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Beautiful fresh pistachios and the labour of love to peel them; in a cauliflower, parsley and mint tabbouleh, with radishes, preserved lemon, marigold petals and pomegranate. Because my dinner LAST night was a Korean deep-fried cheesy potato tornado pork bomb, and you can't eat those every day of the week.

Yet another sashimi and sushi rice bowl...with all the last scraps of tuna, salmon, squid, avocado, a raw egg yolk, and lots of toasted nori.

And further fish market spoils; otoro (tuna belly) donburi. Which is just fatty, creamy tuna belly sashimi on seasoned sushi rice, with chopped green onion.

Looks great, @Chris Hennes. It is, in fact, one of my standby dishes to serve to guests because a) everyone loves it and b) so much of it can be prepared in advance, especially if I have to come home from work and make dinner for people; I just chop all the vegetables up the night before and leave them in a roasting tin, with the spices in one corner and the salt in the other, and cover and chuck the whole thing in the fridge. Then when I get home, I pull out the whole roasting tin, douse in some olive oil, mix it around, and bang it in the oven. I usually chop all the garnishes in advance too, and have the dry couscous standing by in a bowl with a lid, ready to just tip some boiling water and salt into. I try to keep this vegetarian, but if any of my guests are truly meat-tooth types, I will also usually have marinated some lamb cutlets in ras el-hanout spices and olive oil and whack them under the broiler for the last few minutes, since the oven's so hot anyway, or cook them plain and then douse them in pomegranate molasses.

Down the hatch, while standing at the kitchen sink, covered in sushi rice up to the elbows. Glamorous, huh?

After the most beautiful swim at one of Sydney's many ocean rockpools this morning, I knew I'd want something warm to come home to, so got up early and made hot cross buns, to have with strong, strong Vietnamese condensed milk coffee.Chocolate hot cross buns though, because try as I might, I cannot bring myself to countenance dried fruit in baked goods..raisins, sultanas, currants..the horror, the horror..

Thanks for your kind words, all! @kayb, that's what's so good about temari sushi..it's so easy and not that finicky. Just put a slice on fish and some sushi rice on a sheet of cling film/saran wrap and twist it tight into a ball, done. No shaping or rolling or fiddling (other than the inordinate fiddling to which I went to garnishing the things, but that's just me gilding the lily.)

Fish market extravaganza - temari sushi. It's sushi you just shape into a ball by twisting it in cling film. I have too much time on my hands.

Finely diced preserved lemon would probably go down a treat.

Whisk together 2 tbsp of gochujang, 1/4 cup of soy sauce, 2 tbsp of honey and a clove or two of crushed garlic in a small bowl; separate some yolks and slip them into the bowl, cover and refrigerate overnight or for up to 2 nights. Swirl the bowl gently from time to time to make sure the tops get covered in the marinade. That's it. Other times I just use one or two tablespoons of soy sauce and an equal quantity of mirin, for a plainer but no less delicious version.

Egg yolks cured in gochujang (Korean chilli paste), soy sauce, garlic and honey, with chopped short rib, browned in the leftover yolk marinade, and green onion. On rice. I really love curing egg yolks; it turns them to something so deliciously unctuous and chewy and multi textured.

Other favourites: The roasted butternut pumpkin with lime and green chilli (though I sprinkled the lime in some sugar first, as the first time I made it, I thought the raw lime slices were a little too much) The soba noodles with mango and eggplant – though I seem to recall the sauce proportions made it far too wet and dressing-y for my liking Okra with tomato and lemon Black pepper tofu

Jjangmyeon; Korean fermented black bean noodles with pork belly, daikon, carrots, onion and zucchini. Very umami.

I like this book, but I liked Plenty more. Interestingly, the cover I have looks like this; must be the UK version. Anyway, one of best things I've cooked from it is the pistachio and saffron soup. I'm looking forward to cooking this again now that I have a Vitamix - when I cooked it originally, I only owned a stick blender, and while it was absolutely delicious, the Vitamix will give it such a lusciously smooth texture. The other thing I cooked from it like I liked but have no picture of is the wheat berries with pomegranate molasses and silverbeet (Swiss chard to Americans). I used freekeh instead of wheat berries - I like the smokiness of it.

I've cooked quite a lot from Plenty. I do find his recipes to be a bit hit and miss - sometimes the quantities of individual ingredients seem quite insane - but I've never met a recipe I didn't fiddle with in some way, so it might just be me. Here are a few things: Bittersweet salad: Ultimate winter couscous: Caramelised fennel with goat's cheese (before I added the cheese):

Portuguese-y pork belly and prawn sausage buns, on an English muffin. First you marinate some narrow strips of pork belly overnight in fish sauce, garlic and pepper. Then you make a sausage paste from raw prawns, lean pork, white pepper, egg white, salt and cornstarch, and make a little salad of acidulated red onion and fennel fronds. Then you pan fry the pork belly until caramelised, and toast English muffins in the leftover pork fat in the pan, before spreading a thick layer of the prawn and pork sausage across one muffin and pan frying it face down to toast it. Then put the pork belly strips on top, some of the fennel and onion, and a spoonful of spicy aioli, before the toasted muffin-top. (Top of the muffin to you!) I bastardised it slightly by using Vietnamese marinated sausage mince I already had in the freezer for the sausage part, and Portuguese chicken chilli sauce I had in the fridge instead of making my own aioli. Another winner of an idea from this site: http://ladyandpups.com/2016/01/08/lisbon-plus-surfn-turf-pork-belly-and-shrimp-sausage-sandwich/

All week, I've had a serious and deeply emotional craving for Shake Shack, which is basically all I eat in NYC whenever I'm there, I love it so much. (OK, that's not true..I eat a lot of things in NYC.) Anyway, we don't have Shake Shack in Australia, and Australian burgers are generally all wrong if you ask me, so I set out to make an approximation of Shake Shack using a bread recipe I like even better; Japanese milk bread. She may not look like much, and she doesn't photograph all that well, but this burger is a labour of love..I present you: the everything-from-scratch Fake Shack. Here we have: 1. A fluffy, tender Hokkaido milk bun, baked till steaming and then coated in melted butter and retoasted 2. A wondrous mix of 50% sirloin, 25% brisket, and 25% short rib beef that I ground myself 3. A perfect salty outer crust but medium rare interior on the smashed burger, thanks to my cast iron pan and a lot of smashing on my part 4. A delightful rip off of Shack Burger sauce; mayo, mustard, ketchup, blitzed dill pickle, garlic powder and paprika 5. Lettuce, tomato and smoked American cheese. I LOVED HER. AND SO I ATE HER.

A small dinner for me, as I'm still not feeling well; tempura zucchini flowers. I make them with a very light, watery tapioca starch batter. Because I like the coating to shatter like glass in the mouth, rather than be a thicker batter through which you can't see or properly enjoy the flower (IMO). I didn't stuff them, sometimes I like them just as they are. Sprinkled with soft pink Murray River salt flakes. But I wasn't too sick to scoff 2 of my latest popsicle creations for dessert; strawberry, black pepper and Cointreau.

Best fried rice recipe ever; curry fried rice, with crispy garlic and ginger, well-browned beef and onions, lashings of garlic/ginger oil, curry powder, dashi granules, 6 melted Japanese curry bricks and a tablespoon of cocoa(!). And an egg yolk and a little slice of butter. From here: http://ladyandpups.com/2013/02/26/gold-on-gold-curry-fried-rice-eng/

This is salted egg yolk prawns, a Malaysian dish. You steam salted duck egg yolks, mash them and then fry them in butter with chillis, garlic, ginger, curry leaves and shallots until the yolks are foamy, and then coat crispy deep fried prawns in this sauce. Eaten with steamed Chinese broccoli and white rice. If you don't immediately recognise the end product as prawns, it's because of my Staunch Prawn Preparation Opinions, which are as follows: 1. Always remove tail. Tail-on prawns just annoy me. Presentation is nicer, yes, but this is dinner and I ain't playing. 2. Except in very rare cases, I prefer shell off. I do like when prawn shells go crispy, but with a soft, wet sauce, it's hard to keep them crispy enough, so shell off is better. 3. I prefer head on. (Australian prawns are always sold head on). 4. I would rather de-face the prawn, ie. cut off the sharp prongs, whiskers, eyes, and front legs with scissors. Less stabby and fewer eye-balls. 5. Always devein and butterfly. So in sum, my preference is face off, head on, shell off, butterflied, tail off. Phew! See? Staunch.

And this is just a tiny, tiny fish shop! One day I'll take photos of the Sydney Fish Markets and post here. Amazing things (and I like it more than Tokyo's Tsukiji markets, too.)

Beautiful, @BonVivant. I've never cooked sole. Seafood here too, though. Went to my favourite fish shop and bought a fine specimen of the great Australian mud crab. And dispatched him into the next world in 4 tablespoons of roasted black pepper, curry leaves, chilli, roasted shrimp paste and butter. (And also oyster sauce, garlic, shallots, taucheo sauce, chicken stock powder and sugar.) Note my favourite Asian food packaging of the week.

@MelissaH, @Anna N; the lady herself explains "the wax" here:

Looks delicious! I'd dive face-first into that.

Ugliest but tastiest dish contender; Pacific oysters, dusted in potato starch and flash-fried till crispy, then stirred into a sauce of ginger, green onions, Shaohsing wine, white pepper and oyster sauce.