Choosing from too many options at breakfast is a decision you can do without at the start of a day.

If you are living at a hotel for a week, you soon have visions of the leftover chicken porridge you didn’t eat yesterday having become the sticky gunk in a similar chafing dish today. If it’s really watery, you suspect that it had to be diluted when the stock dried up.

The grilled tomatoes with thyme are reassuringly different each day, sometimes pale or sometimes bright red, large one day and finely sliced another day. Together with the herbed cream cheese and the bread(always fresh baked), they make breakfast decisions easy.

Food dominated a driving holiday last week. It was punctuated by morning stops at McDonald’s..For the first time, we eagerly watched out for the bright red letter so we did not have to eat the (more) ubiquitous nasi lemak and dried fish at dawn.

The eating-in was a treat. In KL, there were green peas and cottage cheese chunks delicately simmered and beautifully presented by a friend. It continued on an island with another friend’s Jhinga Malai, prawns cooked in fresh cream and coriander leaves. It culminated some nights later with a warm feast of salad that I tossed with a papaya vinaigrette, and my friend’s baked pasta in port wine, tomato and four cheeses. White wine for the salad and red for the pasta, and both together.

Back in Singapore, I lazily tried to recreate it with an unfinished bottle of sherry and Ikea meatballs. Without the companionship and the port, the bells did not chime this time:-(