james test

January 24, 2016 We've revisited The Glass Den for Sunday breakfast again , this time in the company of the Moody Noodles . The cafe has changed their menu since our last visit but the abundant vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options remain, including the wonderful coconut hotcakes . Dietary features are marked with pot-plant symbols that are cute but call for extra concentration. Michael ordered the vegan breakfast soba ($16.50), a beautiful bowl of green tea soba noodles, sauteed kale, garlic polenta-crumbed oyster mushrooms, pine nuts, smoked coconut and kale sesame crumble. The mushrooms looked and tasted amazing, and Michael enjoyed this rare breakfast-noodle experience. I took on the somewhat deconstructed black sticky rice pudding ($14). The sticky rice was molded into a dense cake that retained the rice's moisture and chewy texture. In this set-up I found the coconut mousse a teensy bit cloying, but there was bountiful fresh mango to lighten the plate. The odd crunchy

January 23, 2016 I usually bookmark appealing recipes from other blogs - right now I've got 820 untried dishes, some of them dating back 8 years. But I was so keen on this one that I made it just 3 days after it was published on Like A Vegan ! Chelsey's novel use of jackfruit as a roast chicken substitute was potentially much more my style than the common pulled 'pork' approach. The canned jackfruit is simply drained, slathered in a herby paste I can make from pantry ingredients, and baked for half an hour. Since I only had one can of jackfruit I changed the ingredient quantities, and I'll tinker with them further for future batches - this version was a bit too sharp with brine and lemon juice for my taste. Serving the jackfruit in soft long rolls with lettuce and mayo brought back Red Rooster memories I'd locked away for 20 years. This alternative is a bit lighter and fresher, and I'm pleased to have a new way with jackfruit in my repertoire. Roasted jac

December 28, 2015 & January 18-19, 2016 Dinner at the Moroccan Soup Bar usually ends with a plate of little shortbreads and pastries stuffed with dates or nuts and dripping with sweet syrup. The Moroccan Soup Bar cookbook contains a couple such recipes, but also some heartier sweet treats including sfenj /doughnuts and muhallabiya . As I mentioned in my last Moroccan Soup Bar post , muhallabiya is a dairy-based pudding flavoured with orange and lemon, drizzled with syrup and scattered with pistachios. I made little cups of it to finish a meal with Michael and our two brothers just after Christmas. More recently, Michael's mum and her two sisters visited us for dinner; on this occasion I tried churning and freezing the pudding as an icecream! Assafiri welcomes adaptations to her recipes and icecream-churning isn't the only change I made. On both occasions I increased the orange and lemon quantities. I should've known it would curdle the milk (!), but thankfully the mix

January 15 & 17, 2016 MOFO was primarily based out at MONA this year, so we didn't get too much time for Hobart eating. We were out at the festival by lunch every day, so we really only had time for breakfasts. Our first stop was a return visit to Pilgrim Coffee, a regular haunt on our Hobart trips. The menu has changed around a bit from previous meals, meaning I had to branch out from the bean-heavy ' hipster breakfast ' that I usually order, instead trying out the omelette with kim chi, rice, spring onion, wombok, coriander and crispy shallots ($18). The omelette is a wonderful combination of flavours - little dabs of blended up kim chi give it all a great spicy tang, while the shallots and rice add some crunch. It's a top-notch example of the genre, but at $18, it probably needs a slice or two of toast to go along with it. Cindy's breakfast was even more minimalist - she ordered the charred stone-fruit with vanilla goats curd, mint and almonds ($15). And

January 16, 2016 The Hobart eatery at the top of my wish-list this year was Straight Up. I read about this all-vegetarian cafe on quinces and kale about a month before we arrived, and we shared our breakfast with the very same mutual friend as they did! Straight Up is quite centrally located on Liverpool St, and has a light, casual look and prominent espresso machine that's likely to attract non-veg diners. Once in, they'd surely not be put off by the menu! It's stealthily gluten-free and absent of bacon, of course, but who wouldn't be tempted by corn bread topped with grilled haloumi, avocado and herb salsa, spiced ginger buckwheat porridge or miso marinated pumpkin? And that doesn't even cover the dishes we did order... Michael picked out the vegan BBQ king brown mushrooms served on potato hash with caramelised onions, harissa and kale chips ($17.50). Michael didn't miss his toast with a potato hash in play, and he loved the meaty mushrooms and slaw-like topp

January 14, 2016 We headed down to Hobart on Thursday for our annual pilgrimage to the wonderful MOFO festival . With no gig-going planned for our first night in town, we met up with some friends to suss out some bars around Battery Point. We started off at the cute and difficult-to-find tiki bar South Seas Cocktail Lounge , which got us started with some lovely cocktails. The cocktails left us keen to find dinner somewhere close by, so we ducked around the corner to Preachers , a burger-focussed pub that we knew had a few vego options. The wind had kicked up too much for us to enjoy the beer garden (complete with school bus), so we huddled inside and looked over the menu. It's surprisingly veg-friendly - there's a vegan pumpkin and mushroom burger and a vego felafel one, plus a good array of fried small plates and a salad. I was pretty psyched to try the vegan burger, but Cindy returned from the bar with the surprising news that Preachers had somehow run out of burger buns at

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on January 11, 2016 Cindy's family wanted to meet us for dinner in Footscray and, with our enthusiasm for our new Cheap Eats 2006 project still high, we decided it was a good opportunity to revisit Cafe Lalibela . It's been more than seven years since we last visited, and not much seems to have changed. The staff are friendly, the service casual, the menu has a good range of vego options and there's a steady stream of people coming through the door. We made the same move as last time and ordered the beyainetu (the platter below serves 3), a combination of different veggie dishes on an injera platter ($14 per head - up from $12 seven years ago, which is pretty good going). The dishes are heavy on the protein: lentils and beans cooked in various sauces, along with a potato and carrot dish. The injera is the star of the show - the fermentation adds a citruss-y kick to the chewy, spongy bread, which soaks up the relatively mild flavours of all the ste

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on January 6 & 10, 2016 In 2006 Tom Phat was a new entry into the Cheap Eats guide , on the frontier of Brunswick gentrification and Asian fusion food. A decade later its brunch & bar fit-out has barely changed and aged rather well, with floor space doubling thanks to an extension into a neighbouring shopfront. While dishes have shuffled around from time to time, the menu has remained a mish-mash of eggs and roti, curries and stir-fries, cocktails and mocktails, with well-marked veg options, plenty of tofu and at least one mention of tempeh. We first visited and blogged Tom Phat in 2008 and made a follow-up post in 2011 . While these describe positive encounters, we'll admit to a couple of disappointments regarding both the food and the service in between; Carla was far more thorough in her polarised feelings on easy as vegan pie . In the past week we've returned for both dinner and breakfast to find out how Tom Phat is faring in 2016. F

January 10, 2016 Cindy and I moved to Melbourne mid-2006 and one of the first things we did was grab ourselves a copy of The Age's Cheap Eats Guide. The rise of Zomato/Urbanspoon has diminished the influence of these books, but when we arrived the Cheap Eats was our guide. This year we're pulling the old book off the shelf to see what's changed in the past decade. I've gone through each of the 474 listings in the 2006 guide, noting down the type of venue, the region it's in, whether or not we've blogged it and whether it's still open. Shockingly, there wasn't a single Mexican restaurant in the 2006 guide - an almost unbelievable absence given the Mexican explosion that hit Melbourne a few years later. Of the 474 places listed in the 2006 Cheap Eats, 282 (59.6%) are still open. The survival rate varied substantially by venue type - bakeries were pretty secure while burger joints, seafood purveyors and vegetarian restaurants failed in droves. There was s

January 3, 2016 I couldn't stop thinking about Family Favourites . I would have loved to make a frozen chocolate crunch or shared around some mango coconut splice blocks , but they just wouldn't work at a picnic. Then I thought of nutella pudding . I didn't need to make more food at all, really, but I couldn't resist a go at veganising nutella pudding. This one goes in the style of British self-saucing puddings, with the nutella in the sauce and a typical cake batter plonked on top of it. I tracked down a jar of biona dark chocolate spread , which was a little less sweet than nutella and completely lacking in hazelnuts, but it did the vegan silky chocolate job perfectly. Dairy cream became coconut cream, buttermilk begat vinegar-spiked soy milk, butter was replaced with margarine, and I switched the eggs for apple puree (I'll go for a mashed banana instead, one day). For all those changes, it was the same pudding in every way that mattered. It's probably inten

January 3, 2016 Cindy's Family Favourites picnic theme had me scratching my head - our family meals were from a straightforward meat 'n' veg range, and nothing amidst the chops and sausages of my memories jumped out at me for the occasion. Instead, I thought back to school lunchboxes and found myself strangely nostalgic for this relatively simple apricot slice. Mum dug up the recipe for me over Christmas - they're called Doffie Biscuits and they're basically sugar, flour and dried fruit.  Veganising them only required me substitutes for 2 eggs and a couple of tablespoons of butter - Nuttelex did the trick for the butter, while a combination of Orgran No Egg and apple sauce provided enough moisture and binding power to replace the eggs. The results aren't going to change your life but they're good - heavy on the apricot and nice and chewy. And if you're me they're going to transport you straight back to your awkward teenage years. Doffie biscuits (b

January 3, 2016 We capped off our new year weekend with a vegan picnic and a Family Favourites theme. I wanted to learn what foods make my friends feel nostalgic, their back stories, and the funny nicknames they might have. Most of all, I wanted to introduce them to Superchook. Superchook fits all these criteria. It's something my mum made semi-regularly as I grew up, taking a little extra effort than most dinners, the kind of thing I'd ask for on my birthday. It was a chicken fillet stuffed with chopped bacon, cheese and green herby specks, then crumbed and fried. From the stuffing to the substance to the egg-dipped outer, it's light-years from vegan eating. Funnily enough, my picnic adaptation was easier to prepare than the original. I bought a packet each of Fry's and Gardein crumbed schnitzels, unsure of which would work better (Fry's were easier to work with, but I liked the Gardein texture better). I gently, gently sliced a pocket longways through each schni

December 28, 2015 I received the Moroccan Soup Bar cookbook for my birthday! The thick volume collates many recipes from the eponymous restaurant, which we've visited many times during our near-decade in Melbourne. (In 2016 we're likely to become even more frequent visitors to the newly opened sister cafe Moroccan Deli-cacy .) A visit to the Moroccan Soup Bar has always been much more than a plate of food, with the wild-haired and lion-hearted restaurant founder Hana Assafiri roaming the room, minimal table reservations, no alcohol, and a spoken menu of vegetarian dishes rich in herbs and spices. Likewise, the book is much more than a catalogue of recipes; Assafiri devotes many pages to her philosophy of generosity, actively supporting women within her business and creating a convivial, diverse environment that doesn't shy away from debate. (I was excited to see her featured in Ai Weiwei's Letgo Room of Aussie activists at NGV.) I devoured Assafiri's words on B