In My Kitchen: December 2025

I missed the last round of IMK as I was behind the Great Firewall of China so this time will be a bit of a 2 month recap, let's have a look at our food happenings...  

Beginning of October saw the Moon Festival, a very important festival for Chinese people. Here we made for probably the 5th year in a row Shanghainese style pork mooncakes. A great success this year as they were wrapped by my dad and none burst! Even the baby ate one... 

We spent a weekend in Lyon with our friends, who are big gourmands. Who can go past a home made tarte tatin as gorgeous as this one? 

Or a plum and blackberry clafoutis anyone? I promise it's as delicious as it looks

We also had heaps of fun making these soft coing jellies (quince I think they are called in English), from a friend's backyard quince tree 

Off to China we go... 

I keep forgetting that my husband is a bit of a celebrity in his domain and I keep getting surprised that he gets invited everywhere - we were in Japan in April so that he could talk about his work, and this time we headed to China for 2.5 weeks. I happily tagged along to eat. 

These are like Chinese hamburgers, made with a short puffy pastry and stuffed with beef and capsicums, and a spicy sauce too! 

These lime flavoured taro chips were incredible!

I succeeded in my goal of eating as many dumplings as possible... 

And wontons...

We went to a few fancy lunches with friends but nothing went beyond this one which was inside a gastronomic museum and we were served individual meatballs topped with crab roe, in a light broth gently kept warm by a candle, isn't the presentation beautiful?  

I know gelato is not Chinese but it is ALL the rage in Shanghai right now. Here was a Japanese gelato bar which had not just matcha gelato, but 3 strengths of matcha (mild, medium and strong). The black sesame gelato had swirls of toasted sesame in it and the textures were simply amazing. It would contend with any gelato place in Italy.  

A typical Shanghainese breakfast - fried doughsticks youtiao and savoury pies dabing 

Along with fresh tofu - this is like a savoury pudding 

Another breakfast classic is jianbing which is incredibly popular in France because it's like a crepe surrounding a savoury filling, here the doughsticks. Often it's made with an egg but always with a sprinkle of coriander and salty spicy sauce

While in Shanghai I got to catch up with a dear friend who lugged these pickles all the way from Wuhan just for me to try. The one on the left is radish and the right mustard pickles. 

She also brought me fresh noodles from Wuhan - the typical dish from there is called hot dry noodle, made with a sesame paste -soy-chilli sauce and topped with pickles. 

For our last dinner in Shanghai my cousin made a huge pot of mapo tofu, one of my favourite dishes. It was nice to catch up with family there!

Still in China, we really enjoyed the changing of the leaves season, Beijing was a gorgeous sea of yellow with its many gingko biloba trees, including a wonderful garden in the maths department of the Chinese Academy of Science (where we were visiting and staying). Who knew that gingko biloba trees had nuts like these? 

The Curveball....

I hadn't really planned to go to China this year. The last time I was there was in November 2019 just after I met S for the first time in Paris. On a sunny afternoon, I took my grandma out of the ward where she was (she was staying long term in a slow stream hospital) for a wheelchair walk. We went to a corner near my old primary school and sat facing the sun, sharing a mandarin segment by segment. She asked me when I would be back in Shanghai and I said I'd be back as soon as work allowed. Then covid hit, and she died in 2022 at the age of 100 during the severe lockdown in Shanghai. I never saw her again. 

My grandma had really wanted to come to our wedding in France and that she used to say that was her motivation to keep living. I didn't realise that this trip would become so sentimental, taking my husband and son to China, but when we passed that street corner all the emotions rushed to the surface. It was also an immense moment taking G to the great wall, something that all Chinese parents want to take their kids to (and my father had taken me to at the age of 7). He must have gone home in the phones of 5000 people, there were that many people amused by a Chinese-Italian English-speaking toddler running around on the great wall! 

Sending this to Sherry of IMK - thanks for hosting and happy holiday season everyone!