In My Kitchen: June 2026

May continued to be difficult following on from Awful April, let's call it Mediocre May, shall we? anyway, things are looking up with the arrival of the warm weather? Let's take a look in the kitchen...  

A few days in Italy... 

We missed Easter in Italy so went for a super long weekend over one of the many long weekends of May (there are 4 in one month!) 

This is my favourite pasta shop in the world (Artusi) in Padova.. the selection is amazing and everything is so tempting there. You can order your pasta to be cut just the way you want, pick up a mindboggling array of stuffed pastas, and amazing sauces to go with by the gram! The bigoli there is unrivalled... 

We have a real tradition to go to Pizzeria iDon when we are in Padova. Here the pistachio pesto was incredible combined with the buffalo mozzarella. Look at that blistery crust!

And to complete the holy trinity of pizza-pasta-gelato that is the quintessential Italian diet, my favourite gelato from Galateia. Where else do you get flavours like raspberry with fior di sambuco liquor, and wild blueberry with gin? 

Back in France, the fruit has arrived.. 

Every patisserie worth its butter is making beautiful tarts... here's one from the one next to the childcare

And one from downstairs.. imagine just being able to walk out the front door and grab something like that everywhere! 

Just some random cherries and raspberries for one of our many spring picnics 

Some home made jam from the seasonal fruit, thickened with chia 

Also in the kitchen... 

Pasta Wednesday continues, here with artisan sausages from the fancy butcher up the road. 

I've been obsessed with putting walnuts in my sourdough..

I bought these "antique" Chinese bowls from the antique shop near the childcare. the inscription on them says 19th c Qing dynasty but who knows if they are real. Pretty for eating icecream anyway  

I chanced upon a café (Good News in the 15th) that must be run by an Aussie because they had all these Aussie cookbooks that made me so incredibly nostalgic... 

This month at work... 

I looked after an old couple in their 90s who both passed away within a week of each other, 67 years married they were. Their lovely children brought in this lovely tea for the staff with a nice note and their obituaries. It was a touching moment.. `

This was an exceptionally unhealthy dinner they delivered one night when I was on call - chicken nuggets, pasta with tomato sauce and custard! I added the cucumber for some freshness. The French diet is not necessarily fancy... 

We had a heatwave for a week where the temp reached 32 degrees indoors in the ICU (no air conditioning). Can you imagine that in a service of 22 beds, we have 5 portable AC units that we must decide which patients are in the most desperate need for AC? I thought it was hilarious that they delivered frozen radishes to cool down instead of ice blocks...  

My piece de resistance this month was this strawberry cheesecake with a vegemite infused crust for my 1 year anniversary at work. I melted the vegemite into the butter and made the crust savoury, not telling any French people (in case it evokes dégoulasse! reactions) until they had already declared it delicious.  It's been bloody hard but I made it to 1 year! 

Curveball time... 

I got a care package from a dear friend in Australia who knew that I'm going through a really hard time. Can you believe she painted that picture of the beachgoers just to remind me of home? How talented she is! Also got some pyjamas for me and for G, some bluey stuff and other bits and bobs. 

I leave you with my monster contemplating the most perfect strawberry possible... 

Sending this to Sherry who hosts the monthly IMK series. Thanks for visiting and have a great month everyone! 

In My Kitchen : May 2026

Welcome dear IMK friends, sorry to say that April was a truly an Awful April... Longtime followers will know that in the last few years I moved from Australia to Canada to France, and it's all going pear shaped at the moment, mid life crisis I guess. Anyway, let's take a distracting moment in the kitchen.. 

For my monthversary baking project, I made a matcha cake which collapsed after I took it out of the oven but was nevertheless delicious. It fit in well with Awful April. You can also see that my selection of family photos also includes a castor that I drew, it says "life is short, eat cabbage"... 

I continued my annual tradition of making sourdough hot cross buns, but these didn't work out so well, a bit dense and chewy to go along with my Awful April .. 

We celebrated Easter with this magnificent dark chocolate easter egg from our local chocolatier Bernachon, stuffed full of goodies, that little chocolate chicken is filled with hazelnut ganache!

We also got a colomba, a traditional Easter bread that is eaten in the north of Italy. It's very much like a panettone in texture and composition but is covered with these little pellets of sugar. 

This was probably the most ambitious thing I made in Awful April, the fish pie from Recipetineats which I spruced up with lots of leek and fennel. We had friends visiting from New York and for dessert we had some wonderful strawberries, a real treat in spring in Paris. 

(There was a funny after episode too. I had bought an el cheapo bottle of wine to cook for the fish pie, and when Canadian friends dropped by a few days later we had finished all the nice wine at home so we offered them the el cheapo wine and they said wine in France is just delicious! didn't have the heart to tell them it was a 3 euro bottle from the supermarket...)

Off on a trip...

So I came up with this idea to take G on a big train trip because I adore trains (and I want to train him to love trains too), and since S was invited for academic reasons to Budapest we set out on our train adventure. It was badly timed, I had been struggling with eczema for weeks, I was terribly depressed, and had a bad head cold.. zero appetite, but anyway here are some photos of our trip. 

We took the train from Paris to Zurich (4 hours) where we caught up with S' little brother and his new lovely girlfriend. She was very sweet and gave us a goodie bag with these beautiful cups (the Starbucks series), a couple of cute wooden spatulas and a little box of chocolates. 

My dream in life is to have a make your own muesli bar like the one in our hotel breakfast.. 

We then took the overnight train from Zurich to Vienna (10 hours), and it was a real adventure squeezing into our tiny compartment, perfectly comfortable and we all slept well to the rumbling along of the train. We were astonished to see that they brought us breakfast in the morning (choose your own breakfast adventure) just before arriving in Vienna.. 

I was so sick from my cold that I literally had just 3 cups of tea in Vienna while lying on the couch all day at my friend's place. On the way back to the station I bought this topfengolatsche which is a typical Austrian pastry stuffed with curd, and we ate it on the train together (rather, G ate 90% of it), so this is literally the only food picture I have from Vienna!

The train from Vienna to Budapest was easy (3.5 hours) and the Hungarians on my train were so friendly, many old ladies besotted with G - must be unusual to see a mixed Chinese baby in the Hungarian countryside. We arrived in Budapest and went straight to a fancy dinner at Vakvarju, this was the dessert which was a tradition goat curd pudding with pearls and purées of strawberry and a tuile of basil. Very fancy. 

What else did we eat in Budapest? I have no idea! but one night a restaurant owner gave G this as a dessert, it's a frozen treat of cottage cheese covered in chocolate..  

Apero on the street anyone? This was leftover Prosecco from the night train! 

This was a picnic dinner in our hotel room because I couldn't stand the idea of eating meat anymore.. so if you are curious how much food costs in Budapest, this dinner of a loaf of gluten free bread, crackers, small chunk of cheese, cherry tomatoes, maquerel, peas and carrots in a can, hummus, a bag of mixed nuts, 3 oranges and a couple of little desserts cost us 7800 forints (21 euros or 25 US dollars).. how does that compare to prices in your town? 

I'm usually a big supermarket souvenir shopper but I was just too sick this time to do anything other than pick up some paprika (the bircher muesli was from Vienna) and this cookbook at the airport with the last of our Hungarian coins... 

The curveball... 

Here is my little monster curled up with his latest friend called Zuri. He usually hates stuffed toys but really took to this one, I think because S' brother's girlfriend gave it to him and she's very pretty (and he loves pretty ladies). He normally sleeps with a rabbit called Mr Rabbit so he has been inventing all sorts of stories about the two of them since we got home to Paris. He's at a gorgeous age where he is asking lots of what's that? why is that like that? kind of questions. It's also amusing to see him switch between languages or correcting our accents in French!

That's it for me this month, feel free to write me if you have been through a mid life crisis.. I need all the tips I can get. Sending this to Sherry who hosts the monthly IMK series, have a great month everyone! 

In My Kitchen: April 2026

Spring made a brief appearance in Paris and then disappeared again! We were in Lyon last weekend visiting friends (no amazing food pics this time, but that's a different story altogether) and it was bitterly cold.. here's a look over the last month in my kitchen. 

S was at a nerd conference in New York and brought me a stash from Trader Joe's - the Green Goddess is amazing on roasted vegetables! 

I made another crêpe cake with altering layers of nutella and mascarpone, this was the leftover slice that I heated in the microwave briefly - everything melted! 

I've been going to the most amazing tofu shop after my 24hr shifts for fresh tofu and taking home lots of takeaway. Here is the purple rice congee with a bit of omelette and peanuts. My grandma used to say "have everything possible with congee, you never know what will happen next" 

We celebrated our wedding anniversary with this lovely bottle of bubbles from the local caviste

On the food side it's hard to go to a fancy unagi restaurant with a 2 year old, so we ordered these delicious (eye wateringly expensive) unagi bento boxes from Nodaiwa - special occasion treat, they were so good, each mouthful of eel melted in the mouth and all the accompaniments were refined and well done too

Pasta Wednesday continues, here with orecchiette, guanciale and ricotta - a great creamy recipe that reminds of carbonara but lighter  

For pi day I had some offcuts of pastry that I put on top of our quiche just for fun... 

I made a traditional flan patissier with an Asian twist - black sesame instead of vanilla. 

It was a real lesson in French social etiquette to not bring something to work that's not "classic"! I had quite a few coworkers turn up their noses:

one said, je n'aime pas la couleur (I don't like the colour)

one said, je n'aime pas la texture (I don't like the texture)

one said, je n'aime pas le goût (I don't like the taste)

two said, je n'aime pas le sésame (I don't like sesame)

 but the rest devoured it!

There was so much sesame custard left that I turned the rest into these sourdough milk buns

I continued my latest interest in flan with this excellent specimen from a boulangerie next to Parc Montsouris where we had a picnic to celebrate the first day of spring 

Our medical student (wannabe neurosurgeon) showed up with this yoghurt cake one Sunday, I was impressed by his efforts - it was light and fluffy inside. It's a classic French recipe said to be so easy the kids can do it, using the yoghurt pot as a measure 

Spring has brought quite a lot of good moods and food sharing, one day a nurse brought her waffle maker and made fresh waffles for everyone, another day another nurse made these cinnamon flavoured beignets (kind of like donuts) freshly fried, so delicious!

The boulangerie next to G's childcare changed hands, the patissier stayed the same but the boulanger has changed and the bread no longer tastes the same...

Here is a random lunch in the sun, from the Tibetan food truck that comes to Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière on Fridays. Their momos are so so good! And the couple is super friendly. They always give out little cups of fried veg chips to the long waiting line...  

Onto the curveballs.. I know that only one is allowed but I'm going to break the rules this month because I really wanted to share them with you!

We bought a teeny tiny toy piano for G!

With much sadness, our local bookshop (open since 1834) shut up shop. It was our go-to bookshop and we tried to buy all our books and cards there to support their business, but alas it obviously wasn't profitable. Sadly it's going to turn into a hipster coffee shop.. One of the great things about France is that people still read, but even in the last few years I see less and less people reading and more and more people on their phones... 

I leave you this month with my little monster practising the great French tradition of ripping the end of the baguette off with your teeth. The childcare shut down randomly for two days (a leaking pipe or something) and we had the most random glorious mid-week vacation, here we are having a picnic at the Chateau de Versailles. 

Sending this to Sherry of Sherry's Pickings for the monthly IMK event, have a great month everyone!