james test

July 20-21, 2015 I had a speedy few days in Perth last week and hassled Steph for dining tips. She gave Formosa/Utopia the thumbs up, so I swung by a couple of times to suss it out. It’s tucked away in Northbridge, in a little courtyard back from the street a bit, so keep your eyes peeled to avoid walking straight past. Once you’re in, you’ve got to figure out the ordering process – the best thing to do is grab a menu, a pen and a little form for ordering and settle in at a table. The menu is humungous, with something like 200 dishes to choose from (plus seemingly millions of bubble tea and related drinks). Everything is pretty clearly labelled – I’d guess about half the dishes are vegan and spice levels are marked. It’s not cheap, but it’s not outrageous either – most mains are between $16 and $20. It’s heavy on the mock meat, although there are enough veggie and tofu based dishes if that’s not your thing. To order, you fill out the form with the code from the menu and take it up to...

July 18-19, 2015 Last week I enthusiastically renewed our vege box order with CERES .... except that I actually ordered an all-fruit box instead of a mixed fruit & veg box. We were beset by multitudes of bananas, apples, kiwi fruits, oranges and grapefruit, more than a dozen mandarins, a couple of limes and four pears. We've been working through them - stirring the limes into creme fraiche for sweet potato wedges , packing apples into our bags for work and punctuating our days at home with mandarin peeling. I made a big batch of rice pudding to enjoy with the kiwi fruits and some apple & walnut pancakes once, too. The bananas are only just ripe now. Three of the four pears went into this David Lebovitz icecream recipe, prepared for dessert when we had some friends over . They're cooked in caramel, blended smooth, then strained and churned into a rich, velvety scoop. The caramel procedure, which I've used for salted cara mel icecreams , always gets me nervous - it ...

July 19, 2015 When I got all excited over Brussels sprouts last week , there was another recipe I took a good look at. This one was developed by David Chang of Momofuku fame, and enthusiastically endorsed by The Amateur Gourmet . It's certainly not your standard sprout treatment, involving a fish sauce-based dressing and crunchy sprinkle of puffed rice and shichimi togarashi. We got ourselves organised to make this for dinner with friends on Sunday night. While these were happily gobbled up by all at the table (including a Brussels sprout first-timer!), they were not everything I'd hoped for. Half an hour in a very hot oven rendered the sprouts near-burnt on the outside and pretty mushy within. I prefer a bit more bite, and will remember to limit their baking to a quarter hour in future. The butter tossed through the sprouts right after baking softened all the crispiness out of their outer leaves and isn't needed at all. Finally, as a shichimi togarashi lover, a quarter te...

July 18, 2015 Fish sauce probably doesn't rank up there with bacon and salami as an animal product that veg*ns desperately miss the flavour of. Nevertheless, it does pop up in recipes that otherwise look delicious and veg-friendly. I came across one such recipe this week and rapidly turned up a vegan fish sauce substitute to try it out with. The sauce recipe uses wakame (I substituted dulse flakes) and mushroom 'oyster' sauce for a taste of the sea, plus garlic and miso for extra umami. Everything's boiled down to a barely-palatable concentrate. I'm not confident that it resembles fish sauce, precisely, but it certainly has pungency in common with its namesake! Vegan fish sauce (adapted slightly from a recipe on The Kitchn ) 1 tablespoon dulse flakes 3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped 2 teaspoons peppercorns 3 cups water 1/2 cup mushroom 'oyster' sauce 2 teaspoons miso Place the dulse flakes, garlic, peppercorns and water in a saucepan and bring them to the ...

July 12, 2015 On our first fridge-stocking shop back home, I noticed that the Brussels sprouts were looking particularly good, each one balled up firmly with a clean green sheen. I didn't buy them on the spot but I did go home and flip through some recipes, mulling over how to use them. Of the options I came up with, Michael picked a kale and Brussels sprout Caesar slaw with pine nut "parm" from The First Mess . Once he got past the pretty photos and actually started with the prep, Michael voiced some doubts. The kale and sprouts stay raw ? I was hesitant too - these cruciferous veges (the original recipe includes cabbage too!) can be bitter and even tough. There's not a lot of sweetness to counteract them here, either. Instead, there's a thick sunflower seed-based dressing with a pungency that really did remind me of anchovies - I put it down to some combination of those seeds, the tahini and the garlic. The dressing goes some way to softening the texture of the...

June 28-30 & July 8-9, 2015 Our travels in Vietnam were bookended with a bit of time in Kuala Lumpur, a city we previously visited in 2010 . This time round we had friends in residence, and they guided us to drinks by a 33rd floor pool on our arrival, followed by banana leaf curries for dinner. If memory serves, the dinner venue was Devi's Corner . Their full menu included a range of mock meats and vege curries, but sadly these were unavailable when we turned up late on a Sunday night. It's a good thing their basic vege plate is so impressive! We were treated to mountains of rice, as much dahl as we could handle, chilli pickles, milky cucumber chunks and an irresistible pink fry-up that we think was bitter melon (though it wasn't actually bitter at all, more sweet and silky like eggplant). While many other diners ate their meals adeptly with their hands, we were grateful for the cutlery available at the table. I was also pleased by the lime barley drink recommended ...

June 30-July 1 & July 5-8, 2015 We spent the biggest chunk of our trip in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), split by the few cooler days we had in Đà Lạt . We stayed right in the heart of the backpacker district Pham Ngũ Lão at the wonderful (and affordable) Duc Vuong Hotel . This had a few upsides beyond the decent, air-conditioned rooms and ridiculously friendly staff - in particular the spectacular rooftop bar atop the hotel and the location, right in the thick of the city's densest cluster of vego restaurants. The rooftop bar offered lovely views across the rooftops of the city, cold beer, an array of excellent smoothies, ludicrous multi-coloured cocktails and some very mediocre chips. We also sampled the deep-fried tofu (a bit bland) and eyed off the  mushroom dumplings all week, but never got around to ordering them. Next time. We sat on the rooftop on our first evening in town scanning the Happy Cow app, puzzling over the vegan restaurant located 0.05 miles from where we were ...

July 2-5, 2015 We've made an escape from wintertime Melbourne to Vietnam and Malaysia for a couple of weeks with our mate Clamps. He's eaten vegan through this part of the world several times before, so he's the ideal IRL complement to our usual Happy Cow research. The major revelation has been seeking out cơm chay in market food courts. This translates as vegetarian rice, but you can expect much more than that. Stalls routinely offer a dozen different vegan-friendly pickings on their set plates, from pickled vegetables and braised mock meats to deep-fried fritters and tofu triangles. The ones pictured from the Đà Lạt market set us back 30-40,000VND (AU$1.80-2.50) per plate and were spectacular. With only a limited ability to interact with staff we were left to guess at how many of these dishes came together - were those crispy bits some kind of fried root vegetable, or processed soy? could those mock anchovies be battered banana blossom? what are the chances of us makin...

June 27, 2015 The fifth gathering of our semi-regular Ottolenghi potluck posse was booked in for Saturday night, part of a ridiculously busy weekend for Cindy and I. We scaled back our usual ambitions and found an uncharacteristically simple Ottolenghi recipe in Plenty as our contribution. By the time we'd done our grocery shopping, dinner had been called off due to illness, leaving us to enjoy this dish without having to share. It really is surprisingly straightforward given the usual rigmarole involved in an Ottolenghi meal - you can do it all in one pot over about 25 minutes and the ingredient list is  modest dozen with only sumac falling outside our standard kitchen stocks (thankfully we'd been given a little take home stash of sumac at Maha on our previous visit, so we were good to go). For all its simplicity, this is a lovely meal - we were generous with the garlic (just one clove, but a really ginormous one), which I'd recommend, while the lemon, herbs and caraw...