james test

June 24-25, 2017 I've had these chocolate & sesame yo-yos from Ottolenghi's  Guardian column  bookmarked for 18 months, just waiting for the seasons and our Ottolenghi club dates to align. They come under the apt heading Rich pickings , sandwiching biscuits dense with chocolate and sesame seeds with layers of chocolate ganache and  tahini cheesecake spread.  Unfortunately, the instructions weren't quite what I needed to get the job done, and I've adjusted my instructions to reflect what's more workable in my kitchen. For example, the ambient heat from the boiled cream wasn't enough to melt all of the chocolate and butter in my ganache, and I had to set up a makeshift double boiler. The rest of my butter was too firm for hand-beating, yet the biscuit dough was too soft for rolling! What is the temperature in Ottolenghi's test kitchen, I wonder? In retrospect, I reckon it's worth refrigerating the biscuit dough before forming the cookies. They spread ...

January 21, 2017 It's becoming a fairly predictable cross-over for me: Ottolenghi club x ice cream. I've done chocolate halva sundaes , strawberry-rose sundaes  and even green herb sundaes ; for the latest club gathering I dialed back to a more accessible Turkish delight-&-chocolate theme. This recipe has a rocky road feel too it - chocolate icecream with a touch of rosewater, studded with toasted walnuts and biscuit pieces, scattered prettily with Turkish delight cubes and rose petals. (I'm always happy for an excuse to use up some of my  rose petals .) It seemed impossible to mess up, though I tried my darnedest. Usually I'd pop my icecream maker in the freezer 24-48 hours before serving time.... this time I forgot until 6 short hours before the event. My freezer raced against the clock, and managed to turn up something near-solid and scoopable. No-one need have known. The original recipe includes a chocolate sauce (actually the same one from the  chocolate halva...

October 30, 2016 My mate Natalie hosted a Sunday potluck lunch, for which I attempted to make peppermint patties. I knew there'd be heaps of food and I imagined these as small bites of sweetness we could still enjoy nibbling on after a big meal. They didn't work out quite as planned. Even though I'd tagged the recipe as vegan, it wasn't at all - still, it was easy enough to replace butter and cream with a small can of coconut milk. This rendered the peppermint fondant much runnier than it should have been. There was no way I could roll, refrigerate and slice it into neat little discs. Instead I pulled out my cupcake pan and layered these out as soft-centred chocolates. So far so good! They looked cute in green mint-coded papers, with a couple of sprinkles on top. And on first bite they were a heavenly contrast of crackling bittersweet chocolate and oozing sweet peppermint. But they were hefty , a bit too much to take on after burgers and mac'n'cheese (and just a...

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-...

June 19, 2016 This idea popped up while I was hosting that Family Favourites picnic potluck in the summer. I was probably telling someone about how my family called jaffles Hot Ones (thanks to toddler-me) and got to thinking about how fun a jaffle potluck could be. A few irons in a row, a pile of bread, and everyone brings a filling. Hot Ones all round! I waited until the cold weather rolled in, when toasty carbs bring the most comfort. My dozen-plus guests definitely brought the goods - extra jaffle irons, numerous vegan cheeses, home baked beans, mock meats, canned spaghetti, the last of a garden's basil... even sweet stuff like caramel bananas and chocolate chips. For dessert, I had another family favourite to share - this one's something my mum would occasionally make for dinner guests. It starts not with bread, but with puff pastry . Yep, you just thaw out a sheet of puff pastry and cut it into two rectangles. Fill the rectangles will sliced banana, chocolate chips and m...

May 27, 2016 This year we celebrated Michael's birthday in Stockholm. I had organised a couple of gifts for him while I was in Melbourne and he was already travelling. I hid a proudly home-sewn shirt for him in the lining of my backpack, but didn't want to carry the weight of the cookbook I'd ordered all around Europe. Instead I photographed a few of the recipes that might plausibly be made in a small foreign kitchen, and prepared a couple of them for him as a birthday preview. The cookbook was Street Vegan , a collection of recipes from the Cinnamon Snail food truck that won Michael's affection and appetite in New York City two years ago. There's a detailed review and recipe trials on Veganopoulous posted late last year, and she kindly let me browse her copy while we were hanging out around then. There's lots of tasty-looking seitan that draws on our whole pantry-full of supplies and an entire doughnut chapter. It'll be fun stuff for weekend cooking pro...

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...

May 23-24, 2015 Last weekend we joined in on a big party for a little girl's birthday. Much of the food was expertly catered by the Las Vegan crew, and another guest prepared a cake decorated with fairies and fondant mushrooms. I brought along a tray of hedgehog slice, a fairly common treat from my own childhood. I don't have a family recipe, but I knew Vegan About Town posted one that I could draw from and adapt to suit my pantry. The whole hedgehog deal was really just a plot to use up two packets of LEDA gingernuts , and it served to polish off some walnuts, cashews and dried cherries too. Best of all, it's an oven-free melt'n'mix method easily accomplished in 20 minutes. The slice has a great fudgy texture and a much darker chocolate base than the non-vegan versions I've known before. On reflection, it was probably too rich and bittersweet for the kids. In fact the little tackers barely took an interest in the savoury selection or the birthday cake once th...

May 1, 2015 Well, of course I couldn't set off on a weekend away without taking something chocolatey. I went for another recent locally published recipe, this one for brownies on quinces and kale . I prepared it late in the evening, after the lentils had simmered and the biscuits were cooling on the bench. I ground up the flax seeds, perhaps not quite as finely as I should have, and set them to gooifying with some water. I piled up the almonds in the grinder but they weren't so keen to powderise. After a couple more attempts I powered down the grinder and discovered this.... I'd snapped the seal, and it was performing some kind of python move on the blade. I sent Michael this frustrated photo, set the grinder aside and retrieved our hand blender. It struggled to smash the almonds, and they were pretty chunky. I proceeded with the rest of the recipe, causing a little mess but no more mishaps. I wondered if my lax grinding might make for coarse, badly textured brownies. Whe...

February 6-7, 2015 Our friend Erin promptly scheduled in a second Ottolenghi potluck one month after the first . I spent that month utterly occupied by my job, working through all three weekends, and by the time the potluck rolled around I was keen to break out and contribute one of the Plenty More desserts. Predictably, it was the icecream recipe that took my fancy. Ottolenghi's halva icecream is rich with cream and egg yolks, with only a hint of sugar and tahini in the custard. It's fudgy chunks of halva folded through that provide most of the bitter-edged sweetness. The chocolate halva I bought from a local deli was crumbly and breaking it down into the directed half-centimetre cubes wasn't possible - I liked the texture it asserted in bigger blocks anyway. Ottolenghi elevates the icecream to full-blown sundae with brandy-spiked ganache, peanuts and black sesame seeds. It's the best kind of over-the-top - alternate spoonfuls of smooth chocolate with salted crunchy ...

Edit 22/05/2012: The EBC has now closed, but most of the menu has migrated to The Cornish Arms . Our past couple of visits to the East Brunswick Club haven't exactly had us screaming for more. The first one, on a public holiday, went unblogged as we were dealt confused menus and embarrassingly poor service. Our second trip was more pleasant, but stopped short of really impressing. Yet a number of other bloggers couldn't stop talking about their Monday night meals . Were we actually missing out on something special here? Well, kinda. The old hot dog night has diversified - now the EBC offers cheap jugs and four meals going at $10 apiece. We chose between: a cheese and bacon burger with chips, a chicken burger with lime mayo, avocado and a side of chips, fettucine bolognese, and chicken parma with chips and salad. While this is quite cheap, you might still be wondering what the big deal is. Here it comes: you can order any of these meals vegan . Any of them. A ch...

I've been a bit unsure of the green tea chocolate and consequently it has lurked in the cupboard, half-forgotten, for several months. The first bite was intensely herbal and a little bitter. This was not at all what I wanted from chocolate! Once that subsided I was able to appreciate the subtle sweetness and the perfect buttery texture as I chewed. I surprised myself by reaching for a second piece and tripped from revulsion to compulsion once again. I still can't work out whether I enjoyed the ride. What I'm certain of is that Matt did brilliantly to include this uniquely Japanese snack in his collection of Tokyo treats.

While I spent a month away from my workplace, Elise kindly volunteered to organise the seminar schedule in my absence. As I checked my email on holiday and at distant conferences, it was always reassuring to spot one of her friendly messages to the group and know that all was running smoothly. It's said that one good turn deserves another, and in my workplace good turns are usually edible. So as a small gift of thanks, I whipped up a batch of crunchy chewy chocolate clusters for Elise. This time I used dried strawberries, almonds, coconut and a sprinkle of orange blossom water. The orange blossom water didn't contribute much at all, but the strawberries were lovely. It's lucky that I had only a limited supply of chocolate, or there wouldn't have been any strawberries left for my porridge !

In the almost-four years that Michael and I have been vegetarian we've not come up against much resistance. Yet I've been surprised at the number of otherwise broad-minded people I meet who screw their noses up at vegan food. "I had a vegan biscuit once and it was revolting !" proclaimed one inner-city Melbournite a couple of months ago, dismissing the entire lifestyle on this fragile basis. It irks me. Though there's a sizable portion of non-vegan foods in my diet, I've eaten (and cooked ) countless wonderful vegan meals and treats without any sense of deprivation. This is probably why I was so interested in the Vegan Bake-Off organised to launch Leigh Drew's new cookbook, Vegan Indulgence . I wasn't particularly set on winning - I just wanted to check out the variety of vegan sweets made in ordinary kitchens and contribute something modest to the spread. Because really, how difficult could it be to make a good vegan biscuit? I set to work on a...

The last destination on my overseas journey was - bizarrely - Chattanooga, Tennessee. Not an obvious stop-over after traversing the UK, perhaps, but again it was work commitments that brought me there. And if the town of Chattanooga reminds you of a certain song , perhaps you can share a gaffaw at my accommodation - the Holiday Inn Chattanooga Choo Choo ! The Chattanooga train station serviced passengers from 1909 through to 1970, and was then converted into a holiday complex. The terminal station is now the grand lobby of the hotel. Guests can stay in renovated train carriage rooms or the more ordinary hotel building at the far end of the old train platforms. The platforms stretch as paths from lobby to hotel, and the lines have been filled in as pretty manicured gardens. Downtown Chattanooga can be pretty lifeless. There's a small zone of family-friendly restaurants surrounding an IMAX and an aquarium but that's it. There are blocks and blocks of tall grey buildings and ...