and beautiful crimp.

Onto the Food and Music series...

We ate these lovely fresh plum tarts with my piano duet buddy who said "Sometimes in life, you just need a plum tart!" She is an incredible lady, always with some wise and sanguine words for young restless me! We ate these with a serve of the arrangement of Beethoven's String quartet Op 18 No. 3 (string quartets arranged for piano 4 hand are super interesting), Ravel's Ma Mere L'Oye and a few of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances.


One evening for my string quartet, we decided to have tagine. The other violinist made from scratch a wonderfully herbaceous chermoula and cooked it into a rich chicken tagine with deliciously plump olives and the sauciest potatoes. 

I discovered the trick to sourdough pitas. After rolling out the dough discs and letting them rest for 30min, blast them on full heat in the oven and the rapid rise creates the pocket!

A deliciously fresh fattoush salad which went so well with the tagine on this hot day.

Here is the tagine stuffed into the pita pocket. We ate these with the Mozart String quartet in D minor, Beethoven's String quartet Op 18 No.1 and the Clara Schumann piano trio.

Once a year, the Chamber Music Society runs a massive camp. About 110 people gather at the University of Wollongong for a 4 day extravaganza filled with music, food and wine. It truly is the highlight of the year. I stayed this year in a flat with my usual string quartet and Barney came along for the ride as well - freshly baked bread every day is a treat!

This cheese & tomato foccacia we enjoyed for one of our lunches. I think the sourdough at camp is going to become an annual feature. 

The highlights of my camp were not 1, not 2 but 3 Dvorak sessions (his string quintet "American", string sextet in A and piano quintet); the Brahms string sextet no. 1, an all time favourite; Death and the Maiden while drunk and the Faure piano quartet. We had such a great time playing the Faure piano quartet that we had to play the slow movement another time and I decided this would be the piece I would like played at my funeral.

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

In my kitchen: January 2020

I had a couple of weeks staycation in December which was just blissful, especially since I worked all through the holiday weeks after that.

The first week of my staycation, I got rather addicted to grilled cheese.

I've realised the secret for me is to put some mustard on the bread and topping it with both tasty and parmesan cheese - great texture and flavour!

I experimented with sourdough hoppers - a simple recipe of rice flour, coconut cream and a dollop of sourdough starter, fermented till ripe and fried up in a hopper pan.

The second week of my staycation, I got back into swimming. I didn't swim at all the summer of 2018-2019 since the car accident, so I was so very happy to be back in the water and painfree! It gave me such a fantastic appetite that I planned a challah party with all my childless friends. It was also a pseudo farewell party as I'm moving to Newcastle very soon.

We started out with the standard 3-strand challah. As a joke, each next guest had to make one more strand than the last.

They were all spectacular, but this one was particularly golden and burnished!

There was also a vegan challah for my dear friend B and this turned out super well. The honey is replaced by maple syrup, the eggs by aquafaba and the milk by olive oil. The colour is paler with a gentle goldenness. The texture was even more light and fluffy than the non-vegan version.

Finally the piece de resistance - a sourdough chocolate babka. Words could not describe how tenderly this pulled apart, softly oozing chocolate and entrancing every guest into a sugary delirium.

On the garden front, my dad has harvested so much bok choy this month.

We love this purple weed vegetable which takes over the whole garden in summer and seems to grow at an incredible rate.

Perfect in a stir fry with a bit of garlic. Also great eaten raw in salad and in soups.

Finally in the music & food series...

No pic, but it was extremely humbling to have a failed loaf for the first time in maybe 2 years! I went to the Christmas party for the Barbarians (a musical medical group in Newcastle) and promised a loaf of Barney but he over-rose the night before and sadly had no oomph left in him. I had worked during the day and had no time to get something else... so as we say in Chinese, I hardened my scalp and showed up with the hideous flat loaf. He still got eaten! Along with lots of increasingly drunk singing of Christmas carols and the Hallelujah chorus.

My regular string quartet has been busy for Christmas but I did catch my other semi-regular piano quartet for Brahms' piano quartet no. 3 in C minor, probably my favourite piano quartet of all time (it's either that one or the Faure, also in C minor). We also played some of the Schumann piano quartet afterwards but it was too much energetic. Here we ate Barney with cheeses, egg salad, a smoked trout salad and ricotta spinach rolls. A proper feast! The violinist announced that it may be our last Christmas together since she recently had a stroke, who knows what the future will bring..

On New Year's Eve I celebrated the arrival of the new decade with my piano duet buddy. We are doing the Beethoven project where we play 4 hand arrangements of the Beethoven string quartets, one at a time. We are still in the Op 18s and enjoying every moment of it.

Another month, another ode to carbs. I'm sending this to Sherry who hosts the In My Kitchen series, thanks Sherry!  

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!