james test

February 25, 2017 We had such a great time at January's Ottolenghi-club, that we reconvened just a month later for Febru-lenghi, another celebration of Yotam's ridiculously good recipes. You'd think it would be getting hard to keep standards high, but this felt like one of the best club-meetings ever - you can get a full run-down over on our facebook page .  I was home alone for the week and got a bit carried away, committing to three different dips - butternut and tahini spread , avocado and broad bean dip and this butterbean hummus with red pepper and walnut paste. This was all a fairly significant time commitment, although a lot of it was spent just waiting for things to roast or cool. The end result was amazing though - each one of these dips was somebody's favourite around the table. The beautifully fresh avocado and broad bean dip was the most summery, while the sweet and nutty pumpkin dip was a bit heartier.  The fanciest of all was the butterbean hummus, which ...

Since we were staying at a bed and breakfast, Michael started taking advantage of the cooked breakfasts. Here this meant fried eggs, hash browns and baked beans, with a rack of toast on the side. This was all served up by a svelte Swede named Inga. She was impossibly perky, wore hot pink capri pants, and when she noticed our camera on the table she insisted on photographing us together. "Which button? Yes. Now hold her hand. You must hold her hand. Oh, so sweet!" She ensured our day started with a smile and a chuckle, at least. We continued our train trek to York, and arrived in time for lunch. Michael picked out Cafe Concerto based on a recommendation in our Lonely Planet guide, and it did us very nicely. (Whoops... don't mind me in the mirror reflection.) It's a casual and comfy cafe that seemed to attract both locals and tourists. Though there were a number of vegetarian items on the menu, most of them seemed to focus on roasted Mediterranean vegetables...

Between Cindy's network of expat-Brisbanites and my stash of $10 tickets, we rounded up quite a gang for a Sunday evening at the Moonlight Cinema in the botanic gardens. The evening's entertainment consisted of a selection of shorts from the Melbourne International Film Festival, but of course the real focus of the evening was the pre-film picnic. After some success with my previous dip-focussed picnic food , I decided to repeat the performance. This time I flicked through our cookbooks rather than Cindy's bookmarks, and came across a couple of relatively easy and tasty-looking choices. First up was the amazingly straightforward garlic, herb and bean pate from our CookSmart Vegetarian flip book. This takes all of five minutes to make and is really pretty tasty. I might go a bit lighter on the garlic next time, as it really was a bit overpowering. Given how simple the first dip was, I decided to be a little more ambitious with the second. This beetroot hummus recipe c...

After a few ridiculously hot days, Sunday was a mild and pleasant Melbourne summer's day (an aside: I still can't get my head around Melbourne summer - when the temperature can drop 10 degrees in 10 minutes, nothing makes sense anymore) and Cindy and I were inspired to put together some sort of picnic and head off to enjoy the late evening sunshine. We decided to keep things reasonably healthy (at least pre-dessert): a couple of dips and lots of fresh vegies. I took on dip responsibilities and raided Cindy's bookmarks to find sun-dried tomato hummus and agresto . The hummus was ridiculously easy to make and was the star of the show - the tahini was noticeable without being overpowering, the few unblended bits of sun-dried tomato provided a bit of texture and the lemon juice gave things a little acidic tang. The agresto was a little more problematic - there were too many ingredients to fit into our mortar and pestle and I gave up after a little while and reverted to the fo...

Like Johanna , I recently bought a bottle of pomegranate molasses for the first time. Pomegranate molasses has orbitted my culinary consciousness for quite some time, but for the most part I was content not to own this specialty ingredient. I wasn't convinced that I'd use it much or particularly like the taste. Then I saw Clotilde 's recipe for muhammara , a Middle Eastern spread. This mixture of roasted red capsicum and walnuts looked like the star of a few excellent bread-and-dip plates I've ordered out. She suggested that balsamic vinegar, which I already had, would make a suitable substitute but all of a sudden pomegranate molasses had taken on an aura of irreplacability, as if it must be the secret ingredient on those dip platters. And far from disappointing me, my experimental taste from the bottle confirmed that this was my kind of syrup. Sweet and languidly viscous, but with a very fruity tang. Balsamic vinegar would do, sure, but the molasses fills out t...

My first set of chocolate clusters were transformed into a sweet spread and the leftover ingredients from my ginger-cashew clusters received the same treatment. This time I blended the cashews, glace ginger and chocolate with Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese to smooth it out. The 'pesto' was a success equal to my first attempt and I found some even better biscuits to team it with! These are Arnott's Lattice biscuits , pastry squares that are like sweet glazed SAO s. I haven't had them in years, though I do remember some incredible passionfruit vanilla slices made with them when I was growing up.

Here's my new invention on a stay-inside Saturday afternoon - dessert pesto. This is not much more than a blended version of the chocolate clusters I recently made, with a bit of cream cheese to bind it together in a spreadable consistency. It's not quite as chocolatey as it looks: the blended dried cherries also added a rich dark taste, texture and colour. I spread it on plain dry (but slightly sweet) biscuits and was in afternoon tea heaven. It was really just an experimental attempt at using up my last small portions of pistachios and dried cherries, but I can see myself pushing this idea further with other fruit and nut combinations: dried apricot and almond, maybe, or dried apple and cashew with white chocolate...? Dessert pesto Throw about 2 dessertspoon-fulls of dried cherries in a blender and pulse until mushy. Add an equal volume of pistachios and pulse briefly to break them up a bit. Next add about 20g of dark cooking chocolate and pulse again. Finally, add...

We arranged to have Carol over for dinner on this night, to thank her for her generosity during our first couple of weeks in Melbourne. During our time in her house, we noticed her smallish appetite and addiction to avocado and crackers before dinner. Thus we decided to prepare a few rounds of nibbly food instead of an elaborate main meal. During the day Michael made pesto and dukkah in his prized mortar and pestle. (Dukkah is a Middle Eastern spice mix, best mopped up using toasted Turkish bread dipped in olive oil.) (The recipes are included at the end of the post.) Carol arrived with the un-yuppie contributions of Cheezels and Snack chocolate, and I demolished about two thirds of the Cheezels before I even looked at Michael’s earthy gourmet creations. (Despite the overall tone of this blog, I’m not much of a food snob. My most craved food is probably chips.) Our after-thought of a main course was an encore performance of the marinated tofu, this time with ginger in the marina...