james test

Probably the biggest and baddest eating temptation in my routine is mid-afternoon at work. The pace slows down and as the hours plod on, I start thinking about the fat-laden snacks at the FoodWorks no more than fifty paces from my desk. While there is certainly a psychological element to my cravings, I am often genuinely hungry by 4:00 and I need to eat to maintain those last threads of concentration. Thus, I'm often on the lookout for recipes and snacks that I can prepare and pack from home that'll minimise the damage done. Muffins have frequently popped up as a possible solution but they're usually very cakey and sweet, not much better than the chocolate bar I'm most tempted by! Trust the super-natural Heidi from 101 Cookbooks to present me with an alternative, with a recipe taken from Homegrown Pure and Simple by Michel Nischan. The photograph of Heidi's batch had the austere and no-frills look I sought to emulate, hinting at lots of fibre and little suga...

The hectic excitement of Kingaroy had left us feeling like a pretty lazy weekend, which meant a quiet dinner at home on Saturday evening. Cindy's enthusiastic consumption of thousands of food blogs means we always have a backlog of worthy recipes to sample. This weekend's treat: Turkish food from Ceviz at Only Turkish Food . I was feeling ready for a crazy kitchenathon, so I decided to attempt two courses: Lemon Zucchini in Olive Oil and Turkish Lentil Balls (see links for the full recipes). The whole process was quite time consuming, particularly because I'm not big on multi-tasking. I'm sure I could have set the vegies up to cook and then made the lentil balls while they were simmering away, but that's not how I do things. I start at the start and work all the way through to the end. So by the time I'd cooked the lentils and the onions, stirred through the bulghur, tomato paste and spices, a good half hour had passed and I hadn't even started on th...

Paul recently tagged us for a "5 Things About Me" meme. He cheekily handed the task of selecting five things about him over to his partner, and Mike provided a most pithy profile of the gourmand. We've decided to appropriate this idea and write 5 things about each other. Here are five things you might not already know about Michael: 1. Michael's CV boasts 3 degrees: in maths, IT and criminology. 2. The first meal that he cooked for me was a huge wok-full of noodles, chicken, veges, peanut butter, and a sachet of curry paste. This was his signature dish and he was secretly disappointed at the lukewarm response it received from me. I was just trying to keep my watering eyes in check - I was no match for the chilli oneupmanship that goes on in a sharehouse of 20-something males. Still, a man who cooks at all is pretty attractive, right? He's since refined his style but still provides most of the enthusiasm (and labour) for the hearty and/or spicy meals on our...

Michael and I took advantage of the mid-week public holiday to schedule a loooong weekend in Queensland. This included an overnight stay in Kingaroy, where my brother Liam has just landed his first job as a journalist. I suspect it was actually my mum who did a bit of early research, identified and then booked the most attractive and veg-friendly restaurant in the area, the Bell Tower Restaurant . With Liam's job success, mum's recent birthday and this rare opportunity to share a meal together, there was plenty to celebrate. While the food at the Bell Tower was quite tasty, reasonably priced and certainly at the more gourmet end of what Kingaroy has to offer, the biggest reason to eat there is the view. Our booking ensured we had a table on the restaurant's back deck, which offers a stunning view of the farmland below and blue-tinged Great Dividing Range beyond. We were further blessed with a warm day, blue skies and cotton-ball clouds to best appreciate our prime locat...

Little more than a week after we entertained Beth in our home , the adventure girl did some serious damage to her foot while rock climbing! She'll be stuck in hospital for several weeks, with surgery and months of recovery to come. After hearing the news on Tuesday afternoon, a small delegation was swiftly organised to visit her for lunch on Wednesday - apparently the hospital food is depressingly bland. As I walked home on Tuesday evening, I racked my brain for some small but flavour-packed offering that I could throw together without too much fuss. A most successful solution came from ingredients already in the cupboard after I made a crucial connection between Beth's habitual work-time snacking on dried fruits and the bag of dried cherries that I impulsively purchased at the Queen Vic markets and had yet to use. Combined with pistachios and dark chocolate, I would be guaranteed little mouthfuls of vibrant colour; crunchy, chewy and smooth textures; tart sweetness, rich c...

This meal's featured leftovers are buttermilk and baby spinach salad . I whipped them up into some savoury buttermilk pancakes, with a hint of India in the salad spices, the chickpea flour and the ghee I fried them in. The buttermilk has them fluffy and buttery all the way through and there's just a hint of crispness on the outside when fresh out of the pan. Delicious! We made a meal of them by trying this capsicum and coconut dhal , put together by dhalmaster Michael. It wasn't one of our favourites, probably because we used lentils with their husks intact, thus preventing them from disintegrating into the broth. Vege pancakes 2 cups grated vegetables 1 1/2 cups besan (chickpea flour) 1 teaspoon baking powder a pinch of salt 1 1/2 cups buttermilk 2 eggs, lightly beaten ghee, for frying Combine the grated veges, besan, baking powder and salt in a bowl. Mix in the buttermilk and eggs, stopping when the batter is only just combined - it's best not to over-mix. Hea...

Recently, Lucy from Nourish Me inadvertantly posted a recipe that would transform our Eastern vegetarian burgers into Eastern vegetarian burgers and chips ! These are chips of the self-saucing variety, moist with a paste of garlic, ginger and ghee and luridly yellow thanks to turmeric and yes, more ghee. If anything, these spuds were a bit too oily for my taste so next time I'll start with 2 tablespoons of the ghee and then up it to three if they look like they can soak up a bit more. Now that I've had 'em, I don't think I'll be making these burgers without 'em. Indian-spiced potatoes 500g of waxy potatoes salt a thumb-sized piece of ginger 3 cloves garlic 1 teaspoon ground turmeric 4 tablespoons ghee (next time I'll use 2-3 tablespoons) 1 teaspoon fennel seeds Scrub the potatoes, place in a saucepan, cover with cold water and add a pinch of salt. Bring the potatoes to the boil and then simmer them until tender. Drain, cool, and dice. Peel and coarse...

In our explorations of the South Melbourne Markets, we stumbled onto Mama Tran's dumpling shop - they make the dumplings while you watch and sell them in packs of 9 for $5.90. I'm sure proper foodies would have bought all the ingredients from the fresh stalls at the markets and then made their own little vegie parcels, but I was happy to take the easy way out and pick up a pack of pre-made dumplings. The plan for the dumplings was some sort of improvised won-ton soup: a big pot filled with garlic, vegie stock, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a dash of kecap manis, a few dried chillies, some chinese cabbage and carrot peelings and the dumplings, all boiled together into a delicious soup. It was thrown together pretty much off the top of my head, but things turned out well - spicy and richly flavoured, with just enough of the dumplings to fill us up. Tremendous.

When Cindy and I first moved to Melbourne we were overwhelmed by the number and range of markets that this food-obsessed city could sustain. In the early months, we spent numerous Saturdays exploring - visiting CERES , Queen Vic , Collingwood , and Prahran . We've slacked off a bit lately - spending our weekends hanging around the northern suburbs rather than heading off into the rest of the city. This weekend we finally got back into the swing of things, with a trip to the South Melbourne markets via breakfast on Coventry Street. Knowing full well that by the time we made it across the river we'd be starving, we skimped on our research barely consulting The Breakfast Blog and not even picking up the Cheap Eats. All I knew was that Coventry Street was where it was at. We started a quick stroll along the cafe strip, but our increasing hunger and the fantastic looking menu at Q11 soon put a stop to our explorations. Q11 is bright and airy - not particularly trendy, but sp...

It could only be a matter of time before Michael and I sampled the 2007 Cheap Eats vegetarian dish of the year, from the White Lotus Vegetarian Restaurant in West Melbourne. As luck would have it, this restaurant is a leisurely bike ride from Michael's and my workplaces. Well, it would be leisurely if it didn't involve negotiating Victoria St in peak hour. For the last couple of blocks I took the safe but wussy option of walking my bike along the footpath - it's the only way to observe the regular honking and occasional yelling from the streets with a detached air and perhaps a short, dismayed laugh. Had I been utilising my prop in the way it was intended, I could easily have glided right past the White Lotus, mistaking it for the local greasy takeaway. The cheap-looking tiles, paper tablecloths and vinyl seats are all there. The menu, however, is a study in the fine Buddhist tradition of mock meats. Sure, you could order some tofu, soup or noodles, but wouldn't y...

So, I made myself two little loaves of bread and you can only stuff yourself with so much during that first day of freshness. What to do with the rest - French toast? Bread and butter pudding? Thing is, this bread's got chilli and cumin going on! Lucky for me, Heidi from 101 Cookbooks recently demonstrated that bread pudding goes down just as sweetly when it's made in savoury form . I used her recipe for the key ingredients and proportions and got my own slightly different combination of flavours going - button mushrooms, shallots, flat-leaf parsley and parmesan. Served with a salad of baby spinach leaves and strips of roasted red capsicum, this made for a very tasty and satisfying dinner - a real autumn/winter warmer. Leftovers are great re-heated or at room temperature. Savoury bread pudding 500g of stale bread, sliced or cubed 2 shallots, chopped finely 2 cups button mushrooms, sliced 1 tablespoon continental parsley leaves, roughly torn 3 cups milk 1 stock cube, di...

Here are a few more dishes from the extensive meat-free menu at the Vegie Bar. First up, Michael's nachos ($8.50): a typically generous Vegie Bar portion, but a shame that it doesn't include some saucy beans. I had two starters: first, a couple of kofta balls ($5.50) and then a Siamese samosa ($2.80). The accompanying tomato sauce has a spunky spicy kick; the kofta balls have an earthy flavour and a few nutty surprises; the samosa is reassuringly squidgy and curry-flavoured. This place is for the vegetarian (and veg-friendly) fast-food lover: filling and cheap with few flourishes. (You can also read about our first , second and third visits to the Vegie Bar.)

Many moons ago, for some no-longer-fathomable reason, I told Cindy I'd bake her a cake for her birthday. All sorts of things conspired against me actually doing so (for starters, she was swanning about Brisbane on her birthday while I was still down here) and it had become something of a running joke in the subsequent months. With four fairly empty Easter weekend days to fill, it finally happened - I baked for Cindy. I insisted that the baked goods be of her choosing, but that they had to be from Nigella Lawson's 'How to Be a Domestic Goddess'. This was partly due to the startling ratio of its price to the number of things Cindy has made from it and partly due to my desire to feel like a fully fledged goddess. Just once in my life. After much careful browsing (mostly in the chocolate section it must be said), Cindy settled on cream-cheese brownies. I have a sneaking suspicion that she combined ease of preparation with perceived deliciousness in her selection crite...

Adam from the Amateur Gourmet recently raved about a pasta dish that he made at home and desperately craved again less than a week later. It looked pretty easy so we stopped Medditeranean Wholesalers after our Cafe 3A breakfast in Brunswick, and collected the essential ingredients. It is rather tasty - in particular I was wowed by the transformation of leathery little sundried tomatoes into moist but chewy explosions of flavour. They strike a most agreeable compromise between Michael's hatred of fresh tomatoes and my aversion to shrivelled fully-dried ones. As you'll be able to see from the recipe (and perhaps the pic), this is basically a bowl of oiled carbs (with a bit of beany protein, sure), so make yourself a big bowl of salad to pair with it. Tasty tomato-striped pasta 375g pasta 3 tablespoons olive oil 1 cup sun-dried tomatoes, drained and sliced, plus 2 tablespoons of oil from their jar 4 cloves garlic, sliced finely a couple of shakes of chilli powder 400g can c...

I am steadily accumulating a recipe wish-list from other food blogs and with a relatively free and easy Easter weekend at hand, I decided to knock one more down. This amount of spare time made more yeast action a possibility and so I finally retrieved one of my earliest bookmarks, for toasted peanut bread. I came across the recipe when Heidi wrote about it on 101 Cookbooks, but the recipe is originally from The Soul of a New Cuisine by Marcus Samuelsson. It's a curious African-style mix including coconut milk and your own spicy home-made peanut butter. As bread-baking will do, this recipe takes a while to get together, then fills your house with a very homely aroma and is delicious straight out of the oven with a bit of butter. Even cooled, it has a warm tint of chilli powder, and the texture is a bit more cakey and less spongey than I expect from bread. To be perfectly honest, the kneading and feeding of home yeast-baking isn't as therapeutic for me as it is for Nigella...

As has happened several times before, Michael has been inspired by Cheap Eats and I by a food blog to visit exactly the same restaurant. But we bided (bode? bid?) our time for a Northcote gig before getting ourselves a vague booking at Pizza Meine Liebe. (Vague in that they consented to writing down the reservation but thought that there might be another group still finishing their meal at that table - as it happened, the table was clean and ready to use on our punctual arrival.) Tonight our booking was for three - along for the ride was my young-at-heart aunt Carol, who would also be joining us at the Northcote Social Club for some indie rock. Glancing at the circles traced on the wall, we soon agreed to share two large pizzas but required some more bargaining time to agree on the toppings. There's a page-long list with extra specials, too - not exactly traditional (as evidenced by the Queenslander and Ozzi pizzas in Mellie's review ), but carefully grouped into compleme...

Update 31/12/2014: Cafe 3A is closed. Easter Saturday dawned crisp and sunny - a perfect day for a stroll up to Sydney Road for breakfast. The original plan was to check out Mule, but they'd wisely decided to enjoy the beautiful long weekend and shut up shop. Luckily, Cafe 3A around the corner was open for business. The menu makes for impressive reading. The savoury breakfasts are egg-based, but with a few intriguing variations from the standard fare. Slightly exotic ingredients like capers, olive tapenade and goat's cheese are dotted throughout the menu and you can build your own brekkie from a base of eggs on sourdough. I decided to skip the poached eggs for a change and instead opted for a vegetarian omelette (see above), filled with red peppers, goat's cheese, salsa verde and capers. It was quite tasty - the capers in particular providing tiny bursts of flavour as my teeth located them. Unfortunately it was all a bit dry - the toast came without butter (although...

From Wednesday night Mexican comes Friday night's dinner: a toasted sandwich filled with chilli and tasty cheese and topped with guacamole.

Post-modern sculpture? If it looks to you like the kind of overblown interpretive concrete geometry that belongs in a public space such as Federation Square you're getting warmer. It's actually the deck furniture at Transport Public Bar (perhaps you noticed the white sneaker toe just past the red padded seat). Even with most retail outlets closed, the city (and the pub) were healthily populated on Good Friday. With books and blankets, Michael and I sought an hour or two's refuge in the city gardens before our growling stomachs led us back to the concrete park and the deep-frier. (Ironically, the Transport public bar claims an "emphasis on organic meals and environmental design". With not a leafy green to be seen, we really missed their point.) While much thought has clearly gone into the modern design of the Transport public bar, it's more pub than trendy bar. It's a place for a beer, a steak or burger with chips and perhaps a yell at the footy on s...

Cindy and I marked the start of the Easter long weekend with a jaunt to Cinema Nova to see The Namesake . In keeping with appropriate long-weekend behaviour, we took the lazy option of buying dinner somewhere beforehand and, after pondering our local choices, found ourselves at Shakahari for a second go. The menu had changed slightly since we'd last visited, and we were overwhelmed with delicious -sounding dishes to sample. Often when we eat out we find ourselves limited to choices from a small subsection of the menus, so it's very exciting to go to a restaurant overflowing with vegetarian delights. Rather than limit ourselves to one each, we shared three of the starters to taste as much as we could. First up was the mushroom aroi mak: assorted mushrooms fried in basil oil served with fragrant Thai herbs and crunchy greens with a lemongrass dressing ($12). This dish was more salad-like than I anticipated, but was still loaded up with a fine array of mushrooms. The dressing...

It's been a while since we entertained anyone in our home, but some newcomers to my workplace provided a good reason to pull out the biggest saucepan and buy an extra 6-pack of beer. Tracy and her partner Lee are the latest Brisbane migrants to Melbourne's inner north and from even further afield (the Northern Territory!), Beth has now taken up residence at a desk adjacent to mine. On Wednesday evening they gave me an hour or so head start from the office to cook up a Mexican-themed dinner at home. On my previous night's planning, I made the decision to keep this weeknight meal quite casual and low-stress. This meant no-fuss appetisers and desserts, and a serve-yourself main course. Michael had picked out some perfectly ripe avocadoes and it didn't take too long to mash them with a very juicy lime and stir in some finely chopped red onion and a bit of sour cream. Voila! Tangy guacamole. I brought out the Chilli Factory salsa as a spicy side, and there were Corona...

Another week, another soup . I think as winter comes on, we'll be souping it up more and more often. Luckily, Cindy's been keeping up with dozens of different food blogs and taking note of some of the particularly delicious looking recipes she stumbles across. This week's winner was the tremendously pink-looking creation on Eat Me: beetroot and carrot soup . I made a few changes, through both laziness and a lack of ingredients (we also decided to cut back on the quantities), but it still turned out pretty well. It was slightly starchy, so I might readjust the vegie proportions next time - maybe an extra beetroot and one or two less potatoes, but otherwise it really hit the spot. I'm really getting a taste for these blended soups - it's hard to believe that I coped for so many years without a food processor. I'll reproduced my version of the recipe here, but feel free to try out the original instead. 1 tbsp butter 1 red onion, chopped 2 garlic cloves, mince...

Just a few days ago, Melinda of Melbourne Larder posted her recipe for hot cross buns and strongly encouraged her readers to try making their own. Never having tried it myself, and with a spare Sunday morning on hand, I decided to take the challenge. As Melinda notes, baking with yeast often puts people off: I inherited this attitude from my mum, who presented my teenage self with a decades-old box of dry yeast sachets when I first raised an interest. I raised no further questions about home-baked yeasty delights until a few years ago, when I finally got sick of inferior purchased pizza bases and resolved to make my own. My revised theory on yeast is that anyone who can carefully follow a recipe and spare some time for the dough to rise is capable of making some pretty good bread products - superior to anything you'll buy from a supermarket bakery. Beyond that it may take some research, experimentation and experience to produce some truly sublime eating. I'm far from re...