AWAM Reviews...Tofutti

A few months ago I had me a big ole flat white coffee. And I had the following conversation with my stomach.

Me: Hey stomach! I know it's been a while, but how good is milk?
Stomach: Oh! Well this is awkward. See, the thing is.... we're not gonna be digesting that anymore.
Me: What are you - you can't just do that.
Stomach: No, I'm...I'm pretty sure I can.
Me: I'm not going to stop having dairy.
Stomach: Well then this is not going to be fun for you.

It wasn't. To add insult to injury, I've always loathed soy milk. It's milk...made from beans. Something has gone terribly wrong there. I don't believe nature intends anything for anyone, but I'm sure the humble soybean never thought: One day I'm going to be milk.

And yet here I am, months later, having finally accepting that I am, in fact, a lactard. And that soy milk is not so bad - I actually prefer it in my coffee these days. I'm slowly dipping my toe in the water of other dairy substitutes, and it is in that spirit that I decided to review the endearingly named cream cheese substitute, Tofutti.



If I was apprehensive of making milk out of beans, I was positively terrified that someone had attempted cheese. I wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't already absentmindedly bought english muffins. You can't have english muffins without cream cheese. It's the law.



Happily, it turns out cream cheese is not too hard to imitate. Although the Tofutti is disconcertingly white, the taste and texture are pleasant enough, and almost exactly the same as cream cheese. Well. Lite cream cheese.

Tofutti doesn't taste anything like real cream cheese in exactly the same way that lite cream cheese doesn't. But that is good enough for this lady's breakfast.

*** (3 stars)

Sunday Night Surprises.

Sometimes, you have one of those nights where you chuck whatever is in your fridge into a saucepan, and something wonderful is born. This was one of those nights. I can't claim most of the credit - the key ingredient in this recipe is the punjabi masala on Show Me the Curry. I made this up a couple of months ago (although I halved the recipe) and I'm discovering that I adore having it in the freezer - it's a fantastic base for a quick meal.

I had some eggplant, red capsicum and cherry tomatoes that were getting a bit old (left over from pizza adventures) and I always have tinned tomatoes and cous cous on hand. Throw in some of your favourite spices, and there you are. I'm not sure you could reasonably call it authentic Indian - it's more like Indian meets Italian - but it was pretty dang tasty either way. So tasty we nommed it before I remembered to take a photo. This post is brought to you by public domain images of eggplant!



A Sort of Eggplant Masala (serves 2)

You will need:

Olive oil
1 small eggplant
1 small red capsicum, finely diced.
1 punnet of cherry or grape tomatoes, halved.
1 tin of tomatoes
1/2 cup punjabi masala1/2 cup water
1 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tbsp cumin
1/2 tbsp ground coriander (or a bit more, to taste)
1/2 tbsp ground cardamom
1/4 tsp dried chili seeds (or more. I'm a bit of a wimp)
Salt
1/2 cup dry cous cous
1/2 cup boiling water
1 tsp butter (optional, vegan without)
Fried shallots, to serve.


You will need to:

Cut your eggplant into thin strips, about 3cm by 1cm. Toss in olive oil, and lay on a well oiled baking tray. Salt generously. Grill for about 15 minutes on medium high, or until golden brown, but not charred.

Heat a non-stick saucepan or frying pan. When hot, add mustard seeds and dry-fry for a minute or so.

Add the (defrosted) masala, the capsicum, and the cherry tomatoes. Stir together and fry for a further few minutes.

Add the tinned tomatoes, spices and water. Simmer for about ten minutes, until thickened.

Add the eggplant, and cook together for about five minutes. Adjust the spices and seasoning to taste.

Prepare your cous cous by adding the boiling water, covering, and letting stand for five minutes. Stir through the butter.

And serve with fried shallots. It makes for a rather nice Sunday night.

Delicious Books

It rained today. It was cold, wet and dreary. I bought a salad sandwich for lunch; it was disappointing (multigrain: my bread nemesis). But I came home after a long day of feeling sorry for myself to find some presents waiting for me. There are always a few books you intend to buy when you get a chance, and every so often I buy them all at once from Abe Books. It's a great site that searches second hand book sellers from around the world. I've found some fantastic, elusive books of plays and poems for much less than their retail price, but it only recently occurred to me that I could buy cookbooks too.



The Spice Box by Manju Shivkaj Singh

An ex-library book, I think it was around $6 US, maybe $15 with shipping. It's in excellent condition, although I can see it getting pretty worn out in my kitchen pretty quickly. I've never attempted Indian cooking before, but I've decided that this is the winter. And after some research, I decided this was the book. I'm already drooling over the recipes for Aloo Matar, Tamarind Rice, Potato-Filled Bread (!) and Vermicelli Pudding.



Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

I found this book in a shop in town. It came with many, many recommendations - and a $100 price tag. AbeBooks had it for under $20 US, including shipping. And it comes with delightful hand scribbled notes - always worth extra in my opinion. I'm excited just looking at the chapter headings - a whole chapter on breads by hand, one on gratins, one on dumplings! Over 1400 recipes - I can't wait to get started.

Other resources I love when I'm down on my pennies are the Food Blog Search website, Big Oven, and Cooks Illustrated. Happy hunting friends!

I Turn My Camera On

I, like my fellow blog mistress, belong to the cult of the iPhone. I just love that I can take my poorly lit, grainy, shitty photos and with a bit of tinkering can turn them into romantic Lomo snapshots that wouldn't look out of place on a postcard dated 1965. Inspired by Tara's recent post I've just now trawled through my iPhone album, and perhaps rather worryingly I've found a substantial number of shots of half eaten food, drunk and dark photos of me and my beer-faced friends, and about three million blurry shots of my very disgruntled cat. (Make of that what you will, folks.)

If my iPhone album is anything to go by, I seem to spend my life eating, trapping my friends into terrible myspace photos, or else chasing my cat around our kitchen... excellent. But enter one of my multitude of fancypants apps, and suddenly I'm not a food obsessed cat lady, I'm a cool and groovy chick, an epicurean, a frikkin wildlife photographer, and I'm living in some sort of hip pastiche world of pretty cats and italian food. Guys, I'm basically living in this Lady Gaga Clip. Thanks, Steve Jobs!

So what am I doing with all of these photos? Well, given that my food-blogging seems to have doomed me to a lifetime of disrupting meals with a sneaky photo shoot, I've been able to compile something of an iPhone tour of Melbourne eateries. Here are three of the half-eaten best.

This cake looked so amazing that I managed to snap a shot before it was consumed. From The Green Refectory on Sydney Road, their baked goods are amazing. This slice of strawberry flavoured weight gain was huge, huge and delicious.

Bolognese and watermelon granita from Pellegrini's, my favourite little italian in the CBD. This place feels more or less like the above-mentioned Gaga clip. There is even a signed Billy Joel photo above the bar, just to drive home the Italio-American vibe. I love it in there.

Borek from the Queen Victoria Markets. Getting your hands on one of these babies requires queueing, shouldering, and shouting. Fighting through the scrum at the borek shop is worth the effort though, spinach and feta heaven.

And one blurry cat photo, because I'm pretty sure he's going to kill me some day soon, and only this shot seems to convince people...

My Weekend (An Illegible Photo Essay)

This was the weekend I discovered, or rediscovered, several things.

1. I like apple beer. I like apple beer better straight out of the long neck in the car park of the bottle-o at a late hour, and a sub-zero temperature. I like apple beer best while watching dear friends dance with inflatable dinosaurs.


2. There are iPhone apps that will make your bad, drunken photos look like they were taken badly by your drunk parents back in the seventies. In one saturday night I managed to take about 83 photos of early, early morning fog and lamplights in Canberra. My apple-beer brain thought fog and lamplights were the most original photographic subject known to man.



3. Most importantly, all these factors conspired the next morning to convince me that the only thing that would alleviate apple-beer hangover was Gordon Ramsay style scrambled eggs.


Bad photo; good food. I like to think it encapsulates the paradox that is Gordon Ramsey: how can such an off-putting man create such tasty, tasty breakfasts? I don't know, but you have to trust me when I say these are the BEST SCRAMBLED EGGS I have ever had.





For those of you who don't want to look at Gordon Ramsey (I cannot blame you), these are the basics:

• Crack two or three eggs into a cold, non-stick saucepan.

• Add half to one tablespoon or so of butter.

• Put on a low heat, and stir (with a rubber spatula) continuously until eggs are well combined and butter is melted.

• Turn heat up slightly, and keep stirring until eggs thicken, and scramble. This might take a while, but it will be worth it.

• Season at the end of cooking, not the beginning! Salt does bad things to raw eggs.
  

Don't bother to add cream; you don't need it. Serve with toast and coffee and the slowly returning memories of last night.

Fuck You Winter

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You know, I love scarves. And coats. And gloves with bows on them. And I like it when your breath fogs in the cold, and you can pretend you're a smoker (you may also like to pretend you work with Donald Draper). I love frost that lasts until midday, air that tastes like snow, and the fog on Lake Burley Griffin.

I like winter. But you know what? I am tired of being freezing cold all the time. If you live in Canberra you're probably going to work while the temperature is below zero. That's just not right. I don't think the work day should begin until the temperature's back in the pluses. Just a suggestion, Stanhope.

But I write (sitting on top of the heater in my lounge room) with an idea: eat soup all the time. I admit it's nothing revolutionary. People have been fighting winter with soup since the dawn of time. Or at least the dawn of soup. But if you're yet to break out the soup pot, here's a recipe to get you started. It's adapted from the wonderful cook book Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special. The Moosewood Restaurant is a New York State based collective, with an emphasis on organic, vegetarian, wholesome food. Read more about them here. This soup reminds me of the best of winter: home, hearth and heart.



Tomato, Barley and Spinach Soup

The original recipe calls for kale and sun-dried tomatoes not packed in oil. I couldn't find either, so I used spinach and roasted some fresh tomatoes. It turned out rather lovely.

What You Will Need

1/3 cup pearl barley
2 bay leaves
5 cups water
7 large fresh tomatoes
1 tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper
2 garlic cloves, minced or crushed
1 red onion, diced
2 400ml tins of crushed tomatoes
1 tsp dried rosemary
1 generous pinch of cayenne pepper
2 cups of fresh, washed spinach or kale

What you will need to do

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees C.

Halve the fresh tomatoes, and toss with olive oil, salt and pepper. Place cut side down on a lightly oiled baking tray, and then put into the oven. Roast for 30 minutes minimum (there really isn't a maximum when it comes to roasting tomatoes).

Combine water, bay leaves and barley in a soup pot (non-reactive is best) and bring to the boil. Simmer for 20 minutes.

In a separate pan, fry onion and garlic until soft and translucent, 10 - 15 minutes.

When the barley is cooked remove the bay leaves and add cooked onion and garlic, tinned tomatoes, rosemary, and cayenne.

Remove the tomatoes from the oven, and slip the skins off. Discard the skins. Roughly chop or break up the tomatoes, and add to the soup.

Simmer for a further 10 minutes, or until soup is the desired thickness.

Add the spinach or kale, and stir through until wilted.

Serve with some bread, some wine, some friends, and a finger raised to the heavens.

The Package Project

About two months ago I signed up to participate in a lovely little blog initiative called The Package Project. The Project - created over at Cupcake Couture - pairs package partners and fellow bloggers, who swap pretty packages and handmade delights from different corners of the globe.

I have happily been paired up with Tonia over at The Fairly Constant Reader, and after much agnoising, rummaging through stuffed full craft drawers and trawling through local markets and charity shops, I have finally put together my package and posted it off to England. I will share a little more about my package once I'm assured of its safe arrival in the English countryside, and I'm definitely looking forward to unwrapping what is currently on its way to me.

I urge any and all of you fellow bloggers to take part in The Package Project's next run. I've enjoyed putting together my little parcel almost as much as I've enjoyed corresponding with its recipient. I've been getting to know her through stalking her online perusing her blog, and browsing her online store too - just gorgeous. Brown paper packages tied up with string really do make my list of favourite things, and sending one to a near complete stranger has been a pleasure.

Oh, and just as a complete aside (I cannot think of a natural segue between mailing gifts and the musical stylings of Colin Meloy.) I cannot. stop. listening. to his cover of Joni Mitchell's "A Case Of You". I fell into The Decemberists' hipster trap some years ago, and if he keeps covering the likes of Joni, I'll be happily trapped forever.