We first met Umami (umami.typepad.com) in cyberspace about two years ago when she was living in Singapore with her husband and blogging about eating out in the Lion City. And eat she did, with great enthusiasm, blogging about every-thing from fatty cha siu fan (barbecued pork and rice) bought from a hawker to uni (sea urchin roe) tempura at a high-end Japanese restaurant. We've since met and stayed with her in Paris, where she's moved to with her young daughter, husband and two dogs. She didn't seem to like the City of Lights when she relocated there almost two years ago - the usual frustrations of uprooting your family made worse in a city known for its bureaucracy.
Now, though, Umami seems to have settled in to her life in Paris and she's especially enjoying the food. She writes about the joys of finding fresh raw prawns in her local open-air market (she cooks them with rice noodles and dried shrimp sauce) and the taste of snail caviar ('subtle, with hints of sweet, briny, savoury, herbal and woody notes') sampled at Galerie Lafayette's food hall.