In My Kitchen: October 2025

Where did September go? Someone told me once that once you have kids time just starts to fly, is it true??  

At work... 

The French eat their radishes with butter, and here was how it was served at the cafeteria, with a 250g block of butter!!!

A sunny day calls for lunch in the park - omelette, stuffed tomato, rice with mystery sauce, side of corn bean salad and a slice of melon, bread and cheese of course. The cafeteria feeds us well!

There are quite often get togethers "le pot" for various occasions at work, and only in France it's acceptable to have a glass of prosecco while on call! Here with an excellent strawberry cheesecake, one of a selection of delicacies...

At home... 

Our friend brought us these cute little sacher tortes from Vienna. They are the classic sacher torte but in round form, chocolate cake with plum jam inside. Very decadent and rich.  

S has been buying me little treats from the boulangerie near G's childcare for my long 24 hour shifts. Here was an excellent fig tart, the shell crisp with just a light layer of crême patissière and look at the topping of luscious figs!

Another on call, another beautiful tart - this time a raspberry one. 

A Fancy Friday we had with roasted fennel topped with lemon and parmesan, delicious! 

I've written about my love of Picard before, and their icecream is also excellent! 

We continue our Sunday lunch at grandpa's series with home cooked Chinese food - here Chinese greens, chicken soup with wombok, vermicelli and tofu, "fake crab" - an egg omelette dish made with vinegar and ginger to simulate the taste of crab, and mung bean sprouts with tofu (home sprouted) 

Finished one of our Sunday lunches with a cheese course - a tomme with pesto, a Saint Marcellin, and a mouldy chevre that I've forgotten the name of

on weekends I've been baking our daily bread and this was a particularly handsome one...

I've been wanting to bake something crazy for a while - I finally managed this dark chocolate and coconut swirl 

We also finally found freselle, a kind of super dry cracker from the south of Italy - in Brussels of all places! and enjoyed them with some heirloom black tomatoes. 

In Brussels...

One weekend we went to Brussels to visit S' sister who just had an adorable baby girl, unfortunately we were all sick and it was a freezing miserable weekend (and we had to keep away from the baby!) I had a checklist of foods I wanted to eat in Brussels and we barely managed any of it... anyway we did stop by a great Italian place and had coffee and cannoli there. 

And at the train station we picked up some waffles for the childcare and my workplace, and some chocolate with pistachio for us. 

The Curveball...

My little monster loves walking around the supermarket with the trolley! He went to the beer section one day and was fixed on the La Chouffe beer, probably because it had a picture of a smurf on it (there were so many smurfs in Belgium!) Anyway it's been really interesting to see the parallel development of 3 languages, and he also knows a few words in Chinese that he only uses with my dad! He has been standing in front of the fridge shouting cena (dinner in Italian)! dîner (in French)! dinner! tofu! compo (compote = mashed apple in French) eat! snack! We remind ourselves often to bottle these precious memories because in the blink of an eye he will be no longer so little. 

Sending this to Sherry who hosts the IMK series, have a great month everyone! 

In My Kitchen: September 2025

I can't believe I just typed September... The French say metro - boulot - dodo (subway - work - sleep) and maybe this is how life just passes us by? Let's take a look at the last month in my kitchen... 

My dad arrived from Australia with a hand of bananas from his garden (I know.. highly dodgy, but extremely delicious)

I finally bought a new bread knife along with a stainless steel frying pan. I've been baking two loaves on the weekends (one for us and one for my dad). 

I've also gotten into this seed mix which I bought from the local supermarket while we were visiting Padova last time.

I found the French equivalent of sav blanc! I will never go past a Pouilly Fumé again 

  

Our neighbour got us these from a popular chocolaterie Jeff de Bruges. We have never had anything from there and they are really decadent and rich

My dad has been bringing us dinner twice a week and it's an incredible help. Here was one of our dinners - rice with steamed fish, home-sprouted sprouts (he's been growing them from mung beans) stir fried with tofu, and green veggies. 

The other days of the week we have meal prep meals - here coconut taro, dal and cabbage tomato stirfry. I was so moved because I got home from a 24 hour shift at the hospital and saw S had prepared the plate for my lunch along with my favourite beer and a pistachio tart from downstairs. What a stellar husband!

Picnic in the park with an eggplant omelette (unusual, but delicious), camembert with baguette, chickpea tomato salad, and fava bean mash. 

Dumplings at home - these were filled with a combination of TVP, cabbage, carrot and coriander

Another day, another amazing Cyril Lignac pastry

In the summer holidays we have been going very often to the blind school garden across the road from our place, where we have had a whole summer of blackberries, mulberries, strawberries and tomatoes. Here was a particularly beautiful strawberry 

In the work kitchen... 

One of the nurses brought in these gorgeous grapes from her vine at home 

You know you live and work in France when the physiotherapist brings in home made macarons. The shells were incredibly light and the filling of salted caramel was *chefs kiss*. 

I love Picard the frozen supermarket and as cliché as it can be, their frozen meals are actually really good. Here is one I had for one of my on calls. 

We had an excess of bananas one week so I made these "healthy cookies" with banana, oats, chia seeds, almond meal and sunflower oil. They were the perfect mid-ward round pickup and G also loved them for his afternoon tea

Wild blackberries from the hospital cemetery

The curveballs..

I excuse myself for having two food related curveballs... 

The first is this vending machine of fresh produce from local farmers within a 100km radius of Paris, pretty crazy idea right? I wonder how they keep the stuff fresh.. 

And the second is my little monster eating blackberries off the vine at the local park. Eating berries with him all summer has been a truly wonderful experience of motherhood. 

I'm sending this to Sherry who hosts the monthly IMK series. Thanks for visiting and have a great September everyone!

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In My Kitchen: August 2025

My my, how July passed in a blur of work, family weekends, catching up with friends and a four day long weekend to Deauville. What I notice to be strange right now is how I am now getting used to typing on the French keyboard and the one on my laptop feels weird now...

From the work kitchen... 

My new workplace is next to a forest, so I've been taking my plate down to the forest at least once a week to eat by the pond. It's a lovely peaceful pond with a walking track around it, so it's pretty amazing to eat there next to the ducks, with many dogs walking by as well. The hospital gives us a pretty good lunch (it's the same as what patients eat), there's always a couple of salads for entrée, choice of two mains, bread and cheese, and fruit for dessert.  

Leek tart, vegetables, tomato mozzarella salad and some kind of beef.

Roast pork, yellow beans and potatoes. Carrot salad and zucchini salad. 

From our kitchen...

Our friends came from China with these fresh rose pastries - can you believe they are stuffed with candied roses!

Our other friends came from Vietnam with these mooncake like delicacies stuffed with bean paste and salted egg, and durian flavoured crumbly sweets that looked like gold bars. 

We found this tempeh in a bio shop one day while out walking, I've never had tempeh d'Okara before - the flavour was amazing! 

Mr Picard continues to help us out on those busy nights where we don't have time to cook. Here these steamed veggie dumplings were actually really good

Fancy Friday continues, at least in the wine department!

Chinese people always have noodles for birthdays - we had biang biang noodles his year from my favourite noodle place, La Taverne de Zhao which is Frenchified Chinese food but still very good handmade noodles 

When S went to pick up my birthday noodles he picked up their chilli paste as well 

Weekend in Deauville... 

So all of France goes on holidays in July/August, it's effectively shut. I arrived in the hospital one day to see that they had even turned off the lights in the corridor, probably because they thought no one was coming! S invited his friend to come and nerd with him in Paris all summer so we are here all summer as well, but we did manage to get away for a long weekend in the nearest beach, also nicknamed the 21st arrondissement of Paris because so many Parisians go there. We even somehow chanced upon the Patrouille, the incredible airshow that the military put on. Our airbnb has to be seen to be believed, panoramic views over the sea and we watched the airshow directly from the couch!

A local cider - you can just glimpse our magnificent ocean view from our airbnb 

Fresh oysters and prawns at the Trouville fish market

Incredible grilled gambas, cost us an arm and a leg but worth every cent!

A simple meal at "home" - veggies with vegan meat bbq style, and a salad of heirloom tomatoes... 

A couple more local delicacies - onion flavoured crisps and apple biscuits 

Onto the curveball...

I leave you all with my lovely little monster who just adores the sea. Deauville faces the UK so the weather is similar - rainy, variable, cold / bloody freezing for Aussies. He didn't show a single skerrick of hesitation before he dived right into the freezing water. He would have stayed there all day if we let him!

Sending this to Sherry who hosts the monthly IMK series, have a lovely August everyone and see you all soon xxx

In My Kitchen: July 2025

Can someone tell me where June went? I think it flew by in a flurry of trying-to-adapt-at-work (it's still extremely hard to force my brain to work in another language), hot days of the heatwave (no air con in the ICU...) and not a whole lot of cooking. Picard the frozen supermarket is our new friend. Let's have a look anyway at my random food photos of the last month.. 

Tunisian sweets from my colleague who brought them back from her hometown

Fancy Friday is still alive if only in the form of wine... S is now best friends with the caviste who even waves at us when we walk past 

Another Fancy Friday when it was suuuuuper hot, we had this lovely fresh light rosé

I went to a 3yo birthday party themed under the sea, my friend was pretty inventive with the food! 

It was so hot last week that we ate these leftover salads from a conference S organised for days on end, chickpea salad and white beans with feta. There were also mysterious flowers in there and I'm never sure if they are edible - does anyone know? 

Saturday night sushi

With this super hot weather we've been having heaps of cold salads, here a rice noodle salad with cold tofu and an egg, just about all the cooking we can manage in this weather..  

We finally succumbed and bought the spectacular fraisier from our local Cyril Lignac. It's as amazing as it looks, a light as air genoise sponge, plump sweet strawberries, a vanilla creme topped with a sprinkling of pistachio. Heaven. 

We have reached an age where G cannot sit still in a restaurant so we have resorted to having picnics in the park, here was an excellent vegetarian plate we got as takeout near Parc Monceau 

Finally it's been a little tradition now to make a melon cake for S' birthday. This year I was busy at work and got home too late to do anything too spectacular, so I call this the geometric watermelon cake. 

My curveball this month is even food related... it's been so hot that we have been going to the supermarket to cool down, where my little monster has now learned to pull a trolley around. He also sat down on the ground with a packet of crackers and refused to budge. The terrible twos are coming, I can feel it :) 

That's it for me this month, sending this to Sherry for the IMK series and wishing all the IMKers lots of coolness if you are in heatwave and lots of warmth if you are in winter. Have a great month everyone!