james test

June 12, 2017 I came back from overseas raring to get back into the kitchen and cook up a storm. Cindy and I settled on this paneer butter masala for Monday night. It's the perfect public holiday project - not super complicated, although the constant pausing/playing of  Mallika Basu 's video recipe slowed us down a bit. The paneer was fantastic - coated in a mix of turmeric, salt and chilli and charred up in the frying pan - but the sauce was the real star. It's rich, spicy and a gorgeous turmeric-y orange. We served it up with a side of spiced coconut spinach and some store-bought paratha and it was the best goddamn dinner I've had in ages. The curry worked just as well for leftovers - there was a depth of flavour to it that beat just about any curry we've made before. This will definitely end up in our regular rotation. Paneer butter masala (slightly adapted from a recipe by  Mallika Basu ) 1/2 cup cashews 400g paneer, chopped into bite-sized cubes 1 teaspoon tur...

April 25, 2017 I like the Serious Eats approach to vegan cookery. Other comparable food websites have a tendency to roll out one post a year about how 'it's not all tofu and mung beans anymore!', then go back to their barbecued briskets. Serious Eats does barbecued briskets, too, but they explore vegan cookery more often and with more curiosity, figuring out plant-based ways to capture popular omni flavours. I liked their treatment of vegan   icecreams , and they've also tried their hand at veganising ramen , chorizo , and carbonara . Their joyous, experimental style even convinced me to try stuffing tofu and rice into my waffle iron . So when their twitter account teased us with pics of a vegan saag paneer a couple of months ago, I was excited . We waited weeks for the big reveal : it's a recipe where tofu cubes are baked in a miso-lemon marinade to form 'paneer', and the saag base gets its creaminess from cauliflower that's simmered and blended into ...

February 28, 2017 Dosa Plaza is an unassuming eatery holding up the corner of an apartment complex in Preston, where High St and Plenty Rd fork off. We'd paid only passing attention to it, until a couple of friends invited us to try it out with them after work. Opening and discussing the menu was an excursion in itself - it's all vegetarian and stretches to over two hundred  items. Vegan, gluten-free and onion-garlic-free dishes are clearly marked, and there's even a 3-page summary sheet of vegan foods available on request. This was a journey that started briefly with pasta before focusing on Mumbai chaat, the Punjabi foods found at most Indian restaurants across Australia, and then south Indian delicacies - idlies, vadas, dosas and uttappas. Chinese fusion dosas, Mexican  fusion dosas, Indo-Chinese dishes, desserts and drinks. Phew! We tried our best to sample across the board. A dozen mini-idlies ($8, pictured above left) were an auspicious start, freshly steamed and a li...

December 3, 2016 Our mate Gill  recently tipped us off about Melbourne Wok, an uninspiringly named restaurant in the strip of Indian and Korean places on Bourke Street. In spite of its bold promise to provide 'Everything Asian', Melbourne Wok seems like a Malaysian-Indian place, offering banana leaf curries for lunch and a wider range of noodles etc at dinner time. We stopped by for a quick lunch on a Saturday, joining a decent crowd of other people keen for the banana leaf experience. At lunchtime your basic choice is vego ($10.90) or non-vego ($12.90) - you get rice, four curries, a raita and a pappadum all served up on a banana leaf. The traditional approach is to eat it all with your fingers - we watched some experts work their way through the meal dexterously, but decided that we'd wind up smearing pumpkin all over ourselves so we opted for cutlery. Cindy kicked things off with a fancy drink - a sirap (rose cordial, $3.40) - a strong and sweet accompaniment to the cur...

December 4, 2016 We had a big hunk of pumpkin leftover from our veggie box and Cindy decided that a big batch of pumpkin flatbreads was the way to go. To accompany it we turned to Mridula Baljekar's Indian Vegetarian Cookbook for ideas, settling on this potato and chickpea curry with sun-dried mango. There's not too much work involved - you pre-boil the spuds, but otherwise everything just goes in one big pot. We had some sun-dried mango powder (amchoor) on hand from ages ago. I'd really recommend tracking it down for this dish, it really adds something interesting. Otherwise this is a pretty straight-up curry - it probably needs another dish on the side to round out the full meal (we chose a side of spiced coconut spinach ). It's good though - a great addition to our weeknight roster (although with the pumpkin bread as well, this was definitely a weekend job). Potato & chickpea curry (slightly adapted from Mridula Baljekar's The Low-Frat Indian Vegetarian Coo...

November 7, 2016 We've been meaning to check out the Tamil Feasts at CERES for months, having heard great things from a few friends and via Moni's rave review . It's a lovely concept - three nights a week a group of Tamil asylum seekers and volunteers take over the community kitchen at CERES and put on a feast. The Tamil guys have all spent years in detention centres and are still waiting for a final decision on their futures. In the meantime they bring their culinary expertise to CERES, raising money for their community and their friends still in detention. More than money raised, the night provides a place for Melbournites to meet asylum seekers, hear their stories and celebrate their culture - it's a lovely idea and the atmosphere on the night we visited was warm and friendly. You pay $30 up front for the food and there's a cash bar on the night with beer, wine and kombucha on offer. Luckily the food really measures up to all the good vibes. They started us off w...

May 1-14, 2016 Weeks 3 and 4 of my Stockholm trip were split by Cindy's arrival and our long weekend in Basel . Before we met up I ate my way through a big pile of leftover Singapore noodles and squeezed in a couple of quick outings. I worked at home on Wednesday and wandered the neighbourhood in search of lunch, settling on Bengali street food at Gossip . It's run by the same people who run Shanti (see below) and was buzzing at 12:30 on a sunny Wednesday. I nabbed a seat in the window and ordered the Monsoon rain sabji from the lunch menu - it's a combination of veggies (carrot, zucchini, sweet peas, pumpkin), lentils, papaya and a mildly spicy sauce, served with salad, rice and a fried egg. The standard lunch also includes a mango lassi and at 90 krona ($15), it's pretty decent value. That evening I met up with some work friends for a speedy bird photography outing to Djurgården and we continued on afterwards for dinner together at Calexico's in Hornstull. It of...

March 17, 2016 We've enjoyed a couple of visits to Mukka even in the face of stiff veg*n restaurant competition on Brunswick St. Most recently we met up with our mates Natalie and Ben, all of us agreed that we should trial the $30pp vegan "Just Feed Me..." menu. We also needed drinks. I circled back on the rose & cinnamon cooler ($7) of my first visit - it's so pretty and refreshing! The staff treated Natalie to a ginger beer souped up with pomegranate juice and seeds and a wedge of lime. This was a riff on their current jug-sized cocktail, which was just too much for Natalie to take on solo. The banquet proved particularly generous in its entree selection.  First up there were neat little samosas, dusted with black salt and served with mint and tamarind chutneys. More novel to us was the bhel puri, aptly described on the menu as "cold and crunchy, light and lovely"; a medley of puffed rice, Bombay Mix , nylon sev , pomegranate seeds, tomato, onion, lime...

November 15, 2015 We had a few friends around for dinner on Sunday night and decided that an Indian feast was the way to go. We fell back on some old favourites - palak paneer , samosas and kulfi - and included this Ottolenghi-inspired dal as something novel. It uses urad dal - black lentils - which are firmer and hold their shape better than some of the other dals we've used before. The downside to their firmer texture is that they need to be soaked overnight, so you need to be a bit organised. The recipe is otherwise straightforward - it's a simple one pot meal that just needs a bit of time to get the liquid thickened up. The dal itself is lovely, with the garam masala giving it a nice warmth and depth, but the toppings are what really make this stand out. It's definitely worth tracking down fresh coconut if you can - we found frozen shredded coconut at Mix Supermarket in Brunswick, which was an easy solution. The recipe below makes tons of food - we were eating lefto...

November 8, 2015 Back in August, fitzroyalty noted that an Indian restaurant was likely to pop up on Brunswick St next to Madame K's , where the vegan-friendly Frolic had previously offered froyo and waffles. Vegan About Town got in as soon as Mukka opened, thrilled to access veg-friendly Indian street food so close to home. She went on to invite me there for lunch just a few days later and I was out the door in 30 minutes. The restaurant lets in plenty of light, and the interior is cheerful, casual and clean. I'm accustomed to Indian restaurant menus running to several dozen pages; the food here is listed on a single compact sheet, but maintains the high proportion of vegetarian and even vegan options, all clearly marked. I love me a lassi, and a Mukka they come in two flavours, mango and rose-cinnamon ($6.50). Even better, they offer vegan-friendly analogues ($7, rose-cinnamon one pictured), made slushy and refreshing with blended almond milk and ice. Steph and I shared a ...

August 21, 2015 Melbourne makes late winter that little less bleak by scheduling in the Melbourne International  Film Festival and Writers Festival (and the Fringe Festival isn't trailing far behind!). We've been attending lots of events and sneaking in some CBD meals around them. Red Pepper and Shandong Mama are faves, Fonda saw us through one dinner and we've also returned to Flora Indian Restaurant, which we first blogged nine long years ago. Its Flinders St location is convenient to Fed Square, they're open 'til 10 or 11pm and they turn around food fast - all good qualities for a festival feed. Flora is an experience with few frills - choose from flourescent-lit menu boards and pick up your own food, drinks and cutlery. There are no markings for special dietary requirements, although there are plenty of meat-free options. There's also abundant seating, and Bollywood clips to bop along to if you position yourself in view of the TV. We picked out some ...

June 28-30 & July 8-9, 2015 Our travels in Vietnam were bookended with a bit of time in Kuala Lumpur, a city we previously visited in 2010 . This time round we had friends in residence, and they guided us to drinks by a 33rd floor pool on our arrival, followed by banana leaf curries for dinner. If memory serves, the dinner venue was Devi's Corner . Their full menu included a range of mock meats and vege curries, but sadly these were unavailable when we turned up late on a Sunday night. It's a good thing their basic vege plate is so impressive! We were treated to mountains of rice, as much dahl as we could handle, chilli pickles, milky cucumber chunks and an irresistible pink fry-up that we think was bitter melon (though it wasn't actually bitter at all, more sweet and silky like eggplant). While many other diners ate their meals adeptly with their hands, we were grateful for the cutlery available at the table. I was also pleased by the lime barley drink recommended ...