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On Tuesday evening, we managed to find time in Emma and Simon's schedule to meet up for dinner. Cindy had been talking up Misuzu's since dmargster's recommendation , so we navigated our way over to Albert Park to try it out. Cindy's research had also told us that we needed to book, even on a Tuesday evening - indeed, when we rang them they stressed to us that if we were more than 20 minutes late we'd lose our table. Sure enough, when we arrived the place was overflowing with people - it's a good sign when a place is in such demand on a school night. We squeezed our way upstairs to our table and settled in for the evening. The menu is well-stocked with vegetarian option - a wide variety of starters and probably half a dozen mains. Japanese food is usually a struggle for those of us who don't eat fish, so it was nice to see so many choices. Emma and Simon were kind enough to share the large vegetarian entree platter ($22.80) with us. Unfortunately, the p

Sunday's indoor picnic yielded a lot of leftovers (no cupcakes though, funnily enough!). For dinner on Monday night, I fried up some surplus winter potatoes (no extra oil necessary) until browned, added some strips of soy bacon and tossed with mixed lettuce leaves. It was an entirely new flavour and texture compared to the potatoes' previous incarnation, and heartily enjoyed.

To top off our indoor picnic , I baked a batch of Nigella Lawson's cappuccino cupcakes. This is only the second batch of cupcakes I've ever attempted, yet they seemed just the thing to enjoy on a checkered blanket in the sun. It was mighty tempting to team them with the espresso cupcakes on the facing page of the cookbook but with a final count of 9 people in attendance, it was more sensible to restrict myself to just the dozen. I was hoping for a not-too-sweet coffee cake with bite, topped with something sweet and creamy, and was curious to try a cake batter that's made in a food processor. The method was as convenient as I'd hoped, but the flavours didn't quite live up to my expectations. The batter had a promising bitterness but it mellowed almost beyond recognition with baking. The icing, on the other hand, was the sweetest, sickliest thing I've encountered in years but I guess teaming icing sugar with melted white chocolate will do that, eh? I didn

Our community of Queensland migrants welcomed two new members, Kerrie and Daniel, this weekend. To celebrate their arrival I wanted to cook everyone a meal but with our posse stretching to about 13 members there was no chance of a sit-down dinner party. Instead I devised an indoor picnic, where we could enjoy lounging about on cushions and spill lunch on checkered blankets with the comfort of oven-baked food and protection from Melbourne's wayward weather. I was in no doubt as to what would emerge from the oven: trays of golden brown pastry. Vegan pastry, no less! Borg's frozen puff pastry (it's at Safeway) is as tasty as any buttery supermarket pastry I've tried. I used it to make (non-vegan) "meat" pies and party-sized non-sausage rolls and had a jar of Chinese-style barbeque sauce at the ready (for the record, the pies are easily veganised and there's been some discussion of tweaking the sausage rolls with silken tofu). The pastries were really

Saturday night provided our first chance to check out the Melbourne International Film Festival. Cindy had spent all day preparing for the indoor picnic we had scheduled for Sunday (coming soon!) and with a 7:30 movie (Snow Angels - okay, but a bit on the bleak side) coming up, it was time for us to find another local dining spot to save both energy and time. We're fast running out of interesting local places to investigate, but after racking our brains for a while we remembered the Hotel Lincoln, a 'foodie' pub at the southern end of Cardigan Street. The pub has two sections - a front bar and a restaurant. Slightly confusingly, there's no real difference in the sections - you can order from the bar menu in the restaurant and vice-versa. It's a bit confusing (particularly when the menus are on blackboards meaning you have to walk back and forth between the front and back of the pub to suss out all your options). We settled into the restaurant section and kicked

It should be no surprise that Michael and I booked tickets to see The Simpsons Movie on its opening night and Tracy, Lee and Brett were just as keen to see the yellow-skinned quintet up on the big screen. (We've all been enjoying Simpsonising ourselves on the website - check out Michael and I here !) In addition, the more normally-toned trio had a restaurant secret to share with us: Camy Shanghai Dumpling & Noodle Restaurant. This is one of the most bustling restaurants I've ever visited, and I was glad to have Lee take the lead. A small but commanding man yelled in our direction and Lee confidently yelled and gestured "5!" back. We had a few minutes to wait but the next yelp of "5!" arrived as our cue to follow the maestro upstairs to another bustling room. We couldn't see a vacancy anywhere, until we saw our host shooing two sleepy-eyed students away from their table (all the while continuing to yell "5! 5!"), shepherding us into th

Michael's fennel leek soup yielded a bowl full of limp and soggy veges, drained of colour and flavour for the sake of stock. I resurrected some of the fennel, leek and carrot by finely chopping them; adding some pepper, powdered stock and chopped soy bacon for flavour; then incorporating them into potato cakes. (The prep method here , using waxy potatoes, is a revelation.) Fresh greens and vego Worcestershire sauce to serve. The resulting golden-fried fritters reminded me of the hash cakes (quit your giggling!) that my grandmother used to make (I said stop it!) from leftover boiled spuds and corned beef.

We needed a better excuse for our trip to Preston Markets than just the nearby bakery, so before we set off we dug up this fennel leek soup recipe from our Moosewood cookbook for Sunday night's dinner. It was loaded up heavily with vegetables and seemed like it would be a decent winter's dinner. The recipe took a bit longer than I anticipated - you basically end up making your own stock for the base of the soup - and the final product was a little short on flavour (at least partly due to my forgetting to put pepper in), but still heavy, warming and satisfying. The thin-sliced radishes were a fine accompaniment, as were the croutons that Cindy made up from the fresh bread we'd picked up at the markets, but the whole package was just slightly short of flavour. It's something to work on - maybe up the leek content for next time. Fennel leek soup (courtesy Moosewood Restaurant's New Classics) 1 fennel bulb, trimmed 3 leeks 2 carrots, peeled and chopped 4 large potat

Cindy has been agitating for a trip to Preston for a few weeks now on the back of this review of La Panella vegan bakery over at this is vegan melbourne . We decided to make the trip worthwhile with a trip to the Preston Markets - a grungier, smaller version of QVM - it's got meat and deli sections, a little organic stall and a range of clothing and other household bits and pieces to go along with the regular fruit and vegie stalls. We loaded up with vegies for a Sunday night soup (watch this space for the recipe/review) and, with the smell of doughnuts driving Cindy crazy with hunger, headed off to find La Panella. It's a little walk away along High Street and, unfortunately, doesn't have seats or tables. It really just seems like the kind of suburban bakery that I remember from my childhood - although in this case you can be reasonably confident that there's no anus in your pie. The crowd around the counter was quite pushy and it took some observant work from th

On Saturday morning, Michael and I made our first visit to the Preston markets and I noticed walnuts at many of the fruit and veg stalls. I've repeatedly read that walnuts go rancid quite quickly and that fresh ones from the shell taste different to everything I've encountered in the supermarket, so naturally I was keen to buy half a kilo and taste for myself. I definitely noticed a paler skin on my shelled walnuts. They have a strong woody taste with only a hint of bitterness - I've always picked up these flavours before but in different proportions. I've also discovered that walnuts make a sweet couple with my Daim bars ! For the remaining handful, I will have to resist the toffee and try toasting them to see how that affects their flavour.

Less than a week after we bid farewell to three Brisbane - based friends , a surprise thank-you gift arrived at our local post office! Inside was a packet of knäckebröd and an avalanche of Daim bites. These became my favourite snacks on a two-month stay in Sweden last year. Knäckebröd are crisp-breads, somewhat like Ryvita, which I enjoyed eating with butter and vegemite. Daim bars are something else again: crisp toffee with a real burnt caramel taste, coated in chocolate. Sticks in your teeth for hours, of course, but what a blissful flavour!

Update 27/2/2014: Walking past the other day, I noticed that The Green Grocer has closed down and been replaced by Sixteen 83 Epicerie. I am still struggling to adjust to a Melbourne winter and within hours of darkness setting in I tend to become lodged semi-permanently on the couch, ensconced in a blanket. Michael, meanwhile, suffers bouts of cabin fever as I bat away his invitations to venture out and about. So it was his prodding that got us to a new restaurant for dinner on Friday night. Thankfully the weather was relatively mild on this night and the Green Grocer had a fireplace to greet us at the other end - if anything the atmosphere was a little too warm and drowsifying for me. The single page menu is almost meat-free from the appetisers through to the light mains (ranging from $8.50-$18.50), but organic meat dominates the heavier end. This suited me fine - my appetite was light and I figured that one of the larger starters should leave me room for dessert. Despite my vagu

Bulging with over 130 recipes and 120 restaurant reviews, an overhaul of our indexing system was very much in order. We've shifted from del.icio.us to a few tediously-created pages of our own, now linked in the side-bar. Scroll down a little further and you'll see a rather nifty label cloud! (That's Michael's fine work, of course.) Apologies if we've been sending long and dull updates to your RSS reader throughout this process. Also, please drop us a comment if you notice any broken links or have some simple ideas about how to make our new index easier to navigate.

This week Beth celebrated her birthday with a banquet at the Moroccan Soup Bar and about twenty well-wishers. Michael and I thoroughly enjoyed a night spent catching up with a few friends and meeting lots of new people along the way. Amongst the conversation was a verbal recipe from a Turkish fellow for the legendary yoghurt chickpea dish that's always finished first at the Moroccan Soup Bar. I madly scribbled down notes and will begin experimenting at home shortly! But before all the meeting, greeting and eating, I made a batch of Nanaimo bars as a gift for Beth. I first encountered Nanaimo bars when a Canadian student baked them for a lab morning tea while I was at the University of Queensland. They're a triple-layer no-bake slice with a biscuit-y base, sweet vanilla filling and chocolate top, claimed by the city of Nanaimo, BC. Hers were super-sweet, a little gooey in the middle and luckily, plentiful - there were enough for me to take a second one, and (3-4 years lat

Today's dinner inspiration comes from A Veggie Venture . Cindy was in the mood for a simple pesto-based pasta and, to mix things up a little, I decided to have a crack at this beet pesto instead of the standard basil option. There was a downside to this choice - the process of roasting beetroots is a lot more time-consuming than rinsing basil, but there were upsides too: successful beet-roasting, an interesting new pesto flavour, and easily the pinkest meal I've ever cooked. By the time the beets had spent an hour or so in the oven roasting, dinner was a snap - the pesto took about 3 minutes to throw together in the food processor and then you just stir it through some cooked pasta with a few mushrooms and a bit of capsicum and then dinner is served. Piece of cake. The pesto dyes the pasta shocking pink, and adds a sweet, nutty flavour to what would otherwise be a fairly bland meal. Beetroot pesto 4 beetroots 3 cloves of garlic 1/2 cup olive oil 1/4 cup pine nuts Some lefto

This dinner was very much inspired by Johanna's tortilla casserole over at Green Gourmet Giraffe . I liked the idea of tortillas baked and softened by a tomato-sauced, spicy beans and a crunchy, cheesy top. Even better, I had another packet of organic corn tortillas in the cupboard to trial it with. From that point, though, I just went with my intuition and the available ingredients rather than religiously following Johanna's recipe. My relatively neat circular tortilla layers were a successful alternative to Johanna's rip-'em-up approach but I didn't include enough canned tomatoes, rendering a moist but not saucy filling. This created a further misfortune: the chopped chipotle chilli spread its heat unevenly through the mix, supplying bland and fiery mouthfuls intermittently. These minor mishaps are easily addressed and I've noted below my intended changes for next time - I think this concept definitely deserves a second run. This dinner, however, was s

On Sunday morning we had only two hours to show our interstate guests another tasty Melbourne breakfast before they set off home and I entrusted Ray with the task. I should have remembered how popular (and thus, slow) their coffee service is. The laid back atmosphere of Ray is usually just my style but on this day we encountered service that verged on catatonic. L is of a more dynamic bent than I and it shouldn't be surprising, then, that when the wrong dishes were cooked and served to her (and I) and no apology was forthcoming, she was decidedly unimpressed. On the bright side, Michael and L2 enjoyed their poached eggs with capsicum pesto, spinach, feta and this time, the promised sprinkling of dukkah. S had meatballs and as the calories hit his bloodstream, gradually re-acquired the power of speech. Meanwhile, L's and my chai lattes grew cold as we waited for our new breakfasts. How long does it really take to toast some pide? As Michael cleared his plate, ours arrived:

Cindy and friends previously discovered Nila Junction in Brunswick and their experience was positive enough that, once our first plan of Los Amates fell through, we were keen to drag our interstate visitors into the city incarnation, Nila City. It helped that we'd just stumbled out of Hell's Kitchen bar a few doors down when we found out Los Amates didn't have room for us. The menu is bursting with cheap Indian options. Insanely cheap. Entrees from $1.95, meals from $3.95 - it's like we'd stumbled into an Indian city. Or maybe the 1970s. Of course, I assumed that cheapness meant small meals and opted for the most expensive vego option on the menu: the vegetarian meal. It's basically a giant thali (although some would say all thalis are giant), with six different curries, a roti and a truckload of rice. The curries were all serviceable without being particularly memorable, but they were warm and spicy, and flavoured up delicious bread and well-cooked ri

How to show our visitors a good time on a drizzly Melbourne Saturday morning? Brunch of course, and lots of it. With eight people to seat, we had to shop around for a while to find a place that would let us book. Luckily, the Rathdowne Street Foodstore is both convenient and amenable to bookings, so Cindy arranged us a table for 10am. We were tucked in the back corner (which I hadn't even noticed on our previous trip), with just enough space for us all to squeeze in amongst the dozens of cushions. Comments on our last post convinced Cindy to sample the ricotta hotcakes, with warm honey syrup, poached pear and lavender ice cream ($14.50). She wasn't let down by the recommendations - the pancakes had a rustic weight, the ice cream was interesting without being overly floral and she was very pleased to receive an entire pear (see here for her previous rant about fruit shortages on pancakes). Nice job blog commentors. As usual, I went for an egg-based treat: poached eggs o

As I hinted in my previous post , I've been spending the weekend with a long-time friend, L. Her journey from Brisbane was made for entirely unselfish reasons - to introduce her internationally-acquired partner S to another Aussie city and to pull her sister L2 away from a demanding day job for a bit of fun. The trio managed to pack in a formidable five days of shopping, sight-seeing, eating and catching up with friends, with a day-and-a-half of it based at our home. On their Friday night arrival at our place, I decided to team a welcoming home-cooked dinner with a very Melbourne dessert out on Lygon St. One of my favourite moments of the weekend was presenting the very vego-skeptical S with a plate of enjoyable meat-free food. Aware that he'd taken a shine to Australia's meat pie, I prepared a muffin pan's worth of TVP mince pies , fragrant with a rosemary gravy. On the side were lemony potatoes with artichokes (I'll make these again and blog them soon) and a