james test

Zucchini #3 was devoted to a recipe from Ms Chocolate & Zucchini herself, Clotilde Dusoulier. She miraculously managed to develop a savoury recipe featuring the title ingredients of her blog - pasta with zucchini slices and a sprinkling of unsweetened cocoa nibs. This isn't all that's unusual about the dish. Clotilde also introduced me to the absorption method of cooking pasta. Similar to risotto, the pasta is thinly coated with olive oil in the pan before absorbing water or stock until done. Rather than gradually adding the stock and stirring continuously, most of the stock goes in at once and the pasta needs only an occasional, relaxed stir. The use of stock brings extra flavour to the pasta and I liked adding the veges in to cook with it, making it a one-pot meal. But the real flavour revelation is the cocoa garnish! It adds a depth and darkness to an otherwise mildly flavoured dish, playing the role I'd usually hand to mushrooms. As much as I love parmesan,...

Our community of Queensland migrants welcomed two new members, Kerrie and Daniel, this weekend. To celebrate their arrival I wanted to cook everyone a meal but with our posse stretching to about 13 members there was no chance of a sit-down dinner party. Instead I devised an indoor picnic, where we could enjoy lounging about on cushions and spill lunch on checkered blankets with the comfort of oven-baked food and protection from Melbourne's wayward weather. I was in no doubt as to what would emerge from the oven: trays of golden brown pastry. Vegan pastry, no less! Borg's frozen puff pastry (it's at Safeway) is as tasty as any buttery supermarket pastry I've tried. I used it to make (non-vegan) "meat" pies and party-sized non-sausage rolls and had a jar of Chinese-style barbeque sauce at the ready (for the record, the pies are easily veganised and there's been some discussion of tweaking the sausage rolls with silken tofu). The pastries were really ...