Cornflake icecream bars

January 24, 2022

   

Here's a Meera Sodha dessert that I made, purely for the fun of it! It's a vegan icecream bar that celebrates breakfast cereal. There's the sugary, crunchy cornflake layers on top and bottom, most obviously, and the creamy filling is also infused with cornflakes. Between them there's a strip of tangy raspberries that save it all from cloying sweetness.

The recipe requires a blender but not an icecream maker. I really liked this combination of oat milk and cashews to form the icecream base. I could taste the cornflake infusion in the unfrozen mixture, but I think it's drowned out by the actual cornflakes in the finished dish and I'd be inclined to skip that process in future - it'll save time, mess and waste.

The coconut oil was surprisingly pleasant as a cornflake binder, but I think it's just inevitable that slicing and handling these icecream bars will be messy regardless. I wonder if it would just be easier to break this down into bowls of icecream scattered with Frosties and raspberries. I'm not sure that it would feel as fun, somehow.

This would also be a fun template for other cereal flavours - I'm imagining Coco Pops and strawberries, or (a vegan equivalent to) Froot Loops and blueberries!

Cornflake icecream bars

(slightly adapted from a recipe by Meera Sodha from The Guardian)

cornflake layers

175g cornflakes, crushed into crumbs

80g caster sugar

100g coconut oil, melted

250g raspberries (I used frozen), cut in half (I don't think this matters)

icecream

75g cornflakes

550mL oat milk

150g unsalted cashews

60g caster sugar

2 tablespoons maple or golden syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

pinch of salt

Line a 20cm square cake tin with plastic wrap, leaving as much overhang as you can on the sides.

Make the cornflake layer by stirring together the cornflake crumbs and sugar in a large bowl. Pour in the coconut oil and thoroughly combine. Pour half of the cornflake mixture into the cake tin and use the back of large spoon to spread it out evenly and compress it as best you can. Arrange the raspberries across the base - Sodha manages to achieve large even halves in a grid across her tray, but mine were more haphazard. Place the cake tin in the freezer while you prepare the icecream.

For the icecream, stir together the cornflakes and oat milk in a bowl, to infuse the milk with the cereal flavour for around 20 minutes.

Place the cashews in a small saucepan and cover them with water. Bring them to the boil, and simmer the cashews for 20 minutes. Drain the cashews and place them in a blender.

Strain the cornflakes out of the oat milk such that the oat milk lands in the blender, and as much liquid as possible has been squeezed out of the cereal. Discard the soggy cereal. Add the sugar, syrup, vanilla, oil and salt to the blender and completely liquidise the mixture - expect it to take a few minutes. The mixture should be smooth and creamy.

Retrieve the cake tin from the freezer and carefully pour the cashew cream mixture over the raspberries; smooth over the top if it's uneven. Freeze for 2-4 hours, until the icecream is firm. Press the remaining cornflake crumbs into the top of the icecream and freeze for another 2 hours to set completely.

Slice the icecream cake into bars using a large, sharp knife that's been run under cold water. I found it easiest to flip the cake upside down onto a cutting board and cut it from base to top.

Meera Sodha's tomato curry

January 15, 2022

   

Several friends have enthusiastically recommended Meera Sodha's East to me in the past year. I recently learned that Sodha has been contributing a vegan recipe column to The Guardian for years, so I've decided to get to know her cooking through that first, and spent a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon bookmarking recipes in the archives. This curry interested me but I didn't bother to hold onto it, since Michael wouldn't be excited about such a tomato-heavy meal. But it remained fresh in my mind when Michael had a weekend out of town, and I went back in search of it. 

I had a nice time preparing this - toasting and grinding spices, chopping tomatoes, cooking everything down over half an hour - but I don't think I got it quite right. First, I wasn't able to buy curry leaves close by and I think they would have been terrific (I've kept them in the recipe below). Second, I cooked the curry for the recommended time period but I don't think I got the coconut milk down to the stage that Sodha aims for. Certainly my curry looks very different to The Guardian photo, though it can be hard to know sometimes where a recipe ends and the aspirational food styling begins. 

Anyway, my coconut milk remained quite milky over the instructed 20-25 minutes, and over several reheats in the following days, so perhaps I need to turn up the heat and/or take a lot longer over the final simmering stage. I did an image search of thakkali kuzhambu, the dish that inspired Sodha's, and it seems to be quite liquid in most cases, with the tomatoes collapsing or blended into the gravy.

Meera Sodha's tomato curry

(a recipe published in The Guardian, where it's credited to her book East)

1 1/4 teaspoons fennel seeds

1 1/4 teaspoons black mustard seeds

1 1/4 teaspoons cumin seeds

1 1/4 teaspoons coriander seeds

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 onions, finely chopped

1 1/4 teaspoons salt

8 fresh curry leaves

1.2 kg mixed tomatoes (I used a kilo bag of medium-sized plus a punnet of colourful cherry-sized)

1 green chilli, finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 1/2 teaspoons tamarind paste

400mL can coconut milk

In a frypan over medium heat, toast the fennel, mustard, cumin and coriander seeds for a couple of minutes. Turn off the heat and grind them coarsely with a mortar and pestle.

Put the frypan back on medium heat and pout in the oil. Add the onions, salt and curry leaves. Cook them for 10-12 minutes, until the onions are well softened. During this time, slice the tomatoes into large bite-sized pieces.

Add the chilli and garlic to the onions, cooking for a further 2 minutes. Transfer half of the onion mixture to a second frypan and set it over medium heat too. Divide the tamarind and coconut milk between the two frypans and stir it into the onion mixture. Spread the tomatoes out over the milky mixture, ideally in a single layer. Cook the tomatoes, without stirring, for 20-25 minutes. Sodha says that the aim is to drive off the water in the coconut milk, such that you can see oil on the sides of the pan, but the tomatoes remain juicy. I'll try cooking mine longer next time.

Serve with naan or rice.  

Pineapple crumble

January 15, 2022

   

   

Michael was away last weekend so I used the opportunity to cook with some ingredients he doesn't enjoy as much as I do. First up: pineapple. I bookmarked this Wholesome Cook recipe a couple of years ago because I'd never really thought of putting pineapple into crumble! But I really liked the idea of teaming pineapple with gingerbread spices and some coconut.

Everything about this recipe is nice without quite hitting on my personal preferences. The crumble is wholesome and filling, with lots of oats, some wholemeal flour, and limited sweetener. I think I was after something a bit lighter and more tropical - I could try less oats, lots more coconut and perhaps macadamias instead of almonds for round two.

   

The pineapple bakes to an impressive midpoint between sour freshness and fully-cooked sweetness, but with a crumble this sturdy I think I actually want that OTT sweetness. (Conversely, my more coconut-based crumble ideas could suit this style of pineapple perfectly!) The spices are present, but I could go for more ginger. I'm unsure why extra water is added to the fruit, because it just pooled in the bottom of my dish (you'll glimpse that in the next photo).

This version is good, though, on its own terms. And it has versatility! I enjoyed it equally with caramel macadamia icecream for dessert, and with yoghurt for breakfast.

   

Pineapple crumble

(slightly adapted from a recipe by Wholesome Cook)

3/4 cup rolled oats

1/4 cup wholemeal flour

2 tablespoons almonds, chopped

2 tablespoons shredded coconut

75g butter, diced

3 tablespoons golden syrup

1 pineapple

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/4 cup water

Preheat an oven to 180°C.

In a medium-sized bowl, stir together the oats, flour, almonds and coconut. Rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir through the golden syrup until just combined. Pop the mixture in the fridge for a few minutes while you prepare the pineapple.

Remove the peel and core from the pineapple and cut it into chunks. Place it in a baking dish and sprinkle over the ginger, cinnamon and cloves. Pour over the water and stir it all together. (I would omit the water if making again.) Retrieve the crumble from the fridge and crumble it over the pineapple. Bake it all for about 25 minutes, until golden brown on top. 

Give the crumble 5-10 minutes to cool before serving.

Baked spring rolls with sweet chilli sauce

January 13, 2022

   

On my most recent weekday off, I decided to make lunch my primary project and picked out Hetty McKinnon's baked spring rolls from her recent Chinese Takeaway series on ABC Everyday. This is a clever technique that I've used before - by turning your oven way up, and brushing or spraying your spring rolls with oil, it's possible to make golden, crunchy spring rolls without the hassle of deep-frying. (Grilling leftover spring rolls also helps bring back the crunch they lose in the fridge.)

McKinnon's spring rolls are stuffed with mung bean vermicelli, carrot, celery, water chestnuts and spring onion. I loved the distinct crunchiness of the water chestnuts and will use them again; celery, I'm less fond of. I gather that shiitake mushrooms are another common filling for Cantonese spring rolls, and I'll be keen to reduce the vermicelli volume a little and get some mushrooms into the mix.

To round this out for lunch, I served the spring rolls with lettuce leaves. It really freshened up the meal on a hot day, but I suspect it's more of a Vietnamese technique and doesn't match the origins of this recipe.

The other fun thing going on with McKinnon's recipe is making your own sweet chilli sauce! It's easy to make within the time the rolls take to bake, and a bit livelier than the years-old bottle in my fridge. That said, there's no harm it falling back on whatever bottled sauce you have on hand: soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, sweet chilli sauce, plum sauce, and Chinkiang vinegar are all common and delicious. 

   

Baked spring rolls with sweet chilli sauce

(slightly adapted from a recipe by Hetty McKinnon, 

published on ABC Everyday)

spring rolls

80g mung bean vermicelli (also called glass noodles)

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1 clove garlic, minced

100g carrot (1 medium for me), peeled and finely diced

70g (1 stick) celery, finely diced

80g canned water chestnuts, finely diced

1 spring onion, finely sliced

1 teaspoon tamari

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon white pepper

250g packet 20cm x 20cm spring roll pastry sheets, defrosted

spray oil

sweet chilli sauce

1/4 cup caster sugar

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 tablespoon tomato sauce

1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon red chilli flakes

1 clove garlic, minced

1 teaspoon cornflour

2 tablespoons water

1/2 teaspoon salt

Place the vermicelli in a heatproof bowl, pour boiling water over them, and allow them to soak and soften for 5 minutes. Drain them and use kitchen scissors or a knife to roughly chop them into shorter lengths.

Set a frypan over medium heat. Pour in the sesame oil, then add the garlic, carrot and celery and sauté for 2-3 minutes. Add the vermicelli, water chestnuts, spring onion, tamari, salt and pepper. Mix everything together well, and after a minute or so in the pan, turn off the heat and allow the filling to cool for at least 10 minutes (and even overnight in the fridge).

Preheat an oven to 230°C. Get your rolling stuff set up at a table, with a chopping board in front of you, the vermicelli mixture close to hand with a spoon in it, spray oil accessible, and two greased baking trays ready for rolls. Take the spring roll pastry sheets out of their plastic and wrap them in a damp towel.

Peel off one spring roll sheet and place it in a diamond shape on the chopping board. Spoon about 2 tablespoons of filling about 5 cm away from the corner closest to you. Roll the corner over the filling to enclose it, then fold in the two long, adjoining sides. Roll the parcel just a little more away from you to secure the filling, then spray the remaining pastry strip with oil before completing the roll. Place the roll on a baking tray and repeat with the remaining filling and pastry.

Spray all of the rolls with oil, and bake them for 15 minutes. Flip each roll over and bake for a further 10-12 minutes, until they're golden and crispy. 

While the spring rolls are baking, place all of the sauce ingredients in a small saucepan set over medium heat. Stir them until well combined, and cook until just thickened.

Serve the spring rolls as soon as they're baked, with little dipping bowls of sauce on the side.

Sister of Soul

January 1, 2022

   

On new year's day we got up a little early for a bayside swim with our mates Lisa and Steph. St Kilda had still barely woken up by the time we were done, so we took a streetside booth at Sister of Soul for breakfast. The staff were conscientious in checking vax status, and helpfully showed us the QR codes at our table that we could use to order and pay for food.

It was nice to still have access to paper menus as we browsed the options. The current breakfast selection is all vegan (with gluten free options clearly marked), running to 8 dishes that cover the important bases: toast with spreads, a big brekkie, smashed avo, an acai bowl, and pancakes. 

   

Surprisingly I wasn't in the mood for those blueberry pancakes, though I saw them go to another table and they looked great. Instead I worked my way through the corn fritters ($20), which had a fairly even ratio of batter to corn kernels, and apparently also include zucchini! There was lots of avocado-sour cream puree to slather them with, a smattering of mango salsa to brighten the flavours, and lots of coriander to garnish. I teamed it with a watermelon, orange, strawberry and mint juice ($7.50) - the juicing happens on site daily, but it looks like they're bottling portions up individually at the moment.

   

Everyone else at the table was set on the Sister's One Big Brekkie ($22.50): a well-flavoured tofu scramble on toast with an excellent potato & sweet potato rosti, avocado, roasted mushrooms and wilted spinach. Michael like the accompanying tub of tomato kasundi and spread it around liberally.

It was a refreshing and deeply satisfying way to start the year. But we can't promise to carry on the way we've started - visits to St Kilda have always been rare for us, and our inclination to eat out is in constant flux.

____________

Sister of Soul

73 Acland St, St Kilda

9593 8550

breakfast, drinks

https://www.sisterofsoul.com.au/

Accessibility: We signed in and showed proof of vaccination at the door and then occupied streetside booth seating, maybe one step up from the footpath. We ordered and paid using phone apps at the table. We didn't visit the toilets.

where's the best in 2021?

   

Luther's Scoops

As the calendar flips to a new year, I review the past year's blog posts and update our where's the best? page. This was a second year shaped by the COVID pandemic, with lots of time spent at home and only sporadic opportunities to see friends, visit workplaces and restaurants, and to travel. We ventured to Castlemaine for a long weekend in January and had a safe, restorative trip to Queensland in April that was focused on seeing family and friends but also included lots of eating around West End.

Otherwise, we've been touring the local circuit of icecream shops! We're now reprising many of last summer's faves, including Billy van Creamy, Luther's Scoops, Icecream Social, Beku Gelato and Gelateria Bico. The nearby Gelato Messina outlet seems to have upgraded its status from pop-up to permanent so we'll aim to add that to our posts soon.

   

Masti

While I anticipated widespread restaurant closures and few new restaurant reports, this update required only five deletions (Maccaroni Osteria Italiana, Rue de Creperie, Tamil Feasts, Thanh Nga Nine, The Yarra Hotel) and included fifteen new-to-us eateries! We've brunched at Elektra, Wolfhound and Mabu Mabu; affirmed Gloria as a new favourite local; had great dinners at Big Esso, Ge'ez Ethiopian Restaurant, Leonardo's Pizza Palace, Masti, The Workers Club, and 113 Eatery; and had one very long, very special lunch at O.MY Restaurant.

Wattleseed and lemon myrtle have long been in our spice rack, and 2021 was a good year for getting to know some more native ingredients better. The gift of Warndu Mai (Good Food) Cookbook yielded a spectacular wattleseed and macadamia brownie recipe. We loved eating at Nornie Bero's restaurants Mabu Mabu and Big Esso, and I made many batches of her damper recipe, flavoured variously with saltbush, bush tomato, and wattleseed. 

Hetty McKinnon's To Asia, With Love was another favourite cooking resource. We're still holding off on blogging the recipes, since the book's still on sale and we think you should buy it, but we've been blogging and tweeting pics and mini-reviews. What a blessing that McKinnon's lemon tofu recipe is freely available online!

   

Hetty McKinnon's miso oats with egg & avocado

Other new entries to our dinner rotation are quick carrot dal and herby zucchini and peas with semolina porridge. We've just made the chipotle-brushed potato tian twice in eight days so that's earned a best-of spot too. 2020's orange, yoghurt and cardamom cake and peanut butter miso cookies became repeat bakes and firm favourites in 2021. I improved an already-perfect slice (tell me that's impossible after you've tried it!), and recently had fun with a novel miso caramel cake.

It's hard to tell what's coming up in 2021 but if it involves good eating, we'll be sure to let you know.

   

That slice