james test

April 29, 2017 We chose these Street Vegan  empanadas as a cooking project last weekend. They're certainly a commitment: there's pastry dough to make, a chimichurri spice paste to saute the tempeh filling in, a sweet paprika-spiked glaze, some slightly fiddly assembly and a relish on the side. We made it a team effort. There were a couple of recipe tweaks along the way, making the most of the sweeteners we had on hand and cooking down the onions a long time to make the relish sweeter still. The pastry has an unusual addition of silken tofu and is a huge bother to roll. I must admit that it baked up awfully well, though - a bit of crunch, a bit of crumble and a lot of toasty comfort. The glaze added some welcome brightness of colour and flavour to the hearty pastries, but there was far too much of it and I've reduced the quantity accordingly in the recipe below. I feel ambivalent about these empanadas - they're very enjoyable, but their flavour isn't as complex as th...

November 26-27, 2016 I know it means a lot to many women my age, but I have never taken more than a passing interest in Gilmore Girls . Dean vs Jess vs Logan? Choose self-esteem, Rory . Nevertheless, the new season was a big deal for some of my friends, and it was fun to share their fandom for a night. We went all out on themed viewing snacks - coffee, popcorn, marshmallows, cookie dough and home-delivered pizza. Although the Gilmore girls aren't ones to bake, I preferred making my poptarts over the real thing.  Street Vegan served me well in the poptart stakes once before , and if anything it did even better this second time around. I chose a strawberry-rhubarb filling instead of chocolate, and doubled down with pink icing. My version has more rhubarb and less strawberries than the cookbook version, which does no harm. I had some moments of concern when I poured in the cornflour thickener and the filling seized up into a dense jelly. Thankfully it relaxed into a more appetising j...

August 20, 2016 We had a pretty quiet weekend lined up, so I decided it was time to get stuck into one of the many intriguing but complicated recipes in Street Vegan , my birthday present from Cindy. The sandwiches section of the book is filled with amazing combos, all of which require a fair amount of effort. After much debate, we settled on these rolls filled with Thai barbecue seitan ribs, pickled onions and smoky, roasted peanuts. There are a lot of elements to these but they're all relatively simple and standalone, which means you can make them whenever you've got time - you could easily prepare the nuts, onions and sauce well ahead of eating, which would make the actual assembly trivially easy.  We doubled the ribs component of these to make sure we had leftovers, but even then we wound up with a disproportionate amount of the barbecue sauce - don't be afraid to tweak the quantities a bit to balance things out.  The end results were spectacular: the ribs themselves we...

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 24, 2016 Cindy bought me a copy of the Cinnamon Snail cookbook for my birthday (and whipped up an amazing meal from it while we were in Stockholm), and I wanted to take it for a test drive before she jetted off to the US. Melbourne was turning on typically soup-friendly weather, and this broccoli/beer soup seemed like something I could tackle on a Friday night.  It came together really easily - you can cook the soup while the 'chorizo' is cooking. The sunflower seed chorizo is worth the effort too, smoky and spicy with a little bit of crunch. This recipe made way more than we needed, but I enjoyed the soup so much that I made a second batch straight afterwards to use it up. The soup itself come out nice and thick thanks to all of the blended up potatoes - it's part soup/part mashed potato, with the nooch adding some cheesiness. Ours didn't come out the kind of vibrant green that was pictured in the book - the broccoli colour was swamped by the beer and tamari, so ...

May 27, 2016 This year we celebrated Michael's birthday in Stockholm. I had organised a couple of gifts for him while I was in Melbourne and he was already travelling. I hid a proudly home-sewn shirt for him in the lining of my backpack, but didn't want to carry the weight of the cookbook I'd ordered all around Europe. Instead I photographed a few of the recipes that might plausibly be made in a small foreign kitchen, and prepared a couple of them for him as a birthday preview. The cookbook was Street Vegan , a collection of recipes from the Cinnamon Snail food truck that won Michael's affection and appetite in New York City two years ago. There's a detailed review and recipe trials on Veganopoulous posted late last year, and she kindly let me browse her copy while we were hanging out around then. There's lots of tasty-looking seitan that draws on our whole pantry-full of supplies and an entire doughnut chapter. It'll be fun stuff for weekend cooking pro...