We started with spring rolls and a skewer of chicken satay with peanut sauce. It wasn’t really authentic-tasting satay – it was just fried chicken on a stick, but very succulent and pretty tasty.

The previous week, we’d seen a man sitting at a table in the food hall enthusiastically tucking into a steaming plate of Cantonese style hor fun from the Mandarin Duck – it looked really delicious. When we entered the food hall this week we had to laugh, because there he was again, stuffing his face with hor fun (perhaps even more amusing was the fact that we both remembered and recognised the man and the hor fun)! We were thus inspired to order a plate for ourselves to share. It was really good – the large square dish was piled high with noodles, chicken, squid, prawns, fish cake and fish balls, bean sprouts and choy sum, swimming in the thick tasty freshly cooked egg sauce, topped with a sprinkling of deepfried shallots, served with fresh cut red chilli in soy sauce on the side. It’s a very generous serve; I’ll only order this to eat on my own if I’m very hungry.

I bought some Japanese takeaway to have for my dinner later as Jac was going to be out for the evening, babysitting her niece and nephew. This is garlic fried rice. I love this rice – it’s really flavoursome, cooked with loads of garlic – tasty little specks of it, and finely chopped carrot. It’s extremely garlicky – you wouldn’t want to eat this just before a job interview, even if you had your toothbrush, extra-strong peppermints, parsley and minty chewing gum on hand.

I got some tuna mayo sushi. I hadn’t eaten this for a while and was craving it.

Of course, there’s always got to be something chickeny! I also got myself some teriyaki chicken sushi. I actually think these are too large – the tuna sushi fit are a perfect mouthful; I have to eat these chicken sushi in two bites and usually end up dropping bits of chicken or rice on the plate.

And to finish, sweet juicy sushi rice-filled pillows – inari sushi. I don’t like the pickled ginger; I never eat it.

I arranged my sushi on a plate around a dish of soy sauce – yum! And so while Jac was babysitting the kids a few suburbs away, I was happily stuffing my face with sushi. Not a bad way to spend a quiet evening.