A typical French breakfast

You better be into bread. And black coffee. And also have a sweet tooth. Cos that's basically how it is in France: bread or pastry with jam, honey or chocolate. Luckily it's all pretty delicious. These breakfasts are from  Le Luxembourg near the Pantheon on Boulevard St. Michel.

Baguette, butter and jam

Hot mocha coffee with whipped cream

Café allongé (long black)

Egg Bistro

At Stanley St, Woolloongabba.

Verdict: very good. Nice Euro-esque interior decor, the dark wood, the bentwood chairs. The tall tables and stools along the walls are a nice touch but not always easy for shortarses like me to climb up on. Strong and hot leaf tea, not teabag (tick), fresh muffin-like creatures on the countertop (tick), hash brown made from actual real potato that grew in the ground, grated, seasoned and freshly fried (double tick). Tables not always wide enough to fully open newspaper and not knock over coffee, though.
We ate scrambled eggs with bacon on sourdough with a hash brown, plus the special: veal and pork meatloaf with a poached egg, tomato relish and sourdough toast. The meatloaf was too much like meatloaf for my liking: however for a meatloaf it was very good and not too strongly seasoned (tick). Poached egg EXCELLENT. Toast legitimate. All things very delicious. Service prompt and calm. Plus the waiter was super cute (insert inappropriate meatloaf joke). Most other patrons were sophisticated and genteel. Concerns: noisy chidren, business-shirt bogans, yapping women. Also how they don't take bookings for less than four people, despite the weekend breakfasts creating queues round the block. Location: I guess they can't help being next to a servo. Parking is OK on the side streets. Lucky the old antiques building is so lovely. YES TO EGG.

Cupstart: online coffee ordering

Pre-ordering your coffee and collecting it on the run from your local cafe. What a good idea. Obviously there will be more locations available soon, but in the meantime I hope they get enough business to keep it rolling.

Our Haus Cafe

Popped down to Our Haus, Riding Road, Hawthorne, for a spot of lunch. Overwhelmingly good feedback from the interuniverse, so I was looking forward to something interesting and tasty. Pictured here is the cheese and tomato toasted sandwich with salad, the Caesar salad and some fries to share. Toastie was well recieved and the chips were a winner (note to cafe: serve aioli with them next time please), but my salad did not please me so much. Sure, all the elements were there, so A for effort but execution gets a C- at best. Poached egg on Caesars are great, but this one was a fridge-cold poachy and so did not ooze satisfactorily. Salad leaves were only one layer thick, and croutons, while made from your excellent house sourdough, were over-baked and really hard on the teefs. Anchovy good. Dressing good. Feel free to toss the dressing through a little more and even add some water to thin it slightly, get that coaty, crispy, juicy effect on your salad leaves. Just a suggestion. Coffee was lovely. Interior decor was also lovely- I was a big fan of your bright fuschia banquette seating and your quaintly decorated inside room, even if there were too many people jammed in there for a simple weekday lunch and even if half of them were annoying wannabe yuppie women who shop at Marg Kaye. Bit squishy at times to get through to a seat. Also think about getting rid of that INCREDIBLY LOUD AND ATMOSPHERE-DESTROYING JUICER or blender or whatever it is. Surely someone must make a quiet one these days. Or just shove that one out the back, and send the work experience kid or the most hated member of staff out there to be on Juice Patrol. Speaking of staff, our waitperson was very friendly and very lovely and very sweet, even if he did seem to be a bit Special Ed at first, when he brought us two forks, then took them away, then came back with one fork, then a second fork, then went away, then returned and took the second fork away again and replaced it with a butter knife. One butter knife. Lucky it was only for a toasted sandwich; or maybe that was the point. Anyway he was very nice and it seemed like all your staff are like little shining Happiness Fairies. Good on them. Unfortunately though, if I return, I won't be having a salad. Maybe work on those- in the meantime I'll order a sandwich or something.

Grub St Cafe

Had heard really good things about Grub St. The interwebs were all a-flutter and people were saying it was totally worth the trip to Gaythorne, which isnt really even that far out of the way for anyone, unless you live at Mt Cotton, in which case you've got more problems than needing some good coffee anyway, so we decided to go check it out.

Cons: A bit hard to see / find as you're driving past, but once you know where it is, you're set. The outdoor seating is basically in a driveway, but that's OK cos the inside is fairly cute. When we went in, the waitperson was a bit surly and a few of the tables needed to be wiped down, so options of where to sit were limited. Screaming local children and some fairly insane other customers, but that's not their fault. Pros: Good coffee. Food was delicious, nice and hot, except my plate had a few grimy specks on the edge. It was fine though. We had the bacon and egg burger, and the corn cakes with chorizo and poached egg. Very tasty, not over-salted. Everything got completely polished off and the plate juice was mopped up with bread scraps. And good prices- $30ish for two people with coffee. Very good. Well done Grub St: I wish you all the best and my only advice is to friendly up your wait staff and create a soundproof fenced and electrocuted area in which to corrall the local offspring.

Christmas breakfast 2010

Melba toasts, smoked salmon, red onion, caviar, capers and creme fraiche. Also, champagne and orange juice.

La Cantina, Surfers Paradise

Had a lovely quiet late breakfast at La Cantina. Hard to find a breakfast as good as this on the Gold Coast. Poachies on wholemeal, with crispy bacon, avocado, tomato, spinach and mushrooms, and scrambled eggs on Turkish toast with crispy bacon and tomato. Yum. I'll be back.

Muesli 4 Me

Muesli4Me.

Create and mix your own custom muesli online; then they post it out to you. I just created an Eastern Blend for me, and some Toasted Cinnamon with dried strawberries and pistachios for a friend. Looks good.

Japanese hotel breakfast

Onigiri with furikake

Plain sweetened yoghurt

Miso

Tasty, light and satisfying. Enough to keep you going till lunch, yet light enough to not feel heavy after eating.

There were a few other breakfast options: cup noodles, curried egg sandwiches, wieners wrapped in sweet bread, salad. Plus stuff like tea, coffee, green tea.

Seven terrible breakfast ideas

Aren't you glad that these aren't even an option in Australia?

Christmas breakfast 2009

Melba toasts

Smoked salmon

Horseradish sour cream

Red onion

Salted capers

Champagne and orange juice

Breakfast at the Continental Cafe

The Continental is behind Chouquette at New Farm. There's a little airconditioned room out the back that is filled with trompe l'oeil brickwork, moulding and faux-Euro mantels and shelving. It has a lovely big tapestry on the back wall and it's a bit like being in a slightly naff Swiss boarding house in the 80s. It's great. The breakfast menu is also great: names like The Belgian, The Norwegian, The Swiss, etc. Good prices, too. Pictured is The Italian with the field mushrooms, and The Euro, with the poachies. Lord, how I love poachies. It's a deep character flaw.

We all agreed that the roasted tomatoes were fantastic- probably up there with the best tomato of my life. Bread was a strong chewy sourdough and very fresh. I fantasised that it was from next door at Chouquette. A really good and high-quality breakfast, and what's even better, the tea was strong, leaf, Earl Grey, delicious and got three cups to a pot.

French Special K

Harrumph. Even though I am meh about cereal and especially Special K at the best of times, I still don't see why the US and Europe gets all the specialty flavours and varieties while Australia gets bugger-all.

Yes, we have the Red Fruits type, but we certainly don't have Dark Chocolate, Almond or Apple Crumble varieties.

Then again, do I really want apple-crumble-flavoured cereal?

Breakfast at Grind

We went to Grind for breakfast, while we were up at Noosa for the Jazz Festival a couple of weeks ago. It's on Gympie Terrace at Noosaville. Out of the selection of breakfasty places along the terrace there, this one was the second-most busy. We had the omelette, the poachy with mushroom and tomato jam, and the eggs benedict. Good verdicts all round. The hollandaise on my eggs though... foamy and buttery. It's supposed to be like mayonnaise, people: it takes time and effort to perfect a hollandaise. It's not just whisking some butter and yolks together, it's creating a thick emulsion that leaves a silky ribbon behind the whisk.

I guess it's my own fault for consistently choosing the eggs benny when I know that hollandaise is a problem for a lot of breakfast cooks. If I didn't love poachies so much I'd go the omelette or even the classic bacon and hash browns, but there you have it. Good coffee though.

Parisian breakfast

Croissants are not good walking food. They leave you feeling hungry again in an hour. I stopped at Clichy's Tavern, boulevard de Clichy, for breakfast of a Pampyrl orange juice, the beautiful French short black coffee, a tartine of strawberry confiture and unsalted butter. Heaven.

Yum cha at Landmark, Sunnybank

Definitely now the best yum cha in town. King of Kings is past its prime; so is Golden Palace. And it looks like everyone else in town knows it! We had a booking for 11.30, and when we arrived, the queue for walk-ins was out the door, round the corner in the shopping centre. This is a huge, loud, asylum of tasty bites. Good yum cha. Very good. Good options, lots of variety, lots of yumminess.

Christmas breakfast 2008

We had Christmas breakfast this year at my aunt's house, with her kids, friends, and my other aunt and her husband. She had prepared a lovely breakfast out on the deck: a ham, my mother's baked eggs, fruit, croissants, smoked salmon and sour cream, blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, champagne, punch and some little fruit and custard tarts.

Asparagus and ham breakfast roll

What an easy and yummy start to summer. I can make these in the morning and eat them in the car on the way to work. One-handed, simple, fresh.

I used a piece of halved baguette from Le Pain Quotidien in Sydney's Leichardt, but one from Chouquette or Rock n' Roll Deli would be great too. I sliced some cold unsalted butter and put it on the bread, as well as some ham off the bone. (Good, dry ham, not that slimy packaged stuff.) With the asparagus, I just cut it into likely-looking lengths, put them into a plastic container and poured boiling water over them. Then I went to have a shower. When I got back I drained the spears (crisp and vibrantly green) and popped them on top of the ham, added salt and pepper and the baguette lid. Fab.

Domanis Cafe Restaurant Bar

This morning was wonderful. We were up at 6, in the car at 6.30, and in Tedder Ave on the Gold Coast an hour later. Originally we wanted to try the breakfast offerings at the Main Beach Delicatessen, which I was very impressed by when we had lunch there a while ago. But as it turned out, they don't open until 8 or 8.30, and we wanted to have a swim earlier rather than later. So, instead, we went to Domani's, a couple of doors down, already open and full of corporate suits at one end and roadworkers in orange vests up the other. It was a clean, cloudless, gusty day, tough icy dumpers screaming in onto Main Beach, the usual GC posers doing their thing (and a lot of Americans down there at the moment. Why is this?), kids in rash shirts, clear green water, big rip, the usual. I love it.
Anway the breakfast was GREAT. Menu looked really good, so it was a perfectly good consolation prize for missing out on the deli. Good coffees too. The three of us had the Healthy Bee (fruit toast, yoghurt, and fresh fruit for my annoyingly sporty and healthy friend), the pancakes with maple syrup, icecream and a side of bacon, specifically requested to be fruit-free (I wonder who could POSSIBLY have ordered that) and the eggs benedict for me (if only I could resist a nice benedict in the morning. Unfortunately, I cannot). My poachies were lovely, soft, ham good, non-smoky, hollandaise slightly foamy and not the best ever, but still freshly made so can't complain, plus they came with a bonus of some slices of pan-fried potato. Nom nom nom. I enjoyed it.
Another review here.

Cheat's congee

Yah, cheated. I know zero about making a proper congee: I only know that I love it to death and if I could have breakfast congee every day for the rest of my life, I would die a happy woman. A happy, starch-filled woman. On the rare occasions that I get to breakfast in an international location, I always zoom straight for the congee with various pickles / kimchi / dumplings / prawns / chili sauce. Optimal zen moment.

So when there was some leftover cold rice sitting in the fridge last week, a rare instant of pre-coffee clarity saw the idea of congee pop into my mind. Cheater's congee. And it was truly awesome.

Cheat's congee

• 1 cup cold cooked rice
  
• chicken stock


• 1 egg


• chili oil


• sesame oil


• light soy sauce
• chopped shallots


• shredded nori / dried shiitake / dried shrimp / pickles / other condiments

Mix rice and enough chicken stock in a saucepan to make the rice gloopy. Bring to the boil and cook for about 5-10 minutes or until rice is thick and not too drippy. Break the egg over the rice and stir to cook the egg and break it up. Transfer the lot to a deep bowl and add shallots, soy sauce, flavoured oils and flavourings to taste.