james test

April 25, 2017 I like the Serious Eats approach to vegan cookery. Other comparable food websites have a tendency to roll out one post a year about how 'it's not all tofu and mung beans anymore!', then go back to their barbecued briskets. Serious Eats does barbecued briskets, too, but they explore vegan cookery more often and with more curiosity, figuring out plant-based ways to capture popular omni flavours. I liked their treatment of vegan   icecreams , and they've also tried their hand at veganising ramen , chorizo , and carbonara . Their joyous, experimental style even convinced me to try stuffing tofu and rice into my waffle iron . So when their twitter account teased us with pics of a vegan saag paneer a couple of months ago, I was excited . We waited weeks for the big reveal : it's a recipe where tofu cubes are baked in a miso-lemon marinade to form 'paneer', and the saag base gets its creaminess from cauliflower that's simmered and blended into ...

April 18, 2017 We were saddened late last year when the news broke that Enlightened Cuisine was closing down. We'd been visiting there on and off for a decade , enjoying their mock-meaty Chinese food. Their closure, hot on the heels of White Lotus ' shut-down, left a big hole in Melbourne's veg restaurant scene. Luckily 2017 brought good news: Enlightened has reopened under a new name, Vegie Kitchen. We checked it out for a quick meal before heading off to see the amazing Patti Smith at the Arts Centre. Aside from the new name, almost nothing has changed. The menu appears to be exactly the same, with more than 100 mostly mock-meaty dishes to choose from. We started off with an old favourite, a serve of the delicious prawn toast ($5), which remains a deep, deep fried delight. We followed up with a couple of mock mains: kung po fish ($19.90) and ginger duck ($19.90). These were both great - the fish had a really great chilli kick and the ginger duck was tangy and delicious...

April 17, 2017 A long weekend is a good time to make brunch at home. This one comes from the Smith & Daughters  cookbook and it's been on my to-do list for months! We've enjoyed the Panqueques Piquantes at the restaurant several times , and they looked pretty achievable for the home kitchen. (By comparison, my all-time S & D fave is the mock tuna & pea croquetta, and I've no intention of ever deep-frying my own batch.) Indeed, these pancakes are a breeze once you've gathered the right ingredients. Although there's corn involved, these are batter-heavy pancakes rather than fritters. (Incidentally, there is a ripper recipe for  jalapeño & corn fritters in the book too!) The pancake batter is filled out with a little polenta and studded with corn kernels and jalapeños. They might sound savoury but once garnished with maple syrup and coconut bacon, they're firmly on the sweet side.  I've had some fraught times frying pancakes in the past, but w...

April 8, 2017 Well, I think we squeezed every last possible picnic out of this summer! I'm sure of it because little more than an hour after we finished up our outdoor Ottolenghi Club last Saturday, the wind changed and it poured with rain. But while the breeze was still blowing from the north and the sun was shining, we shared kuku , salads, and florets of fried cauliflower. We saw out the summer with this fig tart. It's one of the most eye-catching pictures in Plenty More , I reckon - several dozen glistening crimson fig geodes stacked across a golden square of pastry, drizzled with lemon glaze, with teeny herb leaves tucked in. Read the ingredient list and it goes one better - there's some kind of goat's cheese frangipane in between the figs and the pastry! It seems like one of those clever dishes that straddles sweet and savoury, a tantalising hybrid of cheese platter and Danish pastry. The original recipe includes instructions for a yeasted pastry dough, but Ottole...

March 25, 2017 I made these little fancies because it's fig season, and because I had a few egg whites in the freezer. It's a friand recipe that makes just six serves, and it was a nice spontaneous weekend project. Enough to eat warm, just the two of us on the couch that day, and to pack into our lunchboxes a day or two after, and then be happily done before the cakes turned mushy or stale. I expect friands to be based on almond meal, but these ones use ground walnuts instead. It makes for a darker, toastier cake that I think complements the figs very well; a dash of cinnamon and nutmeg pushes the effect even further. The original recipe uses fewer, thinly sliced figs but I set a bulbous half into each of my friands. Baking concentrates the figs' sweetness, but they stay quite fresh and juicy. That's probably why the friands deteriorate after just a few days - they're a fleeting pleasure, like fig season itself. Fig & walnut friands (slightly adapted from a reci...

March 18, 2017 Franklin (not to be confused with Frank !) has ranked highly on Hobart fine dining lists for years. However, reviewers have always tended to recommend the seafood and other meats so we figured it wasn't really for us. Then in the past year a couple of vegetarian friends added their voices to the pro-Franklin crowd - that had us more interested, and we secured an early reservation at the bar on our Saturday night in town. Franklin inhabits an ex-Ford car showroom and they've maintained an industrial look with lots of polished concrete and a scattering of leather and animal hide mats. Somehow they've managed the acoustics well so that guests can enjoy a positive buzz across the room without echoing music or competing conversations. The kitchen is completely open and visible; those of us at the bar had front-row seats to its workings. The centrepiece is an enormous Scotch oven (pictured above). We'd mentioned that we were vegetarian in our online booking, an...

March 18, 2017 We skipped MOFO this year, but Hobart still called us down for a visit - a quick long weekend to see the excellent On the Origin of Art  exhibition at MONA and to spend some time in one of our favourite cities. We did a day tour out to Bruny Island on the Friday, but had more time on Saturday to get into the local food. We started out with a visit to Hamlet, a cafe that's popped up in the year since our last visit to Hobart. It's a community enterprise, that provides employment and training opportunities for people who face barriers to employment. It's tucked away off the beaten track a bit, behind Molle Street near the start of the Hobart Rivulet track - on a Saturday morning it's a serene escape from the hectic bustle of Salamanca and surrounds. The menu is super veg-friendly, with just a couple of meaty dishes. The options range from simple toasts and smashed avos through to more interesting options like the Buddha bowl (brown rice, shiitake, kimchi, ...