james test

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...

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...

January 3, 2016 Cindy's Family Favourites picnic theme had me scratching my head - our family meals were from a straightforward meat 'n' veg range, and nothing amidst the chops and sausages of my memories jumped out at me for the occasion. Instead, I thought back to school lunchboxes and found myself strangely nostalgic for this relatively simple apricot slice. Mum dug up the recipe for me over Christmas - they're called Doffie Biscuits and they're basically sugar, flour and dried fruit.  Veganising them only required me substitutes for 2 eggs and a couple of tablespoons of butter - Nuttelex did the trick for the butter, while a combination of Orgran No Egg and apple sauce provided enough moisture and binding power to replace the eggs. The results aren't going to change your life but they're good - heavy on the apricot and nice and chewy. And if you're me they're going to transport you straight back to your awkward teenage years. Doffie biscuits (b...

January 3, 2016 We capped off our new year weekend with a vegan picnic and a Family Favourites theme. I wanted to learn what foods make my friends feel nostalgic, their back stories, and the funny nicknames they might have. Most of all, I wanted to introduce them to Superchook. Superchook fits all these criteria. It's something my mum made semi-regularly as I grew up, taking a little extra effort than most dinners, the kind of thing I'd ask for on my birthday. It was a chicken fillet stuffed with chopped bacon, cheese and green herby specks, then crumbed and fried. From the stuffing to the substance to the egg-dipped outer, it's light-years from vegan eating. Funnily enough, my picnic adaptation was easier to prepare than the original. I bought a packet each of Fry's and Gardein crumbed schnitzels, unsure of which would work better (Fry's were easier to work with, but I liked the Gardein texture better). I gently, gently sliced a pocket longways through each schni...

December 18-19, 2015 On the weekend before Christmas, our friends put on a yum cha feast . I was originally planning to bring along some mango coconut splice jellies but with the temperature approaching 40 degrees I decided to put them on ice. For a vegan and gluten-free crowd, I adapted a recipe that my grandmother and Mum both made in years gone by. The original blends canned mangoes and sugar syrup, then layers them with dairy cream. I couldn't help noticing that canned mangoes are stored in sugar syrup , and so just used that in the fruity layer. I replaced the dairy cream with coconut cream, natch. I couldn't find a perfectly level spot in the freezer to store my splice blocks, so the ratio of mango to coconut varied from one end of the container to the other. I didn't mind in the least! They're dense and full of ice crystals, but sweet and soothing in the summer heat. You'd struggle to put a dainty spoon through them, and I've been content to eat them wit...

After my baking disaster on Wednesday night, I called for my Mum. But it wasn't quite the desperate and childish plea you might think - I just wanted the no-bake slice recipe that I so enjoyed as a kid. I figured it'd salve my sore ego, fill the snacking void left by the muffins, and use up some of the rice bubbles I recently bought . What I've made here only bears a passing resemblance to my Mum's version, which itself bore only a passing resemblance to the original recipe that she emailed to me. It began as some kind of muesli bar slice, with toasted muesli and seeds. I think the toasted muesli may have been phased out of Mum's, and I don't ever remember encountering seeds. For my texture-intolerant brother, there was the bare-basics version: just rice bubbles bound together with the molten butter/peanut butter/honey/sugar mixture. I liked dried apricots in mine, and for an occasional after-dinner treat, it would be spread with a top layer of dark cooki...

My paternal grandparents have spent their lives working their farm in the Lockyer Valley , west of Brisbane. While it has been a demanding and unglamourous existence for them, my family's weekend visits were a treat for a suburban kid such as I. Playing on the dormant tractors, feeding the cows old pumpkins from the back of the ute, riding a bike unsupervised on the road with my cousin, eating Cocopops for breakfast. The biggest treat of all was 'smoko': mid-morning and -afternoon breaks comprising home-made biscuits or slices, plates of pikelets with jam and cream (rosella jam, please!), pumpkin scones with plump sultanas and thick slabs of butter (Flo's own recipe, of course - we're in Joh country) or perhaps, if we were really lucky, a freshly baked chocolate cake, iced neatly on top and sides. Dinner and tea were corned beef and veges boiled and salted beyond recognition. Pasta was 'ethnic' food. My adult vegetarian diet takes almost zero inspirat...

To celebrate the return of affordable bananas to Australian fruit vendors, Melbourne food blogger Lady Lunchalot has deemed Sunday February 11 to be Banana Sunday . This is the kind of excuse I've needed for years to recreate my Mum's banana cake recipe. You see, Michael hates bananas. Hates them. The taste, the smell, and thus the sight. I've lived in a banana-less household without any major cravings, but I do have fond memories of the banana cakes that Mum baked when I was a kid. Yep, that's me at about 8 years of age, dressed as a banana. The pineapple's my brother Liam. (From memory, the occasion was a special celebration of Queensland Day at our primary school. Unfortunately Queensland Day falls in June which, even in the sunshine state, is a little too chilly to be relying on a dress made out of an old bedsheet.) Sometimes, when our banana supply was over-ripe, Mum would make this recipe into cupcakes and pack one into our lunches. If we were real...