james test

June 24-25, 2017 I've had these chocolate & sesame yo-yos from Ottolenghi's  Guardian column  bookmarked for 18 months, just waiting for the seasons and our Ottolenghi club dates to align. They come under the apt heading Rich pickings , sandwiching biscuits dense with chocolate and sesame seeds with layers of chocolate ganache and  tahini cheesecake spread.  Unfortunately, the instructions weren't quite what I needed to get the job done, and I've adjusted my instructions to reflect what's more workable in my kitchen. For example, the ambient heat from the boiled cream wasn't enough to melt all of the chocolate and butter in my ganache, and I had to set up a makeshift double boiler. The rest of my butter was too firm for hand-beating, yet the biscuit dough was too soft for rolling! What is the temperature in Ottolenghi's test kitchen, I wonder? In retrospect, I reckon it's worth refrigerating the biscuit dough before forming the cookies. They spread ...

June 25, 2017 Ottolenghi club took May off, but we reconvened on the weekend for a real winter-lenghi experience. As always, it was a sensational meal, featuring vego scotch eggs , sweetcorn soup with chipotle and lime , roast cauliflower with green olives and Cindy's dessert, which will be posted here soon. I considered trying this amazing looking potato dish , but decided that transporting it would be too difficult, so I settled for an Ottolenghi stew. This stew is from Plenty More and features classic Ottolenghi ingredients Iranian dried limes and barberries, both of which we sourced from Middle Eastern grocery stores on Sydney Road. It's relatively simple for an Otto recipe, although he still manages to have you both simmer and bake the stew just to add some extra steps. The end result is gigantic - only about two-thirds of it squeezed into our casserole dish in the picture above - I'd recommend cutting in half if you're not cooking for a group. It's tasty and...

April 8, 2017 Well, I think we squeezed every last possible picnic out of this summer! I'm sure of it because little more than an hour after we finished up our outdoor Ottolenghi Club last Saturday, the wind changed and it poured with rain. But while the breeze was still blowing from the north and the sun was shining, we shared kuku , salads, and florets of fried cauliflower. We saw out the summer with this fig tart. It's one of the most eye-catching pictures in Plenty More , I reckon - several dozen glistening crimson fig geodes stacked across a golden square of pastry, drizzled with lemon glaze, with teeny herb leaves tucked in. Read the ingredient list and it goes one better - there's some kind of goat's cheese frangipane in between the figs and the pastry! It seems like one of those clever dishes that straddles sweet and savoury, a tantalising hybrid of cheese platter and Danish pastry. The original recipe includes instructions for a yeasted pastry dough, but Ottole...

February 25, 2017 I was travelling for my job during the week leading up February Ottolenghi club, which meant I wouldn't have time to make icecream. Instead I made posset! I've tried my hand at posset once before 5 years ago , funnily enough for the same reason; I guess a dish of refrigerated cream and sugar is the next obvious choice after a dish of freeze-churned cream and sugar. I've since learned that curdling the cream is another essential part of posset. This allows the dessert to set to a velvety self-supporting consistency in the fridge. Ottolenghi's version uses lime zest and leaves to infuse the cream, then lime juice for the curdling. He'd have us pile it up with papaya for serving, but I preferred to use mango. The overall effect is both rich and refreshing, sweet and sour - a beauty in its own right, and not simply an icecream understudy. Mango-lime posset (slightly adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi's Guardian column ) 900mL double cream 18 fresh or fr...

February 25, 2017 We had such a great time at January's Ottolenghi-club, that we reconvened just a month later for Febru-lenghi, another celebration of Yotam's ridiculously good recipes. You'd think it would be getting hard to keep standards high, but this felt like one of the best club-meetings ever - you can get a full run-down over on our facebook page .  I was home alone for the week and got a bit carried away, committing to three different dips - butternut and tahini spread , avocado and broad bean dip and this butterbean hummus with red pepper and walnut paste. This was all a fairly significant time commitment, although a lot of it was spent just waiting for things to roast or cool. The end result was amazing though - each one of these dips was somebody's favourite around the table. The beautifully fresh avocado and broad bean dip was the most summery, while the sweet and nutty pumpkin dip was a bit heartier.  The fanciest of all was the butterbean hummus, which ...

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 21, 2017 January saw the long-awaited return of Ottolenghi club, our semi-regular potluck-style assault on Yotam's greatest hits . We had an empty day before the dinner, so I decided to take on something a bit more challenging than my usual fancy salad and dove head-first into these eggplant nests. These were an outstanding success - the choice dish in a meal loaded up with excellence and one that we made again before we even managed to get this blog post written. The crispy nests are wrapped around a smooth, smoky eggplant filling and served with a tangy and spicy dipping sauce - they're great straight out of the oven and nearly as good at room temperature.  The key ingredient is kataifi pastry - we found some at A1 Grocery on Sydney Road , and I imagine any decent Mediterranean or Middle Eastern food-store will come through for you. I've read that you can substitute shredded filo pastry, but I reckon you're better off making the effort to track this down ...

October 22-23, 2016 I picked this recipe out of Plenty More with the express purpose of using up some ingredients (cream cheese, eggs, za'atar) but we'd make it again on its own merits. It's kind of a crustless quiche, although the main feature is really a dozen or so melt-in-the-mouth eggplant slices, and the cherry tomatoes nestled among them.  The egg-and-dairy filling is more of a light, fluffy binder with the odd dot of sharp feta. Fresh oregano leaves and a last-minute sprinkle of za'atar bring some complexity to the flavour - all this savoury 'cheesecake' needs is a simple green salad on the side to make up a pretty warm-weather meal. (You might spy some leftover carrot salad filled out with spinach and tomatoes in the background.) Eggplant cheesecake (slightly adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty More , also published on The Guardian ) 2 medium eggplants 1/4 cup olive oil 100g cream cheese 1/4 cup double cream 4 eggs 150g feta 150g cherry tomatoe...

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...

March 20, 2016 Our semi-regular Ottolenghi cooking crew took advantage of one of the last glorious summer evenings of the season to head to Princes Park for a picnic potluck. I decided to avoid the big sharable salad-style dishes I usually fall back on and went scoping for snackier options, settling on two dip-based dishes that looked relatively easy to throw together. First up: polenta crisps an avocado and yoghurt dip. This was not as easy as I originally assumed - the dip was super simple, but the polenta crisp making required a lot of challenging shallow-frying. It all worked out okay in the end, but this is a recipe that you need to devote a bit of time and effort to. The pay-off is worth it in the end - my polenta chips turned out like mini schnitzels, and were an excellent vessel for gulping down big dollops of tangy avocado and lime sauce. The second recipe actually was an easy one (I won't reproduce it here - see the 2nd recipe on this page ) - a simple combination of y...

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...

January 26, 2016 Our semi-regular Ottolenghi potluck club had its first meeting for 2016 on the January 26 public holiday. With warm weather forecast and a whole day to prepare food, I decided to whip up a couple of salads from Plenty More as our savoury contribution to the spread (the full feast is on display over on our facebook page ). My first choice was pumpkin with chilli yoghurt and coriander sauce (pictured above), at least partly because it was pitched as the simplest recipe in the whole book. Given I was turning the oven on to cook the pumpkin, I stuck to the 'roast' section of the book and added the roasted cauliflower, grape and cheddar salad as dish #2. The pumpkin dish was indeed easy - you roast up some cinnamon-coated pumpkin wedges, whiz together a herby sauce and stir some Sriracha into yoghurt and you're done. The results belie the relative simplicity of the recipe - the sweetness of the pumpkin perfectly complements the tangy yoghurt and the slightly sa...

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...

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. ...

September 2, 2015 September saw the fifth meeting of our Ottolenghi potluck gang after a few months off, with a vaguely spring-themed dinner to take advantage of Victoria's newest public holiday. (The wonders of our previous meals can be seen in various degrees of blurriness here , here , here and here .) As always it was an incredible spread, featuring stuffed onions, muhammara, stuffed peppers, rosemary savoury bread pudding, carrot & mungbean salad, green salad plus the spring salad featured in this post and an incredible dessert that Cindy will post about in a day or two. I was inspired by Melbourne's burst of warm weather to go for a very spring-themed dish, a simple salad making use of asparagus and broad beans that are both at their peak right now. I altered a couple of things, frying the shallot gently rather than using it raw and bafflingly failing to buy nigella seeds. It was reasonably straightforward by Ottolenghi standards and added some freshness and variety...

June 27, 2015 The fifth gathering of our semi-regular Ottolenghi potluck posse was booked in for Saturday night, part of a ridiculously busy weekend for Cindy and I. We scaled back our usual ambitions and found an uncharacteristically simple Ottolenghi recipe in Plenty as our contribution. By the time we'd done our grocery shopping, dinner had been called off due to illness, leaving us to enjoy this dish without having to share. It really is surprisingly straightforward given the usual rigmarole involved in an Ottolenghi meal - you can do it all in one pot over about 25 minutes and the ingredient list is  modest dozen with only sumac falling outside our standard kitchen stocks (thankfully we'd been given a little take home stash of sumac at Maha on our previous visit, so we were good to go). For all its simplicity, this is a lovely meal - we were generous with the garlic (just one clove, but a really ginormous one), which I'd recommend, while the lemon, herbs and caraw...

April 26, 2015 At the end of April, we hosted the fourth gathering of Ottolenghi admirers in our home. Without a bike ride constraining our cooking choice, Michael and I committed to preparing the extravagant mushroom and cheese lasagne from Plenty as the autumnal centrepiece. But of course I couldn't leave dessert alone, flicking through Plenty More and jotting down simple rhubarb and quince options on the end of the shopping list. The quinces won out in the end. You probably already know how to poach them, and I've done it before too . The vanilla, orange and star anise in the poaching liquid here aren't anything surprising, but using pomegranate juice instead of water is a very Ottolenghi tweak. It lends a deep crimson to the dish where the quinces can't - they're poached for just 20 minutes and retain the translucent colour of a pear on the inside. On their own, the quinces are rich, velvety, vegan and gluten-free. Ottolenghi serves them with clotted cream ...

March 8, 2015 The March meeting of Cookbook Club was a Sunday brunch, with the express purpose of eating the Super French Toast in Ottolenghi's Plenty More . I thought it was the right occasion to push a secondary fig agenda. Of course Ottolenghi could assist, with a recipe for 'roasted figs with pomegranate molasses and orange zest' tucked into the Sweetened section of Plenty More . Michael helpfully picked up the ingredients on Saturday, and that had me in good shape to cobble it all together on Sunday morning in less than an hour. A little whisking and chopping, 30 minutes' maceration passed with simmering and more whisking, 10 minutes under the grill and we had a handsome side dish all packed up and ready to be cycled over to our hosts. I was a little skeptical that a brief grilling would produce the soft, glistening figs pictured in the cookbook, but mine were a very respectable mimic. The Super French Toast demonstrates that Ottolenghi is as devoted to fats as he...