james test

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...

In our 1999th post, we'd like to remind you that we're holding a 2000-post celebratory picnic this Sunday March 22 from noon. We'll set up at the northern end of Princes Park, near the pond. Come by and say hi, and if you want to stick around a while, please bring your own picnic gear too - blankets or chairs, plates, cups and cutlery and a plate of food to share. (The most sharing plates of food are ones that are vegan, gluten-free and otherwise diet-inclusive.) We couldn't have asked for a better weather forecast- it's likely to be 27°C and sunny! If you're a facebooker, join the event page for last-minute updates.  Note: this food is for illustrative purposes only, actual picnic food may vary

After more than eight years of blogging, reviews of over 700 restaurants in 34 cities, nearly 900 recipes and more hours than I care to tally up, where's the beef? is poised to publish its 2000th post! We're going to welcome the start of our third millennium with some tweaks of our design and some long overdue updating of our where's the best? list, but we'd also like to mark the occasion by eating food. Tons of food. Note: this food is for illustrative purposes only, actual picnic food may vary So we're going to have a potluck picnic in the park to celebrate. Cindy and I are going to pack up loads of food and plonk down near the pond at the Northern end of Princes Park from midday on March 22 . You're all invited to join us - bring food if you want to, but feel free to just swing by and say hi as well. We've set up an event over on our facebook page , so sign up there if you want to keep track of updates and frantic weather-related rescheduling. We'd...

When I read that the theme of the 2nd Let It Grain blog event was millet, I made myself a stern mental note to join in. I've had a bag of millet in the pantry for well over a month, you see, and not used it at all. Thankfully, Lucy of Nourish Me had recently come up with just the kind of recipe to get me excited about it! The millet is cooked with brown rice in tea rather than water, mixed with tahini and herbs and rolled into balls, and finally plopped into a soup or fried into patties. I tried the latter approach. Even with a heat diffuser my grains cooked hotter and faster than they should have, and I added more water to cook them longer. This wasn't the greatest of ideas, with my grain mixture ending up rather mushy. Even so, the patties held together well in the pan and we were rewarded with some rather rich, nutty nuggets. We ate them with a salad lightly dressed with pomegranate molasses, and they worked well with this fresh and tangy contrast. The rooibos te...

Us food bloggers usually discuss what's behind them, but Wendy wants to know what's on our fridge door. Take a look! (And click on the image to enlarge if you want an even closer look.) Ours is primarily a repository for takeaway menus and novelty magnets, but you can also find a map of our neighbourhood, a postcard from Michael's mum, and a scrawled image of Michael watching TV. What's on your fridge door?

What's a pantry challenge? In our home, once every week or so, I tend to delve into the bottom two shelves of the pantry, looking for a half-finished packet of something that can be entirely finished for dinner. Noodles, quinoa, rice paper sheets or felafel mix - these dry and colourless ingredients can actually be a great launching point for a brand new meal, given a quick trip to the shops for some fresh veges on the way home from work. That's hardly a challenge , though, is it? Well, on Tuesday night I managed to create a meal using only ingredients already at home. I realise that's par for the course in many households, but it's highly unusual here. We often don't plan our meals any more than hours ahead, and buy groceries up to five times a week. (For the record, my pantry meal consisted of stir-fried mock chicken and shredded Brussels sprouts with soba noodles and Happee Monkee's dark caramelised garlic sauce .) Kathyrn from Limes and Lycopene has ...

We'd loaded up on goodies at the Queen Vic Market on Saturday and had decided that we should buy some dried black beans and then get ourselves organised enough to actually use them. Thus, by the time Monday rolled around we'd had a couple of cups of beans soaking for a good 30 hours and were ready to turn them into dinner. My first port of call for Mexican-y recipes is Ken Charney's Bold Vegetarian Chef , possibly my favourite in our cookbook collection. He didn't disappoint, providing us with a recipe for 'Beautiful black bean and avocado soup'. It all took a bit longer than I imagined it would - despite our preparedness, I didn't realise how long the pre-cooking of the beans would take. I had them simmering for about an hour, but they still ended up a little bit firmer than I'd have liked. Still, that was the only minor complaint about this meal (well, that and its lack of visual appeal). The soup had a spicy zing, complemented by the citrus tang of th...

The next bloggers' meet-up , set for July 26, introduces a few new elements that make it particularly appealing to me: it adjoins a market , it's north side, and it's most definitely veg-friendly! The plan is to meet at Lentil As Anything at the Abbotsford Convent at 12:30 for lunch. ( I'm told that Abbotsford is the best of the Lentils, so can't wait to give it a shot.) The stayers can then retire to Handsome Steve's House of Refreshment , and decide for themselves whether Steve and his house are all they're pitched to be. Lest you feel timid or wary about meeting crazies from teh Internets, I can assure you that you won't find a friendlier or funnier bunch of food fanatics. Trust me, I've checked 'em out myself - twice . So come join us! I'll be the nondescript gal with the mushroom brooch. Michael will be tall, ginger-haired and affable. He always is.

Pam has generously passed on the Yummy Blog Award to where's the beef? . The Yummy blog award is an award given to blogs with yummy recipes/photos. Even though our being vegetarian is closely linked our personal ethics, the main purpose of this blog is to show that vegetarian food is just plain yummy! So we're mighty pleased that Pam reckons we've succeeded. Winners of the award are also asked to nominate their favourite desserts. Michael doesn't have a long history of dessert preparation or consumption, though he does seem to have a soft spot for fruit pies and pastries, as well as baked cheesecakes . I, on the other hand, was born with a dessert spoon in my mouth. I bookmark and try new dessert recipes often and only occasionally repeat them. However I have an abiding love of dark chocolate and home made ice cream - the peanut butter chocolate balls and raspberry ripple ice cream I made last summer are good examples. Now as winter rolls around I'm get...

Don't tell the Office of Film and Literature Classification, but it turns out we've been publishing all this time without a rating! Thank goodness Sarah and Mellie so kindly stepped in to bestow us with an E for Excellent. It's particularly gratifying to receive this from a couple of cool cookin' Melbourne gals who've been blogging a while longer than Michael and I - I've been reading their edible exploits since we first moved to the food capital of Australia. In turn, I want to pass on the blog love to Yeah, That "Vegan" Shit and Hezbollah Tofu . These folks are rebellious and funny, proof for all the interwebs that veganism is one part compassion, six parts delicious swashbuckling adventure and zero parts self denial. If you've got even more blog-browsing time at your disposal, take a stroll through all the Melbourne-based food blogs I've linked in the sidebar. They are brimming with enthusiasm for everything edible this city has to of...

Like moths to a flame, it seems that food bloggers can't resist the glow of an outdoor wood-fired oven. Five months after we congregated around Vegout's hearth , we made the pilgrimage to Purple Goddess ' kingdom (queendom? goddessdom?) Chez Fur du Mer. She and her faithful feller Furry provided the perfect setting (as well as last-minute kitchen implements and a whopping slab of emergency lamb) for us to set aside our keyboards and let our mouths do the talking, as well as the eating. When Claire, Michael and I arrived, not so much fashionably as embarrassingly late, those present looked about ready to eat us alive! Would you believe they were too polite to beginning digging in without us? Thankfully I was able to get a tray of soy bombs in and out of the oven within minutes, and had Chinese style barbeque sauce at the ready for dipping. Jon has since admitted that when the "Cindy's bringing tofu balls" story circulated earlier in the day, there was ...

With the arrival of autumn it's time to slip into some comfort food, I think. Pastry, potatoes and soup are our favourite ways of warming up, but Johanna has prompted me to start instead with a nut roast. We had some success last year with one of Johanna's recipes so it seemed most sensible to join in her current blog event, A Neb at Nutroast , and try a new recipe. Or, even more daringly, an old recipe. As I mentioned in passing last time , my first nut roast experience a couple of years ago was not a very pleasant one. I had found the recipe on the website of the Vegetarian/Vegan Society of Queensland and decided to cook it for dinner while Michael was off playing sport. Grinding the breadcrumbs and nuts, zesting and chopping and frying took an awfully long time in our poky little kitchen, and then the roast had to bake for an hour! I barely had the energy to pull together some side veges and I was just about ready to cry when the golden, aromatic loaf came out of the...

One night in November last year, I took a tram to St Kilda with a Coles green-bag under my arm and butterflies in my stomach. Within two hours I had put faces and gestures to over a dozen of Melbourne's food bloggers, and eaten almost as many delicious dishes. Though many of us entered with some trepidation, the first Bloggers' Banquet was an enormous success. The feeling of community endured , first with a flurry of posts and comments . A few people met up for subsequent edible outings , and a couple of group blogs (and Flickr and Facebook groups!) have sprung up. Then Ed recently offered tickets to Out of the Frying Pan , an opportunity to represent food blogging to the Food Establishment. Several took it up and what resulted was intensely frustrating, occasionally illuminating, and most definitely controversial . It's inspired me (and other bloggers) to contemplate the merits and pitfalls of blogging. It seems to me that this is the perfec...

My mind's been ticking over ever since Elly announced the Eat to the Beat! blog event . I love a theme, and I knew I could meld meals and music since I count Fiona Apple, Cake and Custard among my favourite music-makers. There are lots of songs out there likening loves to sweet treats, but Warrant's tune Sweet Cherry Pie really isn't to my taste. Ben Lee is more my style, but listening to the lyrics of Cigarettes Will Kill You, I couldn't fathom what he was suggesting I make! (Though clearly it was not to be served up with cake... listen for yourself using the player at the end of this post and tell me what you think is cooking.) Perhaps, like Talking Heads, I was destined to Stay Hungry. Then, channelling the Eels, Michael chipped in with "Whatever happened to soy bomb?" The lyrics of this song are rather bleak and not at all related to food, but I liked the idea of soy bombs for dinner. A google search for tofu balls turned up a pleasant-looking recip...

The Indian food is coming thick and fast at the moment with thematically appropriate meals for SBS's weekly Bollywood movies. This week the movie was Devdas , the most lavish and expensive Bollywood film of all time (full disclosure: it's also one of the longest and we're still getting through it on tape). To match, I went for a lavish meal: dal from our Oxfam calendar and a vegie dish from Mridula Baljekar's trusty low-fat Indian vegetarian cookbook. The dal was nice and simple and was meant to be sour, sweet and hot. To be honest it was mostly sour (tamarind puree) and tangy (ginger), but that's probably mostly due to my lax measurements. Despite not quite measuring up on the 'hot' front, this was one of the better dal recipes we've come across - maybe not quite up to these standards , but then there's no can of coconut milk in this one to fill us up with creamy, fatty goodness. Anyway, this was basically all about the ginger and tamarind fla...

Helen at Grab Your Fork is again running the Asia-Pacific section of Menu for Hope . Last year, food bloggers (and their readers) from around the world raised more than US$60,000 (up from $17,000 the year before - if things increase at the same rate, they're looking at nearly a quarter of a million dollars this year!) for the UN World Food Program. This year, the money is once again going to the World Food Program, but is being specifically earmarked for a school lunch program in Lesotho. Read all about it over at the home of Menu for Hope, Chez Pim . It's all pretty simple: food bloggers source and donate prizes, their readers buy raffle tickets, the money raised is donated to help feed the hungry and lucky entrants end up winning fabulous prizes. It's a win-win situation. The Asia-Pacific prize list is at Grab Your Fork and the complete list is at Chez Pim . So click on through and buy a few tickets. Good luck!

photo taken by Ed from Tomato Food preparation for Monday night's dinner was a more nerve-wracking process than usual. Usually it's just me in the kitchen, with Neighbours on for company, putting together something to greet Michael with after his netball game and then to pack into lunchboxes for Tuesday. Contrary to what the above picture might suggest, neither was I cooking for Satan on this particular Monday. Rather, I was contributing food to a Bloggers' Banquet , a chance to meet other food bloggers in Melbourne face to face, palate to palate. The venue was the Vegout Community Garden in St Kilda, which features a wood-fired pizza oven. Naturally, the weekend was spent carefully planning and preparing my offerings. I needed to choose food that could be created in advance, transported easily via tram, preferably finger-friendly to share among the crowd, and served either at room temperature or hot out of the pizza oven. Sweets were easy - with ingredients I alrea...

It's been a while since Michael and I prepared Indian food at home, but as usual I've had a few appetising recipes from other bloggers tucked away. These super-healthy baked spinach kofta come from SusanV's Fatfree Vegan Kitchen and they're fantastic. The main reason they were fantastic this time was because Michael made them, but they're also special for maintaining a golden crunchy crust even without frying. We were clearly going to need some sauce for the kofta and some more veges to complete the meal, and I found both of these in Mallika's recipe for eggplant raita over at Quick Indian Cooking . Unfortunately I couldn't locate any mango powder, but these were still a winner. The eggplant slices added plenty of substance and a little extra spice, and the yoghurt brought some much-needed moisture to pair with the dry kofta. Next time I make these (and you can bet your bottom dollar there'll be a next time), I'll add a lot more yoghurt so tha...

Johanna of Green Gourmet Giraffe has tagged Michael and I for a meme entitled 8 things (about my day). She creatively combined two memes she'd been tagged for into a single post. Instead we'll double the number of posts but mimic her thrift by posting 4 things each. I'll go first! On Sunday July 15, I: 1. Woke very happily. I went to sleep last night with a crippling migraine and was thrilled to re-enter the world with a clear head. Sun streaming through the north-facing windows in our lounge room made me doubly cheerful. 2. Had two breakfasts. First a small bowl of cereal at home and then, towards lunchtime, a plate from Ray (you can see that in a few posts time). 3. Tried a new food. It was gluten-free pasta in an instant-macaroni-cheese packet. The pasta was fine, but I didn't think much of the bland sauce (just like normal instant macaroni cheese!). 4. Hugged one of my oldest friends. As in longest-known, not most aged! Given that I'm over a ...

Three reasons why this meal was destined to appear on our table this week: 1. Vicious Ange's steak sandwiches with a very attractive garlic crème ; 2. Lindyloo's mouthwatering mushroom sammich pics ; 3. Paul and Freya's Burger Ballyhoo blog event ! One reason why you need to try them RIGHT NOW: They're freakin' awesome. Washed down with an imported ale, this is posh pub grub in your own home with an unlimited supply of paper napkins to wipe that saucy grin off your face. Here's the rundown on creating your own not-steak sandwich... The 'steak' Get yourself one or two massive portabello mushrooms per person. Brush both sides with a bit of balsamic vinegar, then oven bake or barbeque until tender, brushing occasionally with more balsamic. It'll take less than 15 minutes. The sauce Ange's garlic crème recipe over here . You only need a half quantity for 2-4 burgers. The fresh garlic gives it lots of bite: roast your own for a sweeter, wussie...