Baby Chiew turned two months this week, and wowee, it’s hard to believe how much has happened in that time period. Newborns do grow quickly, more quickly than I was ready for—I’ve been taking photos of the baby every day since he was born and am already wishing he could stay tiny! He was just under 6 pounds at birth, and now he’s a full-fledged baby around 11 pounds. So holding him is like carrying two standard bags of flour.
I joke with people that taking care of a newborn is like military service: you do the hard things you don’t want to do, you’re constantly sleep deprived, and someone is yelling at you all the time. It’s difficult for me to recall many specific details from the last two months since my husband and I have been doing practically the same things day in and day out. But I will always remember how this period felt: joyous yet frustrating, tiring yet also invigorating. And amidst the blur, certain tiny moments will be forever seared in my memory. My favorite thing to watch these days is baby Chiew laughing in his sleep. It’s a “hehehe” chuckle and the most adorable, funny sight to behold. Currently, it’s just a reflex, but I still sometimes wonder what he’s thinking about.
It’s really hard to find time for oneself as a new parent, but a friend highly recommended that I take breaks every so often. So during the baby’s naps (like right now), I turn to my creative hobbies like writing and working magic in the kitchen. Summer is my favorite season because of all of the fresh fruit we get to enjoy. Sometimes there’s way too much of it (e.g. buying 6 pounds of cherries), so I’ve learned to make good use of it in different ways. Here are some of the delicious things I’ve made:
Cherry and chocolate chip muffins: muffins have been my go-to breakfast food postpartum, so I made a few batches with excess fresh cherries. I’ve also discovered how much I love baking with almond flour (aside from using it for French macarons), so I did a 50:50 blend of all-purpose flour and almond flour. Almond flour makes baked goods soft and tender, and it has more protein (which is a win for breastfeeding).
Raspberry lemon sorbet: raspberries are notorious for going bad quickly, so when we received 24 ounces’ worth of fruit, I knew I needed to make something with it. My husband suggested sorbet (the inspiration: I had made fresh mint granita maybe a week before I gave birth), so I blitzed all of the fruit in my food processor, added a touch of lemon juice, strained the seeds, and froze the mixture. No ice cream machine needed! I just used the food processor a second time to smoothen out the frozen mixture and make it creamy. (As a side note, granita is more icy/granular than sorbet.)
Roasted figs: another new discovery was how much I love roasting fruit. Roasting intensifies flavor and sweetness by extruding water and caramelizing. My mom gave us some homegrown figs that tasted mildly sweet, so I decided to add depth of flavor by roasting them with brown sugar, some homemade Portuguese cherry liqueur (ginja), and dried rosemary. I had bottled the cherry liqueur myself with cherries from my mom’s garden two years ago, and the rosemary came from fresh plants that I had as decoration at my wedding.
Roasted peaches: yet another roasted fruit adventure…my mom gave us a batch of homegrown yellow peaches as well, which had a similar problem as the figs above. So into the oven they went, tossed with brown sugar and a little bit of lemon juice. They were amazing with Van Leeuwen honeycomb ice cream (with some flaky salt sprinkled on top of the peaches), and I even added them to some kalua pork tacos for some tangy, juicy sweetness.
Blueberry, almond, and lemon cake: years ago, my husband gifted me Yotam Ottolenghi’s Simple. It’s a beautiful cookbook, but like all of the cookbooks I own, it has become more of a coffee table book than a functional one. However, I recently discovered that his blueberry, almond, and lemon cake recipe from Simple was posted online, and it just so happened that I had an excess amount of blueberries. The execution still needs tweaking (the edges get burned very easily), but other than that, this loaf cake is superb. It’s easy to make, has the right amount of sugar, and tastes like a dreamy pound cake. This makes great dessert…and breakfast. ;-)
The next big milestone for child development is at 4 months, so you’ll most likely hear from me in October. Things will get busier in a couple of weeks, but knowing me, I’ll still make time in the kitchen. So you should be getting an update about that as well.
Have a great rest of the summer…continue to enjoy all of the summer produce! 🌽🍓🫐🍑🍒