james test

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...

January 8, 2017 The Vegie Bar family has added another new member since Transformer. It's called Girls & Boys, and it's located right next door to the Vegie Bar on Brunswick St. Instead of smashing the gender binary, they've focused their efforts on sweet vegan snacks - the fanciest of raw cakes, a case of gelato, coconut-based soft-serve icecream, smoothies & thickshakes. They've got also a coffee machine and a selection of the latest lattes (turmeric, beetroot, etc), and the natural conclusion: a vegan affogato. We stopped by after a hot night at the Tote and ordered this choc-raspberry soft-serve explosion ($12) to share. The texture is bona fide and I liked the light, sweet coconut flavour of the icecream. The vegan meringue shards and freeze-dried raspberries were ideal crunchy-tangy counterpoints, but unfortunately the chocolate components were a let-down - the brownie squares were tasteless and the sauce dulled in the cold. It's awfully exciting to s...

November 12, 2016 Our tempeh & grits dinner was the core of a three-course Vegan Soul Kitchen meal. We started with Spicy Goobers, peanuts in a spice mix similar to that of the tempeh. For dessert I had this icecream at the ready. Bryant Terry hit on the same vegan icecream base that I've used for years: coconut milk thickened with arrowroot. He sweetens his primarily with agave nectar, but adds a shot of molasses because it reminds him of his grandmother's desserts. The icecream's other feature is a scattering of candied walnuts. They're an irresistible snack on their own, as well as working well in this icecream - caramelly sweet, crunchy and lightly roasted with the faintest hint of bitterness. The overall effect is very similar to my vegan salted caramel icecream . The icecream's texture was dreamy on the day of churning, but the leftovers ended up a bit grainier as the week went on. So share this one around and enjoy it all right away, at its peak. Molass...

January 24-26, 2016 I often like taking dessert to Ottolenghi club, and this month I had a special request from our host to make a recipe that had recently appeared in Ottolenghi's Guardian column . It's the kind of recipe that calls for an open mind as much as a sweet tooth, featuring a green sorbet of apple, celery, parsley, basil and tarragon. This herbal curiosity is supported by a more traditionally sweet base of meringue and crème fraîche. The sorbet needs a really good blender to puree all that green produce, and I trialled and rejected our food processor and stick blender before finally blending the mixture in our spice grinder attachment in 3 small batches. (Thanks for washing up, Michael.) Even then I can recommend a thorough straining to really get this down to a velvetty, verdant scoop - imagine how off-putting it would be to find a stray celery string in your sweets. A hefty 300g of glucose syrup keeps the sorbet soft, sweet and scoopable. Ottolenghi's reci...

December 28, 2015 & January 18-19, 2016 Dinner at the Moroccan Soup Bar usually ends with a plate of little shortbreads and pastries stuffed with dates or nuts and dripping with sweet syrup. The Moroccan Soup Bar cookbook contains a couple such recipes, but also some heartier sweet treats including sfenj /doughnuts and muhallabiya . As I mentioned in my last Moroccan Soup Bar post , muhallabiya is a dairy-based pudding flavoured with orange and lemon, drizzled with syrup and scattered with pistachios. I made little cups of it to finish a meal with Michael and our two brothers just after Christmas. More recently, Michael's mum and her two sisters visited us for dinner; on this occasion I tried churning and freezing the pudding as an icecream! Assafiri welcomes adaptations to her recipes and icecream-churning isn't the only change I made. On both occasions I increased the orange and lemon quantities. I should've known it would curdle the milk (!), but thankfully the mix...

October 1-2, 2015 When a date for our most recent Ottolenghi feast was announced, I swiftly staked a claim on dessert. Promising icecream served my cause well. There was still the matter of which icecream. In addition to the rich halva sundae from Plenty More (bzzzzt - already done) there are several online options, from a dense rocky road experience to a tropical coconut scoop served with roasted pineapple in the new NOPI book . Ultimately, I leaned on those gorgeous strawberries doing the rounds right now. They're the major component of NOPI's strawberry and rose mess , blended up into a sorbet and also diced up fresh. Then there's a cacophony of sweet, sour, perfumed, creamy and crunchy supplied by mascarpone and crème fraîche, pomegranate seeds and syrups, meringues and dried rose petals. The flavours and textures in my version were flawed but forgiving. The cream and the syrup were very runny, and didn't taste much of the rosewater or sumac they made use of. ...

July 18-19, 2015 Last week I enthusiastically renewed our vege box order with CERES .... except that I actually ordered an all-fruit box instead of a mixed fruit & veg box. We were beset by multitudes of bananas, apples, kiwi fruits, oranges and grapefruit, more than a dozen mandarins, a couple of limes and four pears. We've been working through them - stirring the limes into creme fraiche for sweet potato wedges , packing apples into our bags for work and punctuating our days at home with mandarin peeling. I made a big batch of rice pudding to enjoy with the kiwi fruits and some apple & walnut pancakes once, too. The bananas are only just ripe now. Three of the four pears went into this David Lebovitz icecream recipe, prepared for dessert when we had some friends over . They're cooked in caramel, blended smooth, then strained and churned into a rich, velvety scoop. The caramel procedure, which I've used for salted cara mel icecreams , always gets me nervous - it ...

March 15-16, 2015 You might remember that I experienced my Gelato Messina epiphany over a scoop of Mr Potatohead icecream , a daring and expertly rendered combination of peanut butter gelato, white chocolate and potato chips. Given my imminent departure from Sydney and the icecream's imminent departure from the specials board, I set my mind to making some more.... and making it more vegan, so as to share it around. My last batch of peanut butter icecream set like a rock, so I needed a new formula. Serious Eats, on their annual month-long vegan kick, came through within days, discussing vegan ice-cream making in general and a salted peanut butter flavour in particular. Like me, they choose coconut milk and cream as a dairy substitute. Unlike me of the past, they use light corn syrup as one of their sweeteners - I wondered if this would have a similar effect to the liquid glucose that Eliza Metcalfe recommended to me last year. And what of the chips - how to prevent them getting s...

March 14, 2015 True to our 12-hour tour update , we stopped by Melbourne's Gelato Messina while collecting new street art photos in Fitzroy and Collingwood. This outlet is notably larger than its Sydney siblings and at least as popular. The standard menu crosses state boundaries too, running to 35 flavours, 11 of them vegan and 32 of them nominally gluten-free (GM won't guarantee that any of their products are completely allergen-free).  I trialled one of the specials (pictured front), a peanut butter gelato smashed with pretzel brownies ($4) - it was a little light on the salty crunch but well endowed with dense cakey chunks. Meanwhile Michael sampled the coconut & lychee and poached figs in Marsala standards (pictured back, $6) - all the fruit flavours were bold, fresh and startlingly true to their sources. You'd be hard pressed to find a smoother, more satisfying scoop around Melbourne. We're several years late to the church of Messina, but now have the fervor o...

February 24, 2015 I first read about Gelato Messina on The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry a few years ago. Though it sounded good, N2 Extreme Gelato seemed more exciting still and the former recommendation lapsed in the back of my mind. Both businesses have since opened stores in Melbourne and again N2 grabbed earlier exposure on our blog. Gelato Messina nevertheless seemed to have something good going on, with the Melbourne and Surry Hills stores clogged with queues every time I walked past them. After dinner at Sugarcane , I finally decided to attach myself to the end of it and find out what all the fuss was about. The standard menu runs to two dozen gelato flavours and almost a dozen more vegan-friendly sorbets, and that's not even counting the half-dozen specials they offer at any one time. Scoops with gluten, nuts, eggs and alcohol are clearly marked, though the gelateria prints a disclaimer that they cannot guarantee any product in the shop is truly allergen-free. Mi...

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 ...

Cindy and I rarely make the trek across to Northcote - it's not as though it's particularly far, it just doesn't fit nicely onto one of the nearby north-south tram lines, so it tends to get ignored until there's a sufficiently interesting gig on at the Northcote Social Club. This is a shame, because there seems to be loads of interesting eating places around High Street for us to explore. Take Otsumami for instance - it was a new entry in this year's Cheap Eats Guide, scored three stars and snagged a little 'v' for veg-friendly, so it's pretty remarkable that it's taken us most of the year to try it out. Still, it was only one candidate on the list of places I'd drawn up as options - the fact that it's more or less next door to the venue for our post-dinner entertainment was enough to make it #1. Luckily, we had no problem finding a table - Otsumami have a couple of large communal tables which I presume you can't book, so even on a bu...

Spring affects different people in different ways. All it took was one 20 degree day to have Michael planning weekend trips away and a birding expedition within the city limits. Me? I had an overwhelming desire to pull out the icecream maker and get churning. The only problem was, there was no room in the freezer to store it. Pastry, spinach, bread and paratha were in the way. Oh, and two lunchboxes full of too-crunchy chocolate cookies . Whoops. It took me a day or two to work out the obvious solution - cookies'n'cream icecream! By then I'd seen Steph's vanilla-malted icecream , so I set my sights on a choc-malt twist. I started with my favourite vanilla icecream base , went light on the sugar and added 1/4 cup of malted milk powder after the cream. After an hour or so in the fridge, I strained the mixture and poured it into the churner. Twenty minutes later I added about a cup of coarsely chopped cookies. Done! This icecream was even better than I'd ho...

This eatery's true identity has eluded us for some time. "Tofu Shop International" registered early interest in Michael and I when we first moved to Melbourne and spotted it in our 2006 Cheap Eats guide. Now I'm not even sure that that's quite its name - the sign more accurately reads "TOFU SHOP international fine foods ". Let's just push on with the simpler moniker "Tofu Shop ", shall we? A couple of attempted visits were foiled by the fact that the Tofu Shop is closed on Sundays. As I read about their tofu soft serve ice cream in exotic flavours like rosewater, and coconut-pandan, I became increasingly keen to visit. Then there was Kristy's post about one particular staff member hassling vegans. At an all-vegetarian shop featuring tofu. What the...? There was no sign of this person, or any other unfriendly folk, when we finally tried the Tofu Shop for dinner. Instead we encountered a bench full of vegetarian dishes and a fri...

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 ...