rarerollingobject

To book-end my day of obsessive noodle eating nicely (after Cantonese wonton mee for breakfast), dao xiao mian, or Sichuanese fresh knife-cut noodles. With chicken crackling and crispy fried shallots (which I made myself, so used the oil rendered from the chicken skin to fry the shallots), doubanjian Sichuanese chilli broad bean paste, ground Sichuan and white peppers, Chinkiang black vinegar, minced green onions and dark soy sauce that I simmered down with star anise, cinnamon, black pepper, tangerine peel and brown sugar. You then slick it with a tablespoonful of chicken oil, mix up with the chewy cooked noodles, douse it with chicken crackling, and slurrrrrrrp.

After a week of eating nothing but European food in Paris, and being too busy to cook at all last week with starting a new job etc, I have been close to tears with cravings for food from the motherland, which is to me...Hong Kong Cantonese. So this morning for Sunday breakfast I made wonton noodles; egg noodles, blanched in chicken stock, with wilted greens, prawn and pork wontons, a little chunk of pork belly I char siu'd with maltose and soy sauce and garlic and a square of fermented tofu (it's the traditional recipe), slices of steamed lup cheong, and lots of oyster sauce, dark sweet soy and white pepper. And crispy chilli sauce and ginger oil. And lo, I was happy.

I have two more meals I'm able to cook in my little Paris kitchen before I have to fly out to Dubai tonight (wish me luck; I'm not normally a nervous flier, but EgyptAir has rattled me), so got up early this morning to make breakfast with these lovely girolles mushrooms, sautéed in butter and eaten on bread. With a slightly 'incongruous but I have to use it up' side of saucisson sec. I've never eaten girolles before, much less cooked them, so I have no idea if I've done right by them, but my French friend ate them happily, so I can't have done terribly. And then two doughnut peaches, a glass of wild blueberry nectar, and it's back to bed till lunch! Ah, holidays.

Yeah, it's cultured French butter.. I ain't playing.

Octopus and prawn carpaccios, on buttered bread. And a green salad, for, you know, balance.

The pistachio and raspberry compote one; and the licorice with violet..

Twelve Pierre Herme macarons. That's it. That's my entire daily food intake - making sensible nutritional choices here, people!

I'm in Paris on holidays for the week, and have been having a lovely time buying cheese, chocolate, amazing breads, patisserie, ham..you name it, I've eaten it this week. Tonight was the first night I've actually cooked dinner though, as I've been cooking most breakfasts in (a lot of updates to the Breakfast thread!) and going out to make mischief by night. Tonight, though; I pan-fried a wonderful duck breasts I bought at La Grand Epicerie de Paris till the skin was crispy but the meat still pink, made a pan sauce out of reducing some blackberry jam I found in the pantry of the apartment I'm staying in, and served over mache from the green grocer in the Marche Couvert de Batignolles, the neighborhood I'm staying in. Not the most attractive meal I've ever made, but I was pretty happy eating it on the balcony looking out over this view. ❤️

Still eating my way through Paris at a rate of knots...Slices of jamon iberico on pain aux cereales bread, and a couple of slices of a rich, oozy Camembert that's been aged in Calvados apple brandy. The jamon is amazing stuff; it's so pungently umami and intense that you put a piece in your mouth and it's so high with forest and earth and acorns and dirt that you almost immediately cough.. in a good way.

Breakfast! I had leftover mimolette cheese and ham, so I decided to make Breton crepes. I caramelised onions till sweet to contrast the saltiness of the ham and cheese (though I really do prefer salty to sweet, despite what @Duvel would have you believe ) The colours are a bit garish, but whatever. Made even Bretonnier by adding some of this incredible Breizh butter that's churned with toasted, cracked buckwheat (sarrasin, a staple of Brittany), and then happily toasting my culinary chops with two glasses of Breton hard cider; because if you're not drinking at 8.30am on your holiday, you're just not doing it right. And then despite, uh, what I just said about preferring salt, I had a couple more chunks of my beloved Praluline; a buttery brioche bun stuffed to the gills with pralines roses, pink sugared almonds; most crunchy, some melted down to sweet gooey puddles in the bun.

Well, I'm in Paris. And I sincerely hate having to get dressed and presentable and all that BEFORE eating when on holiday, so I'm buying lots of food to eat in. So, my breakfast! A couple shards of the mighty mimolette cheese, with its craggy, cratered, mite-ridden rind a wonder to behold; a stinky aged goats' cheese; and a jambon beurre, with ham, this lovely cultured butter with crunchy sea salt flakes, and a very good ficelle from the bakery next door. And this palmier, rich with butter and caramelised sugar. Downsides; the murky dishwater that will have to suffice as my first coffee this week, and that I can't find any dinner plates.

Oysters, nothing but glorious local Sydney rock oysters, from the flats less than 10km away. Two dozen, for me. I've never personally subscribed to the idea that oysters are an aphrodisiac; the only thing oysters put me in the mood for is...more oysters.

Warrain Beach, which is just next to Culburra Beach, on the NSW South Coast.

@robie; May - October. But me, I'm a 'getting sick' overachiever and can drop a cold at the height of summer, in the rosy bloom of spring, any time in the year, me. (Working an insanely stressful job and working it 80 hours a week may have something to do with that.) But not for the next fortnight! I'm on holidays! (So decided to get a cold on the first day, naturally). My tradition for beach holidays is that I take with me all the last bits of jam in the jars from my fridge and make scones for breakfast on the first morning. Which was just the thing after a sunrise walk along this beauty.

Hot toddies all around!

Breakfast of champions*! (*champions with sore throats.)

Homemade eomuk/odeng; Korean fishcakes made with pounded fish, squid and prawns. Fried, cooled, and then sliced up and sautéed with gochujang chilli paste, honey, sour plum strip, sesame oil, carrot, green onions and green chilli.

Sticky rice pork balls, in gochujang chilli sauce. If you're familiar with mochi, or tang yuan sesame balls, it's the same dough; chewy, toothsome pounded rice, wrapped around a ball of ground pork shoulder, ginger, white pepper and sesame oil. And the sauce is garlic, soju rice wine, ginger, gochujang chilli paste, honey and rice vinegar, boiled down into liquid fire. Chewy hot balls, best with green onion, lots of cracked black pepper, and more roasted sesame oil.

The great Australian pipi; it's the closest thing we have to clams, native to Australia. Stir fried with XO sauce, chillis, spring onions, salted fermeted black beans, ginger and Shaohsing wine. On a bed of crispy deep fried rice vermicelli to soak up the juices.

And then I had this plum cheesecake for dessert. Too pretty not to share.

A single woman's dinner: morcilla with fried egg and potato crisps. It's a legitimate tapas dish, I tell myself, as I open a bag of salted kettle chips.. And a glass of sherry, from my grandmother's cut crystal Champagne coupes, because I'm fancy. (I'm not fancy.)

That's a brown sugar-crusted roast pork shoulder, roasted for 6 hours until it falls apart at the merest prod. With raw oyster and radish kimchi, cucumber and clam kimchis, sliced raw garlic and green chilli, and lettuce and perilla leaves to wrap it all up in. Bo ssam, baby.

Chả giò rế, or Vietnamese net spring rolls with crab, prawn and woodear mushrooms. I finally found some bánh tráng rế, which are a variant of the normal rice paper discs, made out of a thin rice flour batter drizzled onto a hot pan like a 'net' and shaped into a disc. They're a bit flexible, so you can use them pretty much like normal spring roll wrappers, and they pleasingly shatter into a million crisp pieces in your mouth.

All I had for dinner was potato chips, but at least I made them myself. Laminated potato chips - I mean, there are definitely better ways to spend a Saturday night than mandolining a potato into slices the thickness of silk, soaking them in salted cold water, drying each slice individually, brushing them in melted butter and topping with a sprig of dill and another silk potato slice, pressing out all the air bubbles with a finger and brushing with more melted butter, sandwiching them between two red-hot baking sheets and baking them till they're crisp and golden and buttery. And then dousing them in fine salt and crunching through them with a cold glass of riesling for the entirety of your dinner. But there are worse ways, too.

Beautiful meals, everyone. Mine is butter cereal prawn, a delicious but not photogenic Malaysian dish of prawns, curry leaves, chilli, butter and Nestum cereal. And a lot of chicken stock powder, aka MSG.