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We decided to make the final round of our SBS inspired Bollywood meals a bit special, and invited a gang of people around to enjoy Dhoom , an unintentionally hilarious 'fast paced motorcycle-robbery drama'. The movie was a hit (particularly the boat chase) and fortunately the food we'd prepared measured up. As we were entertaining a few people, we needed to make sure we picked recipes that easily scaled up to feed 8 rather than 2 and were guaranteed to be delicious. Luckily, we have just the recipes: palak paneer and spiced chickpeas, both from our Mondo Organics Indian cooking class. We've made these trusty recipes many times, and they never disappoint. Cindy capped things off with a reprise of her Indian mango rice pudding , which cooled everyone down as Dhoom hotted up. Now we've just got to figure out what to cook when we hire out Dhoom 2 .

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 ...

Even though I'm now located two states away, I still receive the Mondo Organics email newsletter each month. Amongst other news there's always at least one recipe included, and this month it was for mushroom, silverbeet and cashew tart with oaty pastry. I had two incentives to give this a go: first, I have a stash of raw cashews left over from my vegan ice cream ; and second, I bought an oven thermometer on the weekend! Ellie tipped me off on Cake Deco , a fabulously crowded and slightly ramshackle shop of all things baking, located in an arcade off Flinders St. I picked up the thermometer for about $10 and enjoyed browsing through the cake pans, biscuit cutters and other decorative kick knacks. Anyway, the ladies at Mondo have always been mindful of vegetarian, vegan, dairy-free and gluten-free eaters and their recipe caters for all of them.* (That's one of the reasons I've dubbed it greenie pie!) I substituted the soy milk for dairy, since it's what we alw...

Having slacked off for the best part of a week, I made Thursday night's dinner my responsibility. Having spent a few days eating nothing but pizza , I decided to put together an Indian feast. This was particularly appropriate given Emma and Simon were among a tiny minority of our friends who hadn't sampled my favourite Indian recipe: spiced chickpeas . The recipe is from a cooking course Cindy and I did at Mondo Organics . I think I must have been respecting recipe copyright when that earlier post went up, something I will rectify later in the post. As much as I love the spiced chickpeas, it's become something of a rule in our house that dinner requires at least one vegetable (and tomato paste isn't quite good enough). Thus, we tend to dig up a fairly simple veg-heavy Indian dish to accompany the chickpeas and make us feel vaguely healthy. This time, it was stir-fried sweetcorn with peppers and spring onions from Mridula Baljekar's 'Low Fat Indian Vegeta...

On Sunday we had a pub lunch with Michael's mixed netball team lined up, so we wanted to be prepared with a not-too-oily dinner in the evening. We pulled out a dhal recipe that we received during an Indian cooking course at Mondo Organics last year, and then looked for an Indian-style salad to munch on the side. Along with a bit of home-made flat bread from the depths of the freezer, this was a thoroughly satisfying meal. The common ingredients of black mustard seeds, green chilli and coconut meant that the dhal and salad weren't fighting for flavour domination, and the crisp cool texture of the salad was a great contrast to the thick soft lentil soup. This is a low-fuss combination worth repeating! Green bean salad (from The Low-Fat Indian Vegetarian Cookbook by Mridula Baljekar) 1 tablespoon olive oil 1/2 teaspoon black mustard seeds 1 cup green beans, trimmed and chopped into bite-size pieces 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup dessicated coconut 2/3 cup boiling water A bunch of...

Inspired by our spoils from Sydney Road , I volunteered to cook up some palak paneer. We had a recipe from our Indian cooking class at Mondo Organics to use as a starting point, and some delicious roti as an accompaniment. Palak Paneer 1 packet paneer 2 bunches of spinach (3 would probably be better) 1 onion 3 tablespoons lila masala 1 can chopped tomatoes 2 fresh tomatoes, diced 2 teaspoons garam masala 1 teaspoon chilli powder Steam the spinach until it's thoroughly wilted. If you've got a steamer, go ahead and use it. If not, a colander on top of a saucepan works pretty well. Once it's all nicely steamed, pop it in a food processor and blend it up to mush. Fry the onions and lila masala in a large saucepan for a few minutes, then throw in the tomatoes and spices and stir them all together. Cook for a few more minutes and then scoop the spinach mush out of the food processor into the saucepan. It should look something like this: Stir it all together - don't add ...

Having settled in properly to our flat, it was time to really test out the kitchen with a more elaborate menu. I opted for an old standard: spiced chickpeas and a yoghurt-based vege curry. The first stage of making the spiced chickpeas (picked up during our Indian cooking course at Mondo Organics) is making lila masala spice paste, which basically involves turning this: Into this: This paste (along with a glob of tomato paste and a few extra spices) is combined with cooked chickpeas to make a big, tasty feast. However, the chickpeas are a bit samey and, given my vast amount of leisure time at the moment, I opted to make a mixed vege curry to provide a bit of contrast. This curry is basically a pile of steamed vegetables thrown into a paste made of yoghurt, chickpea flour and a pile of spices. Usually, the combination of these two dishes is quite delicious – the spicy, tangy chickpeas moderated by the blander, cooling yoghurt based curry. However, things were somehow reversed: the...