I haven’t updated my blog for a while, but that means I’ve been busy out and about enjoying this summer. Sorry Mum!!

Post-beach Korean with dear friends!

A visit to Hastings racecourse! I kept picking the winning horses until I started actually betting on them. Pfft. There were also weiner dog races in between the horse races, and it had a certain country-fair charm to it that I enjoyed. All this is just a bike ride away——Vancouver really is awesome, isn’t it?!

My not-even-close-to-winning tickets. Good bye $4, it was fun while it lasted

Some of the things I look forward to this summer:

- The long row of blackberry bushes behind our office being ripen
- Making a blue-ribbon-winning pie with the berries
- Sharing the pie with whoever wants a piece and making their day
- Then moving on to making blackberry jam, sorbet, and possibly scones
- An impromptu trip to the prairies and mountains with a close pal
- Lovely conversations by the sea
- Reorganize my abode
- Playing tennis
- Being mysweetestself again

x

A new cookbook

A pizza dinner

Tools of the trade

A shellfish party

xo!

ps: thank you Gene, Mariz and Nick!

I have been going through an anti-domestic hobbies phase (Haven’t touched the knitting needles ever since the last post) and I think I’m just getting out of it. Phew! So to welcome my domestic hobbies back to my life, I’ve decided to bake last night. I wanted to bake cookies with the stuff I already have, so I baked a batch of oatmeal chocolate chip coconut cookies. I only had one egg in my fridge so I had to cut the recipe in half, but the cookies were so delicious I decided to bake the other half this morning.

I’m committed to getting my mini garden restarted as well—this time more edible plants—so I picked up a couple of plants while I was out. Pineapple sage (it smells like a pineapple, woo!) and a Jalapeño pepper plant.

I’ve recently invested in a silicone non-stick sheet/Silpat, and this was the first time I’ve used it. It’s amazing! My cookies were so even and just perfect, and they came off so smoothly. Dream.

Happy mother’s day Mum! I love you. x

In a peasantish style: leftover soup from yesterday and cauliflower and potato gratin both from this blog. The gratin has everything I love, including leeks and Gruyère!

I may not look like it in person, but I am a pretty domestic person. I mean, it’s not like my lifelong dream is to be a picture-perfect housewife—my hobbies just happens to include sewing, and cooking.

So I had the most domestic weekend yet, which involved mending my gloves with huge holes on both thumbs (haha), another attempt at knitting, making something with felts, washing a gigantic bed spread by hand, scrubbing bathroom tiles, cooking a big pot of chili, and baking. Actually I realize that I have had a seriously domestic (and nothing else) weekend. It’s not that I’ve enjoyed all of them—Scrubbing bathroom tiles isn’t fun, and it makes you sweat and your back starts hurting like crazy. But it’s rewarding as heck.

I decided to wrap up my Sunday night with baking a pretty amazing dessert. The two contenders were Pavlova and Blondies, but in the end I chose Pavlova because I needed fewer ingredients and it involved fruits and no butter. Meringue so interesting and weird to me, because there is nothing even close to it in Korean cuisine (if there is, someone enlighten me!). I remember first seeing meringue on top of a piece of Lemon meringue pie (White Spot, circa 1993), and I naturally assumed that it’s whipped cream. To this day, I wonder who first discovered meringue and how— has he/she accidentally whipped only egg whites at a crazy speed? I just read on Wikipedia that meringue dates back to 1692, so that’s some serious history behind this bizarre confection.

I can see why Australians might have this in Christmas, because it’s in the middle of summer there, therefore a bountiful of fruits everywhere. Here, on the other hand, the opposite. All I could find fruit-wise, were kiwis and a very unripe mango. Though, I found a really cool kiwifruit that claimed to be red, but to my disappointment, it wasn’t entirely red, as you can see. Still, there it adds a nice touch of red to the pavlovas. Besides, the kiwi proclaimed its love to me:

Veggie lasagna

Dill, red onion and cheese drop biscuits: I stumbled upon this recipe today and I was excited  because 1. It looks amazing and 2. I have a huge block of old cheddar I’ve been trying to get rid of… Like the plum crumble recipe, you don’t need butter to bake these biscuits—love!

With the crazy work schedule, I can’t seem to do anything but to collapse in my bed when I get home from work these days. An amateur, you say! Yeah yeah I know. However, there is one thing I like to do still though it’s not the easiest thing to do around the house - baking. I am not a skilled or a talented baker by any means, simply because I like to do things my way when I am in my kitchen. I grew up in Asia and if you know Asian cuisine, almost everything is “to taste.” You just put soy sauce or (something along that line) until it tastes right for your taste, so you get the point. I really can’t bother to sift my flour or to level things when I measure important ingredients, so my baked goods don’t turn out exactly like the photographs on the recipe book I aim for. One time I baked a bunch of cookies, they were so bitter I couldn’t even put it on top of my tongue. Turned out I forgot to sort of mix my baking soda. Oops.
I am fine with my wacky baking missions, because I enjoy baking casually. If I have to actually try hard to bake something precisely, reading every step of the recipe twice and then again, after work, it would be a second job, not a hobby. If I HAVE to put my energy into measuring and waiting, it would have to wait until I am really free, not at 7:30pm on a weekday.

Anyhow, I stumbled upon a nice for plum crumble from The Wednesday Chef while looking to possibly find something I can do with a bunch of green  plums my roommate brought home a few days ago… at once. It called for nice Italian plums, but I sort of ignored it and made it with the green ones I have. Forgive me.

Today’s biggest lesson: (Insert pretty much any fruit here) crumble probably is the easiest dessert ever. I’ve always wondered how to make the crumbly bits on top until today and it doesn’t even call for butter, except at the very end to drizzle. For that very reason, this is a recipe that will stay with me because as much as I’d like to, I don’t want to consume a stick of unsalted butter a week. At the same time I am not going to bake vegan gluten egg dairy free dessert for the rest of my life. While it was tad too candied ginger-y for me, I know the solution to this problem already: Put less candied ginger next time. I’ll probably use the proper plum variety, also. Not to say that green plums weren’t delicious, but they just didn’t have the deep red hue sipping through the crumble layer. I knew that from the beginning that the plums weren’t going to give me the lovely deep red, but I was still disappointed. Much like when you break up with someone, you know you are the one to end it but you still feel sad. Maybe not.