Celery-cashew stir-fry with a food court omelette

October 3, 2024

   

We're pretty ambivalent about celery over here - it's a valued ingredient in a few favourite recipes, but often leaves more stalks behind than go into the chosen dish. Roasted cauliflower salad is my usual fall-back and it can take some extra beyond the written quantity. When I chose that as my first celery-laden dish this week, I decided to test whether Hetty Lui McKinnon's recipe for cashew celery could serve as a similar back-up.

McKinnon stir-fries celery chunks with your choice of green vegetable, strips of five-spice tofu and cashews, and coats it all in a cornflour-thickened savoury sauce that's lively with ginger. Served with rice, it's a full meal. Even so, I decided to serve it alongside McKinnon's food court omelette, another recipe I'd bookmarked from Tenderheart. It's stuffed with broccoli (or in my case, what remained of a bag of frozen mixed green vegetables) and smothered in a salty-soy gravy that echos the stir-fry sauce.

The omelette is another dish that, served atop rice, is potentially a full meal on its own. (I remember first encountering something similar at Middle Fish and absolutely loving it.) My omelette was much messier than McKinnon's, and I'll not repeat frozen veges for this one, but the gravy was fun and these two dishes worked together well. Time will tell whether we return to this tasty combination, either to use up more celery or entirely on its own terms.

Food court omelette

(slightly adapted from a recipe in Hetty Lui McKinnon's Tenderheart)

2-3 tablespoons vegetable oil

a few spring onions, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

6 eggs

salt and white pepper, to taste

1 head broccoli, cut into small florets and a 5mm dice (or two handfuls frozen green vegetables)

rice, to serve

gravy

1 tablespoon cornflour

1 1/2 tablespoons tamari

3 teaspoons vegetarian oyster sauce

3 teaspoons Shaoxing rice wine

2 teaspoons sesame oil

1 cup vegetable stock

pinch of white pepper

Make the gravy by placing all of the ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring the mixture to the boil, stirring consistently, for 4-5 minutes. When the gravy has thickened, turn off the heat and set it aside.

Heat a few teaspoons of oil in a frypan, then add the spring onions and garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and set it aside.

In a medium mixing bowl, beat together the eggs, salt and pepper. Stir in the broccoli. Return the frypan to the heat and add a tablespoon of oil. Add a quarter of the spring onion mixture and a quarter of the egg mixture, cooking until the underside is golden and much of the egg has set. Flip the omelette over and allow it to cook through. Remove the omelette from the pan (I stored mine on a paper-lined tray in the oven on low heat) and repeat with the remaining oil, onions and eggs.

Serve each omelette over rice with gravy poured over the top.

Cashew celery

(slightly adapted from a recipe in Hetty Lui McKinnon's Tenderheart)

2 teaspoons cornflour

3 tablespoons vegetable stock or water

1 tablespoon tamari

2 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine

vegetable oil

4 stalks celery, trimmed and slice diagonally

1 tablespoon minced ginger

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

a few spring onions, finely chopped

green vegetable of your choice (we had kai lan), cut into 5cm lengths

200g very firm five-spice tofu, sliced into 5mm strips

1 cup roasted cashews

white sesame seeds, to serve

rice, to serve

In a small bowl, stir together the cornflour, stock/water, tamari, and wine until they're well mixed. Set them aside.

Set a wok over medium-high heat and add some oil. Add in the celery and stir-fry for a couple of minutes until the celery starts to soften. Push it to the side of the wok so that you can stir-fry the ginger, garlic and spring onion for 30 seconds, then bring the celery back in to the mix. Add the green vegetable, tofu and cashews, cooking for just a minute. The cornflour has probably separated from the other sauce ingredients in the small bowl, so stir them back together and pour them into the wok. Toss everything together until the sauce has slightly thickened and coated everything evenly.

Serve over rice, sprinkled with sesame seeds.

Roslyn Thai Cafe

September 27, 2024

   

Roslyn Thai Cafe popped into my instagram feed at some point in the past year, and their pastel sweets earned my follow. It was a convenient lunch stop on Friday's public holiday on our way to the Untitled Goose Exhibition at ACMI, and we didn't mind waiting 10-15 minutes for a table given the rare, fair weather. We assumed we'd be seated in the small, dark interior but were happily led to a terrace out back.

Roslyn's menu is not designed with veg*ns and the gluten-free front of mind though the vegetarian, dairy-free, nut-free and gluten-free options are marked. Pork features widely across the main dishes, with vegetarians having the choice of scrambled eggs on a baguette and a seemingly-vegan roti murtabak.

   

Michael was enthused about the roti murtabak ($19) and added a soft boiled egg ($3) into the mix. The roti was golden and flaky, stuffed with a dry curry mushroom, potato and onion; Michael slathered over the mild satay sauce, cucumber relish and actually-solid-yolked egg.

   

I picked the kaya set ($13.50), a sweet that sticks out amongst the other mains. Here four puffy Chinese donuts are teamed with two pudding-like dips, flavoured with pandan and with Thai tea. They were prepared perfectly, with the hot toasty donuts contrasting effectively with the cool sweet accompaniments. (In the background is Michael's also-very-sweet O-liang black coffee; $5.50.)

   

Roslyn Thai Cafe also features abundant puffy toasts with sweet toppings, fluffy cakes and colourful drinks. They were all out of the sweetcorn custard cake that I ordered, and a staff member helpfully recommended the pandan coconut chiffon ($10.50) as an alternative. Michael and I both derived equal delight in its layers of feather-light pandan cake, coconut jelly and whipped cream.

   

Roslyn Thai Cafe is a cute spot for fancy snacks on an otherwise unattractive street. I'm so glad we stopped in and hope we'll have an excuse to do so again.

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Roslyn Thai Cafe has also received positive coverage from mamma knows melbourne and momentsinmelb.

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Roslyn Thai Cafe

477 King St, West Melbourne

0451 348 039

ahaan/food, cakes & drinks

https://www.roslynthaicafe.com.au/

Accessibility: There is a small lip on the door due to the uneven street. Furniture is densely packed, with low-medium height tables and a mixture of backed chairs and backless stools. The pathway through the furniture is winding. We ordered and paid online via QR code and received food at our table. We didn't visit the toilets.

Peanut cucumber noodles

September 11, 2024

   

   

We bought a 1kg pack of fresh noodles to make a batch of char koay teow, which only needed 500g of them. Cindy had a browse through Anna Jones' One Pot, Pan, Planet and found this recipe, which is so incredibly easy that I decided I could squeeze it in before netball on a Wednesday night. It's probably better suited to summer than whatever second winter/fake spring Melbourne is going through right now, but it's still utterly delicious. You can put it all together in about 20 minutes, so we're definitely going to come back to it in the summer time!

Peanut cucumber noodles

(slightly adapted from Anna Jones' One Pot, Pan, Planet) 

1 Lebanese cucumber

200g snow peas

500g fresh noodles

peanut sauce

5 tablespoons peanut butter

2 tablespoons tahini

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 teaspoons sesame oil

4 teaspoons honey

5 teaspoons rice wine vinegar

1 tablespoon chilli oil (more if you're brave - I added some post-hoc so as not to ruin Cindy's meal)

2 cloves garlic, minced

garnish

roasted peanuts

a small bunch of coriander, leaves only

chilli oil

Halve the cucumber lengthwise, scoop out the mushy seedy bit and set it aside. Cut the remaining cucumber into matchsticks and halve the snow peas longways.

Make the sauce by combining the cucumber middle with the peanut butter, tahini, soy sauce, sesame oil, honey and rice wine vinegar in a food processor and blitzing until smooth. Stir through the chilli oil and garlic plus a bit of water if it seems too thick (ours was). 

Cook the noodles as per instructions - ours simply needed a soak in some just-boiled water for a few minutes and a bit of gentle prising apart. Drain and rinse them under hot water and pop them in a big bowl.

Stir the sauce into the cooked noodles and toss, add the veggies and combine again. Serve, topped with coriander leaves, peanuts and extra chilli oil.

Salted choc chip cookies

September 8, 2024

   

One of my friends made us a little batch of choc chip cookies as a thank you gift and they were the most delicious treat I've had in ages. I hit her up for the recipe and got cracking on making another batch so I could feast on them again almost immediately. The original recipe is from this Basics with Babish video, helpfully transcribed on reddit. 

There's a tiny bit of faffing around in that you've gotta brown your butter and then cool it down again, but once you've managed that everything falls into place pretty easily. I would definitely recommend a generous sprinkle of salt on top as soon as they come out of the oven, it really takes them to the next level.

This recipe makes a pretty big batch, but we'd eaten them all inside four days - it's impossible to stop. 

Salted choc chip cookies

(based on this recipe from Babish)

250g unsalted butter

1/2 cup caster sugar

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

2 eggs

2 1/4 cups plain flour

1 tablespoon salt

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

2 cups dark chocolate chips

1/2 cup pecans

fleur de sel (or other salty flakes) for sprinkling

In a small frying pan melt and then gently brown your butter - I wasn't sure how far to push it, but be careful not to burn it. Kill the heat and pour it into a container to pop in the fridge/freezer so it re-solidifies.

Once you've got some solid brown butter, preheat your oven to 180°C.

Using an electric mixer, cream the butter with the caster and brown sugar until they're well combined. Add the eggs one at a time and keep beating until it's combined smoothly. 

Sift the flour into a separate bowl and stir through the salt, bicarb soda and cinnamon. Slowly add the flour mix into the buttery bowl, mixing it all together. Once it's all combined, stir through the choc chips and pecans and your mix is done. 

Dollop out the mixture onto baking trays lined with grease-proof paper - keep the dollops pretty small (like a heaped teaspoon) and spaced apart, they'll spread. I reckon we got about 25-30 cookies out of the mix. 

Bake for about 14 minutes, sprinkling with fleur de sel as soon as each batch comes out - leave them to cool before you try to move them around too much, they're pretty delicate. 

Spiced chocolate cake

September 3-4, 2024

   

I prefer collaboration over competition every time. There's a baking event within my work environment each year, and my local team choose to work on a project together rather than individually submitting entries. It's symptomatic of why I like working here so much! This year fourteen of us prepared cake with various shades of icing and sliced them into squares to form a pixelated image. I was lucky to be assigned 'almost black' - easily achieved with a dark chocolate ganache and a touch of black food colouring.

I volunteered to make something vegan, and turned to the classic Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World to try a new cake. I was tempted by the peanut butter cake and the chai-spiced cake but ultimately went for the Mexican Hot Chocolate cake, which looked like a crowd-pleaser. It aims for a slightly grainy texture and complex flavour with coconut milk, flax seeds, almond meal, cinnamon, cayenne, vanilla and almond essence all in the mix. The recipe is designed to make a dozen cupcakes sprinkled with sugar, cinnamon and cocoa but a square cake with a ganache topping better suited my purpose.

This cake achieves that excellent complexity but - I chuckled to myself as I ate a small leftover piece last night - more than anything it evokes the softness of a Coles chocolate mud cake. It's the flavour of cinnamon and cayenne that set this cake apart.

   

Spiced chocolate cake

(slightly adapted from a recipe in Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero's

Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World)

cake batter

1 cup coconut milk

1 tablespoon ground flax seeds

3/4 cup plain flour

2 tablespoons cornflour

1/4 cup almond meal

1/2 cup cocoa 

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

generous pinch of cayenne pepper

1 cup caster sugar

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon almond essence

chocolate ganache

4 tablespoons coconut milk

75g dark chocolate chips

3 tablespoons golden or maple syrup

Preheat an oven to 180°C. Line a 22cm square cake tin with paper, or line a muffin tray with cupcake papers.

In a large bowl, whisk together the coconut milk and flax seeds. Allow them to sit for 10 minutes so that the seeds thicken the milk.

In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, cornflour, almond meal, cocoa, baking powder, bicarb soda, salt, cinnamon and cayenne.

When the coconut milk-seed mixture is ready, whisk in the sugar, oil, vanilla and almond essence. Gradually add the flour mixture and mix well. Pour the cake batter into the baking tin(s) and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the cake passes the skewer test. Allow the cake to cool before applying the ganache.

When the cake has cooled, make the ganache. Place the coconut milk in a small saucepan and heat until almost boiling. Turn off the heat and add the chocolate, stirring until the chocolate is entirely melted. Whisk in the syrup. The ganache might look quite runny; if that's the case you can let it sit a while to thicken slightly. Gently pour the ganache over the cake(s) and allow it to set a while (although it will still be soft) before serving.