Ginger cheesecake slice

November 1-2, 2014

This recipe has been on my dessert wish-list since I received a review copy of Veganissimo a year ago. The cookbook's helpful icons reminded me that it's both gluten-free and soy-free, and was thus an ideal dessert for our pizza party.

I've little to report when it comes to the making of this cheesecake - everything came together as instructed without any angst or uncertainty. The base is a slightly sandy mix of flours spiked with ground ginger, but its main role is to support a major dose of crystallised ginger. Over the top goes a cashew-based cheesecake mixture, and in a refreshing departure from the now-ubiquitous raw cakes this one gets baked.

The result is firm and dense rather than fluffy, creamy with a sweet heat. A small slice brings big satisfaction (...particularly when one's belly is already full of pizza).

Ginger cheesecake slice
(from Leigh Drew's Veganissimo!)

base
3/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/3 cup coconut flour
1/3 cup almond meal
1/4 cup coconut sugar
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1/2-1/3 cup olive oil

200g crystallised ginger, roughly chopped

cashew cheesecake
2 cups raw cashews
1 cup almond milk
2.5cm piece fresh ginger, peeled and coarsely sliced
1/4 cup agave nectar
1/4 cup maple syrup
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons cornflour
1 teaspoon vanilla

Cover the cashews for the cheesecake in water and soak them overnight.

Preaheat an oven to 160°C. Line a 20cm square cake tin with baking paper.

In a large bowl, stir together all the dry ingredients (buckwheat flour through to ground ginger). Pour over 1/2 cup of the oil and mix it through with a spoon or clean hands. If needed, add more oil a tablespoon at a time until the mixture resembles wet sand. When the texture is right, pour the base mixture into the baking tray and spread it out evenly, smoothing it down with the back of a spoon. Bake the base until it is golden at the edges and beginning to dry out, 10-15 minutes.

While the base is baking, place the almond milk in a small saucepan with the fresh ginger pieces. Simmer the milk over low heat for 10 minutes, then turn off the heat and allow the ginger to infuse into the milk as it cools for a further 10 minutes.

When the milk is cool enough, remove the ginger pieces and pour it into a food processor or blender. Drain the cashews and add them too. Add the remaining cheesecake ingredients and blend them thoroughly until as smooth as possible.

Sprinkle the crystallised ginger pieces over the base. Pour over the cheesecake mixture and smooth over the top. Bake the cheesecake until it is golden on top and firm around the edges, 40-50 minutes. Allow the slice to cool completely before slicing and serving.

Grillin' cheese sauce

November 2, 2014

Last weekend we had some friends over for a vegan pizza party. I made a quadruple batch of my favourite pizza dough, we grabbed a few fresh veges and cured olives from the market, and we invited our friends to bring their favourite pizza toppings too. Michael collated a range of grated and gratable vegan cheeses and I had a go at making my own.

This pizza cheese recipe from Live Blissful resembles any number of cheesy vegan sauce recipes out there, based on mock-milk and ground cashews with nooch, lemon juice and garlic for flavour. But the way it bubbled and coloured and crusted in the oven took me by surprise - it definitely brings the golden-gooey look to an otherwise cheeseless pizza.

Tastewise, it was pretty mild. I used a little onion powder instead of garlic due to our guests' dietary requirements and will revert to a generous shake of garlic powder in other circumstances. (It probably wouldn't hurt to increase the nooch and lemon juice quantities either.) This formulation works well in tandem with grated commercial vegan cheese like Cheezly or Daiya; they've got flavour and a bit of stretch but can dry into miserly strings in the oven and this sauce lends body and creaminess.

This cheese sauce still has something to offer on its own, and we grilled up a good portion of it on plain toast too.

Grillin' cheese sauce 
(from Live Blissful)

1/4 cup raw cashews
1/2 cup almond milk
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons arrowroot
1 teaspoon garlic or onion powder
1 tablespoon olive oil

Cover the cashews in water and soak them for at least an hour. Drain the cashews and blend them with the rest of the ingredients until the sauce is as smooth as possible. Transfer the sauce to a saucepan and heat it, stirring constantly. Take it off the heat once it's thickened, around 5 minutes.

Use the sauce on pizza, toast or inside grilled cheese sandwiches.

Broccoli soup with tahini, lemon & pine nut dukkah

November 1, 2014

Our veggie box included a couple of heads of broccoli and some silverbeet, so Cindy's recipe radar went off when she came across this soup on My Darling Lemon Thyme. It was perfectly designed to fill our post-Halloween lazy day - a simple soup, easy to whip up and healthy to help our recovery from all the cocktails and over-eating at Smith & Daughters.

Ah, if only. This was basically a disaster - our stick blender blew its motor in the middle of the process, our tahini sauce sank like a stone rather than swirling neatly on top of the soup and I managed to splash the half-blended soup all down my front. Good times. Luckily, there was enough leftover for us to re-blend the soup on Monday with a new stick blender and for me to eat it with less of a grump on and actually enjoy it. The tahini sauce in particular is excellent - tangy and salty and providing some depth to the flavour of the soup. I think I've been scarred enough by this soup not to put it into high rotation, but it's not really fair to blame the recipe for our appliance breakdowns and my clumsiness - go and look at the great photos on My Darling Lemon Thyme to get inspired.

Broccoli soup with tahini, lemon & pine nut dukkah

(slightly adapted from a recipe on My Darling Lemon Thyme)

tahini & lemon sauce

1 clove garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon pine nuts
4 tablespoons tahini
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper
water to thin things out if necessary (the recipe recommends 2 tablespoons, but our mix seemed plenty runny without it).

soup
1 leek (the white parts), roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cumin
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 heads broccoli (stems and florets), roughly chopped
1 litre veggie stock
1 x 400ml can coconut cream
a small bunch of silverbeet leaves, stemmed and roughly chopped

1/4 cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
2 tablespoons dukkah (the original recipe wanted za'atar)

Start with the tahini sauce. Smash up the garlic, salt, allspice and pine nuts in a mortar and pestle until it's a thick paste. Stir it together with the tahini and the olive oil and season and then set it aside.

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan and gently fry the leek and garlic with the salt and cumin until it all softens nicely. 

Stir in the broccoli for a minute or two and then pour in the stock and simmer everything for 15 minutes or so. Throw in the silverbeet leaves and cook for another few minutes before adding in the coconut cream. 

Let the mixture cool a bit and then stick-blend until the soup is smooth (or your blender explodes). Serve with a dollop of the lemon-tahini sauce on top and a sprinkling of the pine nuts and the dukkah.

Springtime salad with ricotta & hazelnuts

October 21, 2014

Broad beans come and go quickly in spring, and we were lucky to be delivered a paper bag of pods in our vege box, along with some excellent asparagus. A 'broadbeans' tag is tucked into my recipe bookmarks for just such a moment; this season I pulled out a salad recipe that Anna posted on beans & barley five years ago.

I made a couple of minor changes, swapping the rocket for vege box lettuce and serving the ricotta in big dollops rather than tossing it through the salad. It's rare that I use honey at all, but I loved the way it combined with apple cider vinegar in the dressing (and I'm sure it'd be fine to use maple syrup or similar instead).

With a vibrant green foundation of lettuce, broad beans and asparagus, richer protein in the ricotta and hazelnuts, and a lively sweetness in that honey-vinegar dressing we found that this had everything we needed for a light dinner.

Springtime salad with ricotta & hazelnuts
(slightly adapted from a recipe on beans & barley)

handful of hazelnuts
450g unpodded broad beans
1 bunch asparagus
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 tablespoons honey
2 handfuls green leaves, rinsed
100g fresh ricotta
salt and pepper, to taste

Gently toast the hazelnuts in a dry frypan, then set them aside.

Fill a large pot with water and bring it to the boil. Extract the broad beans from their pods and discard the pods. Chop the asparagus into 3-5cm lengths. When the water is boiling, add in the broad beans and blanch them for no more than 2 minutes. Scoop out the broad beans and add the asparagus to the water, blanching them for 1-2 minutes before scooping them out.

Heat the apple cider vinegar in a small saucepan. Stir in the honey until it's dissolved. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Hopefully by now the hazelnuts are cool enough to handle. Rub off their brown skins and roughly chop the nuts.

When the broad beans are cool enough to handle, use your fingernails or a small knife to remove the skins from the beans.

Arrange the green leaves in a bowl or on a platter. Arrange the broad beans and asparagus on top, then dot over teaspoonfuls of the ricotta and scatter over the hazelnuts. Pour the dressing over the top and serve.

Wang Wang Dumpling

October 19, 2014

We spent Sunday afternoon at Coburg's Post Office Hotel at a terrific gig. Though we'd snuck in a few shoestring fries, we were ready to escape the pub chaos and grab dinner elsewhere after the encore. Wang Wang Dumpling was only a short walk away - the Elegant Gourmand at tummy rumbles blogged about it yonks ago and it was exactly what we wanted.

Wang Wang Dumpling is large and reasonably spacious, with the easy-to-wipe-down surfaces and hand-written specials of a family restaurant. I noticed that they were running a steady takeaway trade up by the counter.

The menu is a huge plastic binder with veg dishes scattered throughout - it's a bit of work to establish what the options are and prioritise, but there's plenty to choose from.

The staff started us off with some complimentary hot tea, and we ordered additional big botttles of falsely-fruity iced tea ($3.50 each) as we mixed up dipping bowls of soy sauce, vinegar and chilli oil.

The spring onion pancake ($4.50) was a crispy-golden monument to deep-frying with only the smallest flecks of green.

Fried tofu with salt and pepper ($14) is new to the menu. While the batter and garnishing chilli-capsicum dice are great, this batch was woefully underseasoned; we found ourselves dredging the odd piece through our chilli-soy bowls.

The fried vegetable dumplings ($10.00) were more satisfying. Biting one in half, I could discern finely minced mushroom and green vegetables inside.

We weren't in the mood for noodles, but apparently Wang Wang make their own. One of the hand-written signs promised deep-fried icecream, too, but good sense and a stomach full of fried dough won out over my screaming nostalgia. I'd like to return to try more and luckily we're only a #19 tram ride away. With reserved but friendly service and a quick turnaround on orders, this is a nice venue for comforting and unfussy meals.

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Wang Wang has also received positive write-ups on Consider the Sauce and The Quince Poacher.

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Wang Wang Dumpling
3/51 Waterfield St, Coburg
9354 0294
menu: drinks, entrees, dumpling & soup, chicken & duck, claypot, beef & pork, more beef & pork, seafood, vegetable & omelette

Accessibility: There was one step up on entry and reasonably spacious tables inside. We ordered at our table and paid at a medium-high counter. We didn't visit the toilets and suspect they might be located outside of the restaurant.