Fina's Vegetarian Cafe II

Update 17/06/2023: Fina's is now closed.

May 25, 2013

With a free Saturday night and a craving for some Vietnamese, Cindy and I roped in a couple of friends and headed off to Victoria Street for a return visit to Fina’s. Our last trip had been a speedy pre-festival lunch, so we enjoyed having a bit more time to work our way through the gigantic menu.

We started out with some shared entrees, including Fina’s vegetarian fried wontons ($7.50).

These crisply little treats were stuffed with a delicious mixture of silken tofu, mushroom and the occasional chunk of mock-prawn.

We also sampled a serve of the vegetarian Vietnamese grilled pork skewer ($18.50).

Not having paid close attention to the photos on the menu, I had imagined these as just a big pile of skewers. Instead, we got a big pile of skewers plus salad, noodles and rice paper wraps to make our own little rolls with. The ‘pork’ skewers were brilliant, although my rice-paper wrapping skills need work.

Our final starter was a single serve of the ban xeo chay (Vietnamese pancakes, $10.50), which Cindy sampled on our previous visit. More awkward wrapping of things (this time with lettuce leaves serving as the wrappers) and more superb food – the pancake is stuffed with an excellent mess of sprouts, mushroom and mock meat.

Onto the mains! We all sampled a bit of the vegetarian salad ($10.50), a tasty mix of fresh veggies, crackers, noodles and mock meat.

You pour a little bowl of vinegary sauce over the salad and toss it all together before everyone tries to pick out all the weird little ham pieces for themselves.

I was convinced by the very charming owner of Fina’s to sample their specialty dish – vegetarian spicy noodles ($9).

This is a massive bowl of soup loaded up with noodles, chunks of mysterious mock-meat, eggplant and a side of sprouts, lemon for squeezing and fresh chilli. I made the mistake of adding both fresh chilli and a generous dollop of chilli oil and then spilling noodles straight into my tea cup, which left me spluttering embarrassingly with nothing to drink to sort myself out. Spluttering aside, this is an excellent dish – there’s way too much food for you to eat, it tastes superb (apparently the stock cooks for 10-12 hours) and it costs $9. Not too shabby.

Cindy went with the vegetarian dried noodles ($10.50), a tasty hodge-podge of noodles, tofu, salad and two kinds of mock-meat.

The prawns weren’t a huge hit, but the curly bacony looking things were a success. I was a bit overwhelmed by my spicy noodles to really sample this dish, but Cindy gave it the thumbs up.

End of meal table wreckage

Our second visit to Fina’s was as big a success as our first – they’re cheap, friendly and the menu is massive and massively delicious. There are still loads of dishes for us to sample, along with an incredible range of intriguing cold drinks. Fina’s may have surpassed both Thanh Nga Nine and Loving Hut as our go-to Victoria Street option.

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Nobody else seems to have blogged Fina's since we visited back in February.

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Fina's Vegetarian Cafe
268 Victoria St, Richmond
9428 6765
veg dishes $4.50-18.50, drinks $3.20-7.50
facebook page

Accessibility: There's a small step on entry, but the interior is flat with a clear passage through the middle. Tables are moderately crowded. The venue is well lit but the menu font is difficult to read - it's got photos of all the food anyway. We ordered at our table and paid at a low-ish counter. We didn't visit the toilets.

Saucy sofrito tempeh

May 19-20, 2013

This meal started with a big bunch of coriander. I figured Viva Vegan! could give me some tips on how to use it, so I flicked around and developed a three-recipe plan (it really is a great book for mixing and matching).

Recipe one is sofrito, basically a big pot of diced green capsicum and onion cooked down until it collapses into a sweet, still-chunky sauce. Terry Hope Romero mentions that it can handle a whole lot of coriander. It's a solid hour's chopping and cooking, so I got it going on the weekend and hoped I could handle the rest on a worknight.

Recipes two and three divide the sofrito batch neatly between them. Two thirds gets mixed into rice with beans, tomatoes and spices and then baked. It's a clever, low-maintenance way to prepare a whole meal in a single tray and offers plenty of time for making some bonus saucy tempeh.

The tempeh was quite the bonus, indeed! A little tamari and red wine vinegar livens it up, while the remainder of the sofrito and some cherry tomatoes smother the tender nutty cutlets in gentle sweetness. It's bona fide comfort food, without a potato or a pinch of flour in sight.

Sofrito con cilantro
(from Terry Hope Romero's Viva Vegan!)

1/2 cup olive oil
6 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
900g green capsicum, finely chopped
900g onion, diced
2 cups coriander leaves, roughly chopped
salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and add the garlic, capsicum, onion, salt and pepper. Stir the vegetables over medium-high heat for 10 minutes, then lower the heat and stir more occasionally. When the vegetables are soft and becoming mushy, at least 20 further minutes, stir in the coriander and cook for a further 10 minutes. Cool the sofrito to room temperature and store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

Saucy sofrito tempeh
(adapted very slightly from Terry Hope Romero's Viva Vegan!)

300g tempeh
2 tablespoons tamari
1/3 quantity sofrito con cilantro (see above)
generous handful cherry tomatoes, halved
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 cup vegetable stock
vegetable oil

Slice the tempeh into thirds, then through the centre to get six thin rectangles. Steam the tempeh for 10 minutes. When they're done, transfer it the tempeh pieces to a shallow dish and sprinkle the tamari over both sides of them.

Heat a generous glug of oil in a frypan. Fry the tempeh for around 5 minutes on each side, until golden brown. Set the tempeh aside and keep the frypan on the heat. Pour the sofrito into the frypan and add the tomatoes, vinegar and cumin. Stir occasionally, cooking until the tomatoes soften, 6-8 minutes. Place the tempeh pieces back into the pan, smothering them in the sauce; pour over the stock. Cook for a further 5 minutes, until most of the liquid is absorbed or evaporated but the tempeh is still saucy.

Brazilian carrot cake goes vegan

May 19, 2013

I used another carrot overload as an excuse to revisit Brazilian carrot cake. This time I tried for a vegan version, hoping that the carrot-dappled, slightly coarse texture of the cake might respond well to a flax seed egg replacer. With a little soy milk and margarine in the chocolate glaze, I had a certified vegan-friendly cake good to go.

Since I reverted back to a whole round cake from the muffin-sized set I baked last time, I upped the baking time to around 40 minutes. By then it passed the skewer test yet still clearly held plenty of moisture. I'm always watchful of vegan cake drying out but this one proved to have only just graduated from the mushy stage. It probably could have taken another 5-10 minutes at a lower temperature without dehydrating.

Still, I'd consider it a success. The complexity of the crumb and simple silkiness of the glaze work so well together. The cake gives these fragrant hints of rosewater and fruit and grains, and I can't quite work out which ingredients to point to and bestow credit.

Mushroom stout stew with potato dumplings

May 19, 2013

We had friends for dinner on a chilly Sunday night and Cindy had the perfect PPK recipe bookmarked - doubly perfect given our morning was taken up mushrooming on the Mornington Peninsula.

Sadly we didn't forage quite enough mushrooms for this stew recipe, but we had a good stash of button mushrooms on hand to cover the deficit. It's a very hearty recipe - rich with gravy, beans and mushrooms, but really topped off by the glorious dumplings on top - perfect for a cold winter's night. The stew itself has a nice flavour - peppery and herby, with some sweetness from the carrots and a bit of a celery tang. It's really all about the dumplings though.

There's a bit of time involved, but it's not particularly complicated. Probably best to leave it for a weekend. We took a few shortcuts - swapping in a mushroom stock cube for porcinis and skipping all the dough kneading for the dumplings - the dish didn't seem to suffer for it.

Mushroom stout stew with potato dumplings

(slightly adapted from this recipe at Post Punk Kitchen)

stew

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 onion, diced

6 garlic cloves, minced

150g button mushrooms, sliced

50g pine mushrooms, sliced

3 celery ribs, finely diced

1 teaspoon dried rosemary

2 teaspoons dried thyme

250g carrots, sliced into thin half moons

1 1/4 cups of Coopers stout

2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 teaspoons ground black pepper

1 teaspoon salt

2 cans kidney beans, rinsed

3 cups veggie stock with a cube of mushroom stock powder crumbled through it

1/3 cup flour whisked into 1 cup of cold water until there are no lumps

dumplings

1 cup mashed potatoes (however you like them - we mashed ours with a bit of soy milk and a splash of oil)

1 1/2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup cold water

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and throw in the onion with a shake of salt. Cook for about ten minutes, until the onion is soft. Add in the garlic and cook, stirring, for another minute or so.

Add the mushrooms, celery, thyme and rosemary. Cook for another ten minutes or so, until the mushrooms start to cook. Throw in the carrots, stout, tomato paste, pepper and salt and bring the mix to the boil. Boil the pot for about eight minutes, until the liquid has reduced substantially.

Add in the mushroom/stock mixture and bring it all back to the boil and cook for another five minutes or so.

Gently pour in the flour mixture while stirring the stew.  Cook for about five minutes until the stew starts to thicken up nicely.

Kill the heat and add the beans, preheat the oven to 220°C and get cracking on the dumplings.

Combine the mashed potatoes with the oil and water and stir well.

In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt.

Make a well in the middle of the flour mixture and pour the potato mixture into it. Mix together to form a loose dough.

Transfer the stew to a baking tray and then dollop big spoonfuls of the potato mix on top.

Pop the whole thing in the oven and then bake for roughly twenty minutes - the dumplings should be nice and brown on top and deliciously soft in the middle. Let it all sit for ten minutes to cool and before serving.

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We're submitting this kidney bean-rich stew to Catherine's legume-themed blog event.

Snag Stand II

January, 2016: We noticed from the tram the other day that Snag Stand appears to have closed, replaced by a Mr Burger outlet.

May 18, 2013

It feels like forever since we first visited Snag Stand outside Melbourne Central. I've developed a taste for the Lord of the Fries hotdogs and we've even got into the habit of making our own versions at home (pro tip: potato crisps on a hotdog are surprisingly excellent). Still, we've been meaning to return for ages  - the veggie chorizo has been well-loved and everyone raves about their chips.

So on a lazy Saturday afternoon in the city we decided to stop by. The menu hasn't changed too much but it's clearer about what's vegetarian and they've added the chorizo to the original potato, smoked apple and sage dog. Neither of their designed dogs are vegan, but you can build your own from components (be warned: at last reckoning neither the onions or the mushrooms were vegan-friendly, and I'd be surprised if that had changed).

We stuck with the standard menu option - a veggie chorizo with semi-dried tomatoes, rocket, chipotle aoli and shredded Spanish goat's cheese on a brioche bun ($9.90), with a side of chips and herbed aoli ($3.90 + $1 for the dipping sauce).  The chips were small but excellent - crispy and heavily seasoned with plenty of aoli for dipping. You can see why they've got such a great reputation.

As for the hot-dog - first up: don't order the brioche bun. At least I wouldn't next time. Though Cindy disagrees, I don't really understand the appeal of it as a hot dog bun and would much prefer a basic roll. Second up: this chorizo is pretty damn good, possibly even better than our homemade attempts. It doesn't have the dryness that you sometimes get with a veggie dog, and it had some nice smoky flavours going on as well. The whole mess worked okay, but I reckon I'd go for a simpler option next time - just a dog, some mustard and some onions in a standard roll. We'll see.

It's great that there are two vegan dogs on offer at Snag Stand (and good ones too - probably pipping the Phat Brats versions) but kind of a shame that they don't go the extra mile and offer up some more vegan toppings to go with them. As a vego though it's worth a stop - a $10 hot dog is a bit extravagant but you can be guaranteed something pretty delicious.

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Green Gourmet Giraffe seems to be a regular visitor, while Louise By Degrees has an excellent (if slightly old) run-down of what's vegan on the Snag Stand menu.  Live Blissful went to the Brisbane store and enjoyed their vegan offerings.

Meatier bloggers are mostly positive about Snag Stand - see The Blog of Sharlene K, Food Made With Love, Eat. Play. Shop., Melbourne Date Night, hypothesesofagradstudent, The Very, Very Hungry Caterpillar, Yellow Eggs, Sarah Cooks, We Love Melbourne, table to tummy, Ichigo Shortcake, two munch, Kran & Nina, Suchgoodlife, HEARTLEA, Seminmalista, egg tarts and apple pie, food.loves.my.mouth, Let's Get Fat Together, Gastronomical ramblings and We Dare Food.

tirache and lunchosaurus were less impressed.

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Snag Stand
corner Latrobe & Swanston Sts
vegetarian hot dogs $6.90-9.90
http://snagstand.com.au/

Accessibility: Snag Stand opens directly onto the Swanston St footpath, which is reasonably flat and without too many obstructions. Ordering and pick-up occurs at a low-ish counter. The few tables available are high set.