james test

June 18, 2017 My Twin Peaks  cherry pie was so unforgettably good that only a month later I rolled up my sleeves to try making a vegan version. There's just one ingredient that needs substitution: butter. Following discussion on our facebook page , I replaced the butter with the same weight of Nuttelex and set my food processor a-whirring. It melded with the flour, forming a dough without need of any of the water listed as the final ingredient. Then came the tough part. This vegan crust was easy to roll but impossible to pick up without extensive tearing. I rolled it twice, cursed the heavens a hundred times, and patched it up as best I could. Forming the lattice wasn't much better, with all of my pastry ribbons breaking in one, if not three, spots. For all that angst, my pie was a flawed beauty, just as sweet and juicy and sour and crumbly as the original. (If anything it was even more Twin Peaks -appropriate, with the filling gorily spilling from one side.) So, what to do fr...

August 6-7, 2016 While I was in the US, missing Michael and cooking stuff together, we agreed that we'd try making the Street Vegan poptarts when I got home. While I would have happily embarked on them any old weekend, we had a nice opportunity to bake them for a 2-year-old's birthday party and share them around. Michael picked out the peanut butter-chocolate filled version and I set to work a day in advance. The filling is a simple, reliable mix of chocolate ganache swirled with peanut butter. The pastry is made with electric beaters and includes egg replacers, which isn't my usual pace. It seemed too mushy and I upped the flour to make a more sturdy, rollable dough (I've adjusted the quantities accordingly below). On the morning of the party I set to work assembling and baking the poptarts. The recipe's designed to make 10 hefty tarts but instead I cut at least twice as many two-bite treats. I barely used half of the filling since my mini-tarts had a higher edge-...

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...

March 20, 2016 I've clearly been dominating the dessert division at our Ottolenghi get-togethers, because I felt a teensy bit flummoxed at the prospect of making a main. I lounged around with Plenty and Plenty More and some little ripped bookmarks, looking out for picnic-friendly autumn-appropriate dishes. I had plenty of time to plan and shop and cook. Michael nudged me into making the Very Full Tart - it looked like a ripper centrepiece and unlikely to be any the worse for being served at air temperature. Ottolenghi recipes are notoriously effortful, and this is the rare one where you can actually bring extra work upon yourself. In Plenty , the recipe simply demands that you procure 300g of shortcrust pastry. Welp, I made my own. With a food processor on hand it's not too much of a drag, and I called on this ol' pumpkin tart recipe for (butter-heavy) quantities. From there it was a long, slow procession of chopping and roasting vegetables - capsicums in two colours, egg...

November 22, 2015 We joined a gang of veg*n bloggers and associated hangers-on for a potluck picnic in Edinburgh Gardens this past weekend. The potluck was organised by Steph , who added the fun/complexity of a 'celebrity chef' theme. The easy option would have been to fall back on one of the many crowd-pleasing Ottolenghi or Isa recipes we've made before, but we decided to embrace the spirit of the theme more thoroughly and veganise some unlikely celebrity chef dishes. Cindy had oodles of fun trawling her way through the slightly terrifying Paula Deen archives , weighing up options like the bacon cheeseburger meatloaf and the banana split brownie pizza - this Guardian rundown outlines just how horrifically unhealthy (and unvegan) Deen's cooking style is. In the end, after weighing up the picnic-appropriateness and veganisability of various mad recipes, we settled on these mini cheeseburger puffs , which basically involve wrapping the fillings of a cheeseburger in p...

October 17, 2015 Michael and I unintentionally went over-the-top on peanuts in our contributions to Hayley 's birthday picnic , doubling down on roasted peanuts and peanut butter in both dishes. While Michael's dressed a kale and quinoa salad, mine formed the base flavour for a sweet little pie. My first contact with this pie was as a recipe tester for Leigh Drew's Wrapped in Pastry . The peanut butter caramel filling was always destined to win me over, but it was the fresh blueberry topping that proved to be the clincher. Instead of the depth and richness of a more predictable chocolate/peanut butter pairing, blueberries really lighten up the caramel and lend a hint of tartness. It makes for a really nice springtime dessert. The shortcrust pastry was not my best effort. I think I added too little liquid, rendering it crumbly and difficult to roll (yet so very easy to swear at). By contrast, the peanut butter caramel was simple and completed in perhaps 5 minutes. I enjoyed ...

August 30, 2015 I was smitten by this recipe the day that Greek Vegetarian Lisa posted it , but it's taken almost two years for me to try my hand at it. I gave it a go on a Sunday afternoon home alone, but not before I set some seitan simmering and cued up Netflix to replay the second season of United States of Tara . The centre of the slice is a custard thrice-thickened with cornflour, semolina and eggs. I also made sure to add my fanciest vanilla. The custard is wrapped simply in a few layers of filo pastry, dabbed with butter. (Make sure to watch the video embedded in Lisa's post for some expert elastic bougatsa wrapping!) Since we weren't able to eat it all in a day I stored most of the custard and pastry separately in the fridge, assembling and baking just one pastry every few days when we were ready for it. I'm not usually one for daintily dusting sweets on serving, but I think the sugar and cinnamon really liven up this dessert. We also accompanied ours with sl...

Our first adventure on Friday morning was an hour-long tour of the Real Mary King's Close . In the 17th century, many Edinburgh residents lived in densely packed homes running steeply downhill from the Royal Mile to the Nor Loch. As the City Chambers were planned and constructed these homes were repossessed. (I think most of this happened by the 1750s, though the last residents were not removed until the very early 1900s.) Rather than comprehensively demolishing them, the homes were simply cut level and built on top of! Mary King, a seamstress, was the most senior member of her close (street) and thus, it was named after her. What remains of her close underground was the location of the tour, a series of dark, dank rooms. The costumed guide and thematic mannequins were a little cheesy, but also a most effective way of presenting the lives of those at the Close and others like it. The tour does not permit photography so you'll just have to see it for yourself! Once we eme...

The morning started as so many have on this trip - with a breakfast at our lodgings. Another vegetarian take on the English cooked breakfast for Michael; cereal and a bit of toast for me. Have I mentioned the strawberries? They've been abundant throughout our journey, and like none I've ever tasted. You don't need a super-red and almost over-ripe specimen to detect flavour - even the plainest ones are bursting with it! We bought a huge punnet from the supermarket in anticipation of the next leg of our train trip. But we still had an hour or two before our train was due, and we passed that time at the National Railway Museum . Fierce. Actually, this was precisely the tidy and informative collection you would expect of the British, particularly the section devoted to the carriages set up for the royal family. Here the warehouse was decked out in Union Jacks as far as the eye could see, and the platform covered in a red carpet! Travel by rail wasn't so luxurious for ...