james test

February 21, 2016 When Steph invited us to her end-of-CNY-fortnight celebrations , I knew right away that I'd try making the Chinese New Year peanut cookies that I saw on Sarah Cooks three years ago (I made almond jelly and melon salad that year).  With lard and an egg involved in the original recipe, I had some veganising to do. Sarah left some nice potential adaptations at the end of her blog post. I also couldn't help noticing how much her cup of lard looked like coconut oil so I used the latter as my main binder, added in a little peanut oil, and glazed the cookies with off-the-shelf egg replacer. Limited to salted roasted peanuts from the corner shop, I also skipped the custom peanut roasting and salting the Sarah begins her recipe with. My cookies turned out sweet, crumbly and lightly golden, just as they should. Most of us were too full of deep-fried mock duck and kimchi pancakes to scoff too many cookies, but I loved layering them up like scales on a fish-shaped platt...

February 21, 2016 Steph hosted a potluck on Sunday night to mark the end of Chinese New Year celebrations, with dishes needing to be vegan and on-theme. Last time we had a CNY potluck I had a memorable dumpling failure , so I was keen to come up with the goods this time around. I still aimed high - deciding to make a first attempt at turnip cakes for the occasion. It's a bit of a rigmarole - you need to grate and cook daikon, fry some fillings and then make a big loaf that you steam for an hour or so. Our situation was made a bit harder by the lack of a proper steamer in our house - the saucepan/colander solution we came up with worked okay in the end, but it increased my anxiety substantially. Our substitutions: mock jerky for sausage and vego belacan for dried shrimp worked fine, and these fried up a treat in Steph's excellent frying pan (they stuck pretty badly when I tried a couple of test ones at home). I didn't trust the texture to hold up if I made traditional recta...

February 17, 2016 Yellow is a mid- to high-priced bistro in Potts Point, and part of Sydney's fancy Bentley group . They recently hit the news by announcing a transition to an all-vegetarian menu and I happened to be in town for work for their first vego night. It's a lovely space, with a history as a bohemian arts collective . The exterior is bright yellow and the interior is dark and moody. Service is superb - friendly, knowledgeable and efficient. The new menu has a decent range of vegan options - the staff were very clear that the chef was trying to avoid relying too heavily on the standard dairy, egg and risotto approach to vego dining. The vegan tasting menus on their website look very promising indeed. There's an a la carte menu of about twenty dishes, from marinated olives ($5) up to a salted carrot, quinoa and kale dish ($27). I was dining with a couple of friends and we all decided it would be easier to just take the set menu - 5 courses for $70. You get a coupl...

February 13, 2016 When Maddox first opened on Sydney Road a couple of years ago, we made several pleasant visits for breakfast. It didn't really stand out from Brunswick's consistently excellent cafe culture, however, and we rapidly reverted to our home-ground favourite Wide Open Road . But towards the end of 2015 I started noticing favourable reviews of Maddox on other blogs , with photos showing fancier dishes. The Maddox team even emailed us early in the new year, inviting us back and promising good veg options and sweets. We elected to return anonymously and pay our own way. The menu has had a complete overhaul (perhaps even two or three!). Like The Glass Den , they've taken on sleek but tiny symbols to denote their gluten free, vegetarian and vegan options. Breakfast standards have new accents, with roast strawberry buttermilk on the granola and chickpea chips among the mushrooms. Vegan dishes swap in new components like babaganoush instead of leaving an egg-shape...

February 7, 2016 We came home from our Ottolenghi-fest with a jar full of pickled watermelon rind and Cindy wasted no time in coming up with a plan to use some. She figured that our Vegan Soul Kitchen book was likely to have some dishes that would benefit from watermelon pickle, and pointed me in the direction of these Johnny Blaze cakes for a Sunday night dinner. These are pretty basic polenta cakes really (certainly much easier to make than the pumpkin and kale stuffed version I occasionally bust out for potlucks). They're relatively dry, with a nice warm flavour thanks to the cayenne and jalapenos. You do need a good accompaniment, and the tangy watermelon pickles were ideal. We also whipped up a batch of the chilled citrus broccoli salad from the same book for a simple buy very effective dinner combo. Johnny Blaze cakes (adapted very slightly from Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen ) 1.5 cups polenta 1/2 cup wholemeal self-raising flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/4-1/2 teaspoon c...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on   February 7, 2016 We decided to broaden out our Cheap Eats 2006 project by heading south of the river for a return breakfast at Las Chicas, a place we'd last visited almost exactly nine years ago . It's managed to maintain a healthy buzz over the decade, meaning we were confronted with a queue for a table at 11:00 on a Sunday. When we were shuffled in after 10 or 15 minutes we were slotted into the back bench of the courtyard, overlooking one of the most picturesque carpark views in town. The menu is massive and well-stocked with vego items. Vegans have seven dishes to choose from, including coconut sago ($14) and shitake mushrooms with marinated tofu and miso broth ($16). Prices must have gone up since 2007 - our old post has the most expensive vego brekkie at $12, while nowadays you can get a vegetarian big breakfast for $25. Cindy ordered something similar to the dish I had way back in the day - the pumpkin, polenta and sunflower loaf with avoc...

February 7, 2016 Here's a big, bright salad that's been sitting among my to-make bookmarks for a couple of years. We've actually already got a Moroccan carrot salad in our archives ; by comparison, this one streamlines the spice list and has a greater variety of vegetables. Their roasting is brief - the carrots retain a hint of crunch while the onions are soft. Chickpeas are just barely warmed through and lemon wedges collapse in your hand, spreading juice and vesicles across the salad. Everything's warmly spiced with cinnamon and paprika, while slivered almonds and dates add extra texture and a bit of sweetness. The original recipe also includes a dressing of yoghurt swirled with pomegranate molasses, but we found that there was plenty of moisture and flavour without it. This salad would make a nice light lunch on its own, with the chickpeas lending just enough substance to satisfy. We teamed it with a watermelon salad for a lovely early dinner, and had plenty left to ...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on January 28, 2016 Our recent morning visit to Ray was handy for making comparisons to our earliest Ray breakfasts in 2007 . But we were actually much more curious about the evening menu that the cafe has introduced of late, including a $30 per person vegan degustation on Thursdays. Just two days later we arranged to meet our mate Troy there and get a more extended show of their vegan cheffing skills. Course 1 of 5 was a nice array of finger food - Tooluka olives in sherry vinegar with charred quinoa bread, and steamed edamame seasoned with a lively coriander salt and squeeze of lemon. Course 2 really raised the stakes with molten cauliflower & miso 'cheese' croquettes, sitting atop piccalilli puree. A pretty salad of raw, pickled and fermented vegetables added piquancy and crunch, and included dabs of black tahini and hemp oil. As our third course arrived, it was clear that Ray was willing to provide quantity as well as quality. A dish of crus...

January 24-26, 2016 I often like taking dessert to Ottolenghi club, and this month I had a special request from our host to make a recipe that had recently appeared in Ottolenghi's Guardian column . It's the kind of recipe that calls for an open mind as much as a sweet tooth, featuring a green sorbet of apple, celery, parsley, basil and tarragon. This herbal curiosity is supported by a more traditionally sweet base of meringue and crème fraîche. The sorbet needs a really good blender to puree all that green produce, and I trialled and rejected our food processor and stick blender before finally blending the mixture in our spice grinder attachment in 3 small batches. (Thanks for washing up, Michael.) Even then I can recommend a thorough straining to really get this down to a velvetty, verdant scoop - imagine how off-putting it would be to find a stray celery string in your sweets. A hefty 300g of glucose syrup keeps the sorbet soft, sweet and scoopable. Ottolenghi's reci...

January 26, 2016 Our semi-regular Ottolenghi potluck club had its first meeting for 2016 on the January 26 public holiday. With warm weather forecast and a whole day to prepare food, I decided to whip up a couple of salads from Plenty More as our savoury contribution to the spread (the full feast is on display over on our facebook page ). My first choice was pumpkin with chilli yoghurt and coriander sauce (pictured above), at least partly because it was pitched as the simplest recipe in the whole book. Given I was turning the oven on to cook the pumpkin, I stuck to the 'roast' section of the book and added the roasted cauliflower, grape and cheddar salad as dish #2. The pumpkin dish was indeed easy - you roast up some cinnamon-coated pumpkin wedges, whiz together a herby sauce and stir some Sriracha into yoghurt and you're done. The results belie the relative simplicity of the recipe - the sweetness of the pumpkin perfectly complements the tangy yoghurt and the slightly sa...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on January 26, 2016 Our Cheap Eats project was a welcome excuse to revisit Ray, a cafe we've long liked . I reckon it might've been the first eatery we visited sporting the exposed brick-and communal table look that's now so ubiquitous in Melbourne. Ray's popularity has motivated an expansion and minor remodel since then, though the ambience is much the same. The menu's had something of a remodel in the last couple of years too. Known initially for its Middle Eastern tweaks to the usual brunch fare (such as dukkah-spinkled poached eggs and French toasted Turkish bread ), it's now a haphazard litany of pop culture references with Oatkast and Iron Maiden sitting alongside Avocado Da Vinci. Thankfully their dietary features are clear, with plenty for vegan, gluten-free and halal eaters. Michael took on the handsome Cob Dylan ($19.80), a generous stack of corn fritters topped with a fried egg and augmented with avocado, fattoush salad, ...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on January 25, 2016 We were heading in to Richmond for a gig on Monday night, so decided we'd take the opportunity to revisit The Tofu Shop as part of our Cheap Eats 2006 project . This place has been trading since the early 1980s, so it's no real surprise that it's still going strong. The basic ordering process hasn't changed since our first visit in 2008 - you pick your plate size and then select from the bain marie dishes until they've filled it up for you. The prices have gone up, but not by a ridiculous amount - a small plate costs $12, a medium $17 and a large $26 (compared with $8, $15 and $17 back in the day). I ordered a medium dish and let the staff work out a selection for me - there was lots of good stuff in this bowl, including: broccoli with sweet chilli tempeh, potato and black-eyed beans, chilli jam tofu, chickpea curry, baked zucchini with paprika, feta and garlic (this was the only non-vegan dish) and pickled cabbage sala...