Attempting to Bake with Blueberries

A lovely blueberry, almond and lemon cake

After you have filled an 8L bucket with blueberries, what do you do with them?

The first thing I did when I went home was to grab them by the handful and quickly pick out any stems or leaves before putting the berries in plastic bags and freezing them. It's best not to wash the blueberries before freezing because it with wash away the natural protective coating, causing them to deteriorate faster.

At the bottom of the bucket I found three small spiders we had carried 27km away from their home! I humanely left them on our patio ledge...

Then with a bag of blueberries I had stored in the refrigerator I attempted to make blueberry muffins. 

The recipe was pretty straight forward, but somehow I managed to bungle it and ended up with muffins that tasted good, but were very dense, thankfully not as hard as a rock. 

Unfortunately they were not fluffy at all. I had added baking powder, perhaps not enough milk... 

Another factor is possibly not mixing the butter enough to incorporate more air.

I thought it was strange the recipe had called for mixing the berries in some of the flour mixture, but it turns out this is correct; it's so that the blueberries don't all sink to the bottom.

Today I decided to try another recipe, a blueberry, almond and lemon cake by British chef, restaurateur and food writer Yotam Ottolenghi. I even watched the New York Times video of him making it so that I would not get it wrong this time.

I made sure the butter was room temperature and mixed it with lemon zest, sugar, vanilla extract and three eggs before adding the dry ingredients of flour, almond flour, baking powder and salt. 

The batter came together nicely and added almost all the blueberries before putting the mixture in a loaf pan lined with parchment paper that was covered with butter. 

It was in the oven for 15 minutes, then the rest of the blueberries were added on top (so that they didn't all sink to the bottom) and then it was baking for another 35 minutes.

The end result?

The loaf was very fluffy in the middle, had a wonderful lemony taste, not too sweet, and the edges crisped up a bit thanks to the almond flour. The only fault was putting it in a bigger loaf pan; will put it in a smaller one next time for more height.

I managed to redeem myself!

After taking a bite, my father asks, "Why didn't you make two loaves?"

First Attempt at NYT Chocolate Chip Cookies

Big chunky chocolate chip cookies for the holidays

Happy New Year and wishing everyone all the best for 2026!

Just before the Christmas holidays I finally got off my butt and made some cookies that turned out pretty well.

The New York Times has several chocolate chip cookie recipes, but this one has gone viral. Check out the video here.

I read the recipe several times, bought the semi-sweet chocolate discs and went to work.

It calls for bread flour and cake flour, but I read in the comments that all-purpose flour worked well too. I found cake flour in our pantry so I used it and all-purpose flour.

Perhaps I didn't wait long enough for the unsalted butter to be at room temperature, but it seemed to be well combined in the mixer.

I cut a lot of the sugar, both light brown and granulated, and in the end the dough yielded 19 golf ball-sized dough balls that I froze for 24 hours before baking my first batch of a dozen cookies.

Again I didn't defrost them completely before putting them in the oven, so they ended up like big mounds instead of lying flat. But they were cooked through and I lightly drizzled sea salt on top of the cookies as soon as they came out of the oven.

The end result was a buttery, slightly flaky cookie that had a lot of rich chocolate without the cloying sweetness. 

I gave them to a friend from Singapore who was visiting and her son loved the chunky cookies!

Then I tried defrosting another batch of the ball-shaped dough a bit longer before baking them, but they still turned out round and chunky with slightly melted chocolate discs.

So I don't know why they ended up like that, perhaps the discs were too big? Or I over mixed the flour? 

Nevertheless they were still happily eaten by others so they are worth trying to make again.

At least 13 Dead in a Massive Taipo Blaze

The fires are still burning in a Taipo housing estate

***As of 10am November 27 HK time there are 44 dead, 279 missing***

Hong Kong is on edge watching fires still raging nine hours later engulfing several buildings in a housing estate in Taipo, where at least 13 people, including one firefighter died in the No. 5 blaze, the highest rating in severity. 

The residential buildings at Wang Fuk Court were covered in bamboo scaffolding when the fires broke out this afternoon after 3pm. Currently there are reports of 70 people still trapped, 200 missing. 

News reports say 128 fire trucks, 57 ambulances, 767 firefighters and 400 police officers were deployed to the scene.

According to the New York Times, a 74-year-old resident heard a firefighter pounding on his door to evacuate after 3pm, but he and his wife refused to move and it wasn't until three hours later they were rescued. 

Andy Yeung Yan-kin, Hong Kong's director of fire services said the heat was so hot inside the buildings it was difficult to rescue people.

The city's residents will not be sleeping tonight; some have brought noodles, bread and water to rescuers and victims.

This fire reminds me of the November 1996 Garley Building fire in Jordan where 41 people died, making it the worst building fire in Hong Kong in peacetime. One of the casualties was an acquaintance's brother who was a firefighter.

However, this Taipo fire may be worse at this rate.

We are all anxiously watching.

Review: Cover-Up

Hersh talked to a lot of people to get tips that led to stories

Journalism students idolise people like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal in 1972. 

But there's another journalist they should look up to too -- Seymour Hersh.

Poitras and Obenhaus who directed Cover-Up

His life and career is covered in the fascinating 117-minute documentary, Cover-Up, by directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. She is best known for her documentaries on Edward Snowden and the Sackler family.

In 2005 Poitras approached Hersh about doing a documentary about him, but it took him 20 years to finally agree.

He's a prickly character, and Hersh is filmed in his office, with piles of files all around him, files filled with faded yellow note pads filled with illegible handwriting, and a Rolodex on his desk. But hey, he uses an iPhone and Macbook to keep reporting.

During the Vietnam War Hersh was a freelancer -- a freelancer(!) when he uncovered American soldiers had shot and killed up to 500 civilian men, women, children and babies in a remote Vietnamese village.

Hersh says the US military officials were angry their soldiers were being killed and to up the numbers of Vietnamese deaths, they randomly killed innocent people. He managed to get a tip on the soldier charged with killing 109 people, tracked him down and spoke to him.

He then managed to interview other soldiers who were eyewitnesses or participated in the massacre. 

Hersh's reporting gave more ammunition to those opposed to the war.

Hersh is still his prickly self, trusting no one

It was his ability to track down and talk to people that made Hersh either praised or feared. US President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were caught on tape calling the journalist "a son of a bitch", angered that he was able to find out so much information.

Is it no wonder Hersh was either praised or feared.

After Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story, Hersh, who was then at the New York Times, was told to go find stories, and he managed to find out the burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters were still being paid hush money. 

This story helped keep the story alive and bring more information to the public about the scandal, that eventually led to Nixon's resignation. Hersh wrote over 40 stories about Watergate, that were mostly published on the front page.

Hersh also reported on how the CIA spent millions to destabilise the socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende and after a coup d'etat, installed a military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.

The documentary also gets Hersh to talk about his father, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who played the violin. He says his family was very short on words and he never knew his father had escaped the horrors of the Nazis and wished he had known before so he could ask.

He still has lots of files all over his office

His family had two sets of twins -- Hersh had two twin older sisters, and he and his brother were twins too. His father had a dry cleaning business, and expected Hersh to take over. He didn't like the work but did what was expected of him. He had to quit school to look after his ailing father and on the side Hersh read a lot of books. But when his father died of cancer, this gives Hersh the opportunity to get a college education and the instructor felt he was more qualified for university and got him enrolled into the University of Chicago.

He randomly met a reporter and thought the job was so exciting that he started as a copyboy and a month later became a crime reporter.

Cover-Up also recounts the torture in the prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq from 2004-2007. When he was able to get the photographs of prisoners tortured by US soldiers, and obtained a report by a general that listed all the things that were done to prisoners, Hersh was able to write the story that put Secretary for Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the hot seat.

Rumsfeld even tried to explain the difference between abuse and torture in a bid to disclaim the article.

But Hersh didn't get everything right. When he was researching into US President John F Kennedy's alleged romance with Marilyn Monroe, he claimed to have letters between the two, but they turned out to be fabricated by a known forger. That put a big dent into Hersh's reputation, but he looks back at it as dodging a bullet, as those so-called letters did not make it into his book, The Dark Side of Camelot.

Strangely he also felt Syrian President Bashir al-Assad couldn't have used chemical warfare on his own people...

Nevertheless, Hersh is still kicking and writing on his Substack account. During the filming he is shown talking to a source on the phone, getting information about Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Cover-Up was intense to watch, with a few sarcastic moments sprinkled throughout, but also eye-opening for someone like myself who is not familiar with Hersh's work. It's people like him who inspire younger journalists to try to find the truth. What he did was just talk to people and you never know -- they might just slip some information that could lead to something big.

Cover-Up

Directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus

117 minutes

Piano Prodigy Mao Fujita

Fujita with his matcha ice cream for dessert on Saturday night

This weekend I had the privilege of meeting a young pianist who is rising up the ranks of the music world very quickly. Mao Fujita is only 24 years old and looks very young too, but his playing is so deft and playful, making him a perfect conduit for Mozart's music, but he says he loves to play all kinds of music -- as long as it's classical.

My relatives sponsored his concert held by the Vancouver Recital Society, so I had a chance to meet him for dinner the night before. Eight of us dined at Minami, a contemporary Japanese restaurant in Yaletown. The food suited the location, with lots of young people dining late (we sat down at 8pm).

It's Fujita's first trip to Canada, let alone Vancouver, and he hardly had a chance to see the city -- he arrived Friday night, practiced all day Saturday before we met him, and then Sunday afternoon was the recital before he went back to the airport to fly to Amsterdam.

Playing to a packed audience on Sunday afternoon

Even though the Tokyoite claimed he was a bit tired, his eyes were bright and he was nice to talk to.

Some facts about Fujita: He started learning the piano at the age of three and told us his older brother actually played better than him. But there were a lot of expectations and pressure hoisted on his brother, who quit in the end because he hated practicing... 

Meanwhile Fujita grew to love playing the piano, as there was no pressure on him at all and hearing him talk about music he gets very excited, as he thinks about the the phrasing and tone of specific pieces. Quite amazing.

However, he told us his parents are doctors, and his grandfather was one too, and so there were expectations the two brothers would follow, but that did not pan out. Instead his older brother became a piano tuner, and Fujita a rising piano star who gained a lot of attention when he came in second with a silver medal in the XVI International Tchaikovsky Competition in the piano category in 2019.

He's also left handed too as we found out while eating with chopsticks! Three out of the eight at the table were lefties.

During the dinner he politely refused alcohol and was very clear on wanting one scoop of matcha ice cream for dessert. After that he was keen to go back to his hotel to sleep.

Fujita talking to Leila Getz, concert organiser

The next day the concert venue, the Vancouver Playhouse, was packed, with almost every seat taken. There were many children in the audience as well as Japanese. Two small children barely two and three sat on booster seats, the younger one clutching his teddy bear and was a very good concert goer.

The adults, not so much. Especially in the second half, some phones went off, with two of them racing for the door -- really? Another got up and left during the third movement -- it was going to be over in a few minutes for goodness sakes!

It was noisy and that made it hard to listen to Fujita because his piano playing is so delicate -- his fingers deftly touch the keys to bring out really subtle sounds but at the same time it's Mozart sonatas, which means every note must be heard -- no fudging!

He was so precise with his playing but also added his own interpretation in a split second delay or emphasising different notes. He also seemed keen to get the concert over with -- as soon as he sat down he would play right away, not wasting a moment.

Interestingly he did not wear a suit, but instead chose to wear a dark brown long sleeve smock or tunic over his pants and shiny shoes. There seemed to be a button on his left side that was very shiny when it caught the light.

Fujita during the Tchaikovsky competition

After the concert of four Mozart sonatas was finished, he received a standing ovation and he sat down to play Tchaikovsky... It was the Sonata No. 9 in D major, so he chose to play a Tchaikovsky piece in D minor!

He took a few minutes to change into casual clothes before for the Q&A, with many young people asking questions like, What is the hardest piece you have ever played? Have you learned all the Mozart sonatas? (no). How do you memorise all the pieces?

When he was young he would play three, four hours a day. Now living in Berlin the last two years he is allowed to play from 8am to 8pm, not that he practices 12 hours a day. However, he is constantly thinking about what he has to play next with his hectic schedule of 70-80 concerts a year! And he flies economy!

How does he deal with jetlag? Practicing keeps him awake!

And what is he listening for when he practices? My playing! he replied. Then he said when he practices he thinks he is playing very well, but in front of an audience he is nervous. 

In late January he made his Carnegie Hall debut, though the New York Times did not give him a particularly favourable review, saying his pieces were relatively safe... nevertheless he told us at the dinner that he will play there again next year.

One person asked why Mozart? And he said during the pandemic he was stuck at home and gravitated towards Mozart and focused on his pieces, which led to his most recent recording last year, Mozart: The Complete Sonatas.

Excited for this young person who is so passionate about classical music he is not interested in any other genre!

Sonata No. 7 in C major, K. 309

Sonata No. 8 in A minor, K. 310/300d

Sonata No. 13 in B-flat major, K. 333

Sonata No. 9 in D major, K. 311