james test

August 21-22, 2016 My job is now split over two campuses - I've got some lovely new officemates and we've all moved into a newly refurbished workroom together. Our supervisor invited the rest of the department around for an office-warming morning tea, and our team all agreed to bring along snacks to share. I first baked a tray of gluten-free, vegan caramel slice to ensure that most special-diet bases were covered. Then I moved onto using up some bananas in a cupcake recipe that I've had bookmarked for 8 years. With eggs and vegetable oil and fresh strawberries folded through perhaps it's more of a muffin recipe, except that the 'muffins' are spread with cream cheese frosting. I slathered the frosting on generously with a knife (no piping for me), and added some sprinkles on top for decoration. I had almost a cup of leftover frosting, which I enjoyed eating with fresh strawberries over the following week. I like the flavour combination of sweet bananas and stra...

August 20, 2016 We had a pretty quiet weekend lined up, so I decided it was time to get stuck into one of the many intriguing but complicated recipes in Street Vegan , my birthday present from Cindy. The sandwiches section of the book is filled with amazing combos, all of which require a fair amount of effort. After much debate, we settled on these rolls filled with Thai barbecue seitan ribs, pickled onions and smoky, roasted peanuts. There are a lot of elements to these but they're all relatively simple and standalone, which means you can make them whenever you've got time - you could easily prepare the nuts, onions and sauce well ahead of eating, which would make the actual assembly trivially easy.  We doubled the ribs component of these to make sure we had leftovers, but even then we wound up with a disproportionate amount of the barbecue sauce - don't be afraid to tweak the quantities a bit to balance things out.  The end results were spectacular: the ribs themselves we...

August 14, 2016 Though it's still pretty chilly, there are signs that winter is receding - the neighbourhood magnolias are flowering, the magpies look ready to swoop any day now and we've seen 20 degrees again, just the once. It's enough to inspire Michael to get up early for bird-watching, and for me to grab a picnic blanket and meet him for lunch. Rather than preparing our own spread, we picked up lunchboxes from Mankoushe ($13 each). They'll cater to all manner of special dietary requirements, and the packages were vegan by default on the Sunday that we dropped in. We enjoyed dense little packs of a half-dozen dishes - grainy salads, garlicky sauteed greens, fresh tomatoes and pickley cabbage, nuts folded into a starchy mash, and slightly saucy lentils. Michael ably shovelled up his share with a wooden fork while the sun was still shining; I was slower. The wind picked up, the sun ducked behind a cloud, and I tucked up the last third of my food for later. We escaped ...

August 23, 2016 Today we celebrate the 10th birthday of this here blog. We started where's the beef? in our first month of living in Melbourne and it's grown into an incredible document of our time in this city - it's threaded with the broadening acceptance and availability of vegetarian foods, the ebbs and flows of food trends, and our own evolving kitchen habits. We've collated some year-by-year highlights below. ____________ Year 1 Being our first year living in Melbourne, we spent our weekends exploring various restaurants, markets and festivals all over the city . Michael started working in Fitzroy and launched the Gertrude St Grub series ; Cindy's workplace showed off their home cooking skills .    Best recipe: spiced chickpeas    Best restaurants: Three, One, Two , Moroccan Soup Bar Year 2 Cindy had a slow culinary start because she had her wisdom teeth removed . After that week we got much more sociable, participating in our first food blogger mee...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on August 13, 2016 Part of the reason we decided to do our Cheap Eats 2006 project was to catch up on some glaring omissions in our near-decade of blogging. Cindy covered off Fo Guang Yuan in April, and this weekend we made our first ever visit to Collingwood vego stalwart Friends of the Earth. We haven't actively been avoiding it, but the fact that it's taken us so long to visit is probably at least partly due to a suspicion that FOE would serve up worthy but bland vego food. Luckily, that impression was completely wrong - the cafe has a lot more to offer than just lentil stews: there are doughnuts and other sweets, lunch rolls, pizzas and more, along with a seasonal mixed plate. Everything is vegan by default (although there's dairy milk and butter on hand), and they're good at gluten-free options as well. There's a handy selection of veg-friendly groceries, including organic fruit and veggies. I really wanted to try the baked tofu roll...

August 10, 2016 I've been making this vegan cheesy macaroni recipe for years and am well overdue to blog it. It's stayed unblogged so long because I never take a photo of it! It's the lazy Friday night-on-the-couch recipe that uses pantry ingredients, for when I haven't soaked cashews for Isa's mac'n'cheese . Over the years, the pressure to write it up myself has steadily increased. Source blog VeganYumYum hasn't been updated since 2012 and her archives have been disturbed by hackers. After all that time of making this macaroni for the two of us, the recipe has achieved legendary status with a small cluster of friends just this year. Back in April Michael and three mates embarked on the 100 km Oxfam Trailwalker , and I joined the support crew. I cooked this macaroni for dinner: making a double batch of sauce at home two days in advance, then the pasta and some roasted broccoli and carrot in a cabin as the team walked. I insulated the enormous pot with te...

August 6-7, 2016 While I was in the US, missing Michael and cooking stuff together, we agreed that we'd try making the Street Vegan poptarts when I got home. While I would have happily embarked on them any old weekend, we had a nice opportunity to bake them for a 2-year-old's birthday party and share them around. Michael picked out the peanut butter-chocolate filled version and I set to work a day in advance. The filling is a simple, reliable mix of chocolate ganache swirled with peanut butter. The pastry is made with electric beaters and includes egg replacers, which isn't my usual pace. It seemed too mushy and I upped the flour to make a more sturdy, rollable dough (I've adjusted the quantities accordingly below). On the morning of the party I set to work assembling and baking the poptarts. The recipe's designed to make 10 hefty tarts but instead I cut at least twice as many two-bite treats. I barely used half of the filling since my mini-tarts had a higher edge-...

Cheap Eats 2006, a decade on August 2, 2016 Between Michael's and my travels, we've let our Cheap Eats 2006 project lapse for a few months. We're reviving it with this visit to Gopal's in the city. When we first moved to Melbourne I was just barely done being a student and Brisbane's Hare Krishna restaurants, with their cheap and filling vegetarian meals, were a favourite hang-out. Gopal's had the same relaxed atmosphere and we notched up two short reviews in our first months here. We later checked in for a marathon cooking class , and we've failed to mention this dependable eatery on our blog for a good five years since. While we were originally a bit put out by the cost of the chef's special, it has aged well! $12 in 2006, the equivalent feast plate is still just $12.95. This entitles you to a tray heaped with food - soup, rice and your two chosen curries, two chosen salads, a drink and a dessert. It's hearty, bulk cooking based on affordable ve...

July 27, 2016 I picked up a few small gifts for Michael on my travels through the US: a snowy owl pin from West Virginia, astronaut magnet and freeze-dried ice-cream sandwich from the Air & Space Museum, and of course some duty-free snacks at the airport.  Actually, the first gift I bought was a jar of Jamaican jerk seasoning from DC's Union Market . Though the seasoning itself is vegan, it's traditionally used to flavour meat. Still, I had some vague memory of seeing a few vegan recipes on USian blogs and I was pretty sure Michael would enjoy its spiciness. The person running the spice stall boosted my optimism, telling me about the vegetable-based stew she'd made recently with this condiment. Just go easy, a teaspoon at a time, she warned me. This stuff is hot! I had a hell of a time getting this jar safely home. I packed it in my carry-on bag, only to have it rejected as a liquid over 100mL. So I chased my checked-in luggage back through the front counter, downstairs...

July 24, 2016 Cindy returned from her travels early on a Monday morning, and I wanted to have something worthy to greet her with. I turned to Nigella for help, settling on this recipe for a winter plum cake. It seemed well within my limitations technically (no separating of eggs, no layers), but still seemed fancy enough to serve as a welcome-home treat. I still managed to cock things up initially, and had to restart from scratch after combining the wrong ingredients. Once I actually read the recipe things came together pretty easily. The end result was superb: the almond essence shone through, and the canned plums added bursts of sweet fruitiness. It doesn't need much icing - I used the simple lemon glaze from this recipe . We polished the whole thing off in a matter of days - I'll definitely make it again. Winter plum cake (slightly adapted from Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess ) 1 600g can of plums (I could only find a 800g can, so I just snacked on the res...