Agraba

November 19, 2014

We were hitting a Wednesday night gig in North Melbourne and were on the lookout for somewhere new to eat in the neighbourhood. There doesn't seem to have been a boom in exciting veg-friendly places in the area, but Agraba turned up in a few google searches and it seemed like it was worth a visit. It's a cute little joint - they've got records playing, old photos of Turkey on the walls and a sunny area out the front. We tucked ourselves inside and perused the menu, finding loads of vego mezze dishes to choose from - they don't label things as vegan, but I think everything we wound up ordering would be dairy free. 

We somehow resisted the crumbed and fried haloumi ($9.9) and settled on a few healthier dishes. The arnabeet meklieh ($9.9) was a simple dish of fried broccoli and cauliflower with a side of tahini sauce and a squeeze of lemon. I was in the mood for some proper vegetables, so it hit the mark nicely for me.

Next to it is the baba ghanoush ($9.5), as smoky and eggplanty as you could hope for, with plenty of fresh pita bread for dipping.

Our other vegetable dish was the loubia ($9.9), sauteed green beans with olive oil, coriander and tomato. I don't remember the coriander having a strong impact, but the beans were oily and delicious anyway.

We couldn't resist trying a plate of their felafel ($10.9), with pickles and tahini sauce. These were a pretty respectable effort - crispy on the outside and loaded up with herbs and spices. They're not going to challenge Half Moon or Mankoushe, but they're not going to leave you disappointed either. A plate full of pickles always goes down well with me too.

Agraba worked out pretty well for us - it's reasonably priced and tasty food, with plenty of vegetarian (and vegan) options and a pleasant atmosphere. Throw in the delicious house made lemonade (with rosewater!) and friendly staff and you've got a solid local restaurant - it's well worth a visit if you're in the neighbourhood.

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Nouveau Potato, Off The Spork and BirdseyStreet all enjoyed the food at Agraba - it's surprisingly under-blogged.

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Agraba
63 Errol Street, North Melbourne
9329 0058
menu: mezze, drinks, desserts
http://www.agraba.com.au/

Accessibility: There's a flat entry into a pretty crowded interior. They do full table service. We didn't visit the toilets.

Cumin-cayenne mashed potatoes with caramelised onions

November 16, 2014

We had a relatively quiet Sunday with plenty of time for cooking, so we decided it was time to revisit Vegan Soul Kitchen several times over. Our initial attempt had been a mix of excellence (the veggies) and adequacy (the tofu), so we focussed our attention on more vegetables this time around.

Our planning was partly dictated by our veggie box leftovers, but we managed to pull together a complementary set of dishes: chilled citrus broccoli salad, rosemary salted asparagus and cumin-cayenne mashed potatoes with caramelised onions. The first two were super easy: a quick blanch of the broccoli and some dressing for the first and simple roasted asparagus with a ground up mix of salt and rosemary for the second. They were great too - I didn't chill the broccoli enough so it wound up cooking itself a bit in the dressing while it was marinating, but it was still zingy and crisp, while the rosemary-salt (pictured below) added some nice flavour to roasted asparagus (which is already pretty great).

The real star of the show though was the mash, so we're including the recipe below. It's not particularly complicated - the onion caramelises while you're boiling the spuds and then it's just a judicious mix of spices and soy milk to add flavour and creaminess. But the end result is greater than the sum of its parts - we cooked up a bit less than the 1kg in the recipe below, and we were both scraping the dregs out of our bowls wishing for more. 

We will definitely be making this recipe again and I'm excited to keep digging through this book for more great dishes.

Cumin-cayenne mashed potatoes with caramelised onions
(adapted slightly from Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen)

1 kg potatoes, peeled and cut into 1cm chunks
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 brown onion, diced
2 tablespoons cumin
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 cup soy milk
2 tablespoons fresh thyme, minced
salt and pepper to taste

Place the potato chunks in a large pot covered with cold water and bring to the boil. Cook for 20-25 minutes until the spuds are soft.

In the meantime, combine the olive oil, onion, cumin, cayenne and a few pinches of salt in a frying pan and cook over low heat, until the onions are soft and caramelised - about half an hour. Add the soy milk and thyme to the onion mix and stir through.

Drain the potatoes and return them to the saucepan, mashing them until relatively smooth.

Combine the soy milk/onion mixture with the potatoes and whip the mix together, until the mash is light and fluffy - about a minute. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve.

Banana-pecan cornbread muffins

November 16, 2014

I'm launching right into a second banana-based baking recipe here. This one's appeal was threefold: it'd do away with another frozen banana (of course), produce a packable snack for workday afternoons, and expand my experience with Vegan Soul Kitchen.

Bryant Terry's description of these muffins hit my snacking marks: "not quite a dessert" with "light, sugary" banana-bound cornbread offset by "earthy-sweet" maple-coated pecans. The pecans have earned a stand-alone recipe page in the book for good reason - they're a lovely little candy that might not make it into the muffin batter if you taste them first. Luckily I made a few extra because I couldn't stop at five, let alone one.

And actually, I found that their maple coating got a little lost in the muffins - I wonder if plain pecans would do the job just as well. I did go ahead and adapt the batter for convenience, using sunflower instead of corn oil, topping up my wholemeal flour with a little spelt, and replacing rice milk with almond milk. 

A bigger unknown was using polenta as the 'yellow cornmeal'. Southern USian and Central American cooking traditions use a broader range of corn products than are easily accessed here in Oz, and I've no idea whether polenta behaves as intended in this recipe. It remained sandy and crunchy in the baked muffins - consistent with Bryant Terry's description but coarser than the cakey cornbreads I've eaten in other contexts. I wonder if a little resting time for the batter would help the cornmeal soften and soak up moisture before baking.

I'm keen to learn more about all things corn. This book's affection for corn grits might finally propel me to USA Foods where candies and hot sauces have thus far failed.

Banana-pecan cornbread muffins
(adapted slightly from Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen)

maple-coated pecans
130g pecans
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon maple syrup
2 tablespoons maple sugar, coconut sugar or brown sugar

muffin batter
1 1/4 cups polenta or other yellow cornmeal
1/2 cup plain flour
1/4 cup wholemeal flour
2 tablespoons raw sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 large ripe banana
2 tablespoons maple syrup
3 tablespoons sunflower oil
1 cup almond milk

Preheat an oven to 180°C. Line a large baking tray with paper. Roughly chop the pecans and spread them over the baking tray. Toast them in the oven for around 4 mintues, stirring them at the 2 minute mark. 

When they're done, place them in a small-medium saucepan. Stir through the oil until they're evenly coated. Pour in the maple syrup and stir until evenly coated. Finally, sprinkle in the sugar and stir until evenly coated. Set the saucepan over medium heat on a stove, stirring them regularly for 2-5 minutes, until most of the liquid has evaporated. Transfer them back to the paper-lined tray, spreading them out as quickly as you can. Allow them to cool.

Turn the oven up to 220°C. Grease a muffin tray.

In a large bowl, stir together the polenta, plain and wholemeal flours, sugar, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt.

In a small bowl, thoroughly mash the banana. Whisk in the maple syrup, the oil and finally the almond milk. Pour this liquid mixture into the large bowl of dry ingredients and stir them together until just combined. Fold in the cooled pecans.

Spoon the mixture into the muffin tray and bake for around 15 minutes, until the tops are golden and the cakes are just cooked through.

Banana butterscotch pudding

November 9, 2014

I've been accumulating bananas in the freezer and wondering what to bake them in. I wanted to make this sticky banana pudding while Michael was away travelling but I can't find the recipe online anymore - and boy howdy, have I looked. It was after my latest failed search that I let it go and started researching alternative versions. There are actually plenty of self-saucing banana puddings out there that my fond memories prevented me from noticing.

I went with a Bill Granger recipe posted on fuss free cooking. I knew it wasn't the same as my ol' fave - I remember there being butter and/or cream in the butterscotch sauce - but if anything that made it simpler to prepare. Given that mashed banana is a common egg replacer in vegan baking, I doubled on the fruit and cut down on ingredients in the process.

Pouring a watery syrup over the cake might look weird, yet I trusted it would work (I've done this once before). Granted, it's not as buttery as the original, but this butterscotch sauce thickens and pools in the bottom of the dish and leaves sticky caramel on the edges of the cake, just as it should. The pudding is very, very sweet and I'll try reducing the sugar in the cake down to 70g or so next time I bake it. Fresh from the oven the pudding is cakey and almost light; after a day in the fridge it tends toward dense and fudgy. It's a treat either way.

Banana butterscotch pudding
(slightly adapted from fuss free cooking,
where it's credited to Bill Granger)

cake
85g butter or margarine
115g castor sugar
2 bananas, mashed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
125g plain flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
a pinch of salt
1 cup almond milk

butterscotch sauce
140g brown sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup
1 cup water

Preheat an oven to 180°C. Lightly grease a baking dish

In a large bowl, beat together the butter/margarine and the castor sugar until fluffy. Beat in the mashed bananas and vanilla until thoroughly combined. Sift over the flour, baking powder and salt and gently beat it in, gradually adding the milk as you go. Pour the cake batter into the baking dish.

Place all the sauce ingredients in a small saucepan and bring them to the boil. Gently pour the sauce over the cake batter. Bake the pudding for 30-40 minutes, until the cake is cooked through.

Loving Hut II

Update 07/04/2020: Loving Hut has been rebranded as Brother Bon.

November 8, 2014

Leigh Drew has been in Melbourne recently promoting her new cookbook Greenilicious. She found time between celebrity appearances and repeat visits to Yong Green Food to share a meal with some veg bloggers including Veganopoulous, Green Gourmet Giraffe, The Good Hearted, Veganise This! and Kittens Gone Lentil.

Veganopoulous kindly reserved us a table at Loving Hut Northcote, which we've been long overdue to revisit. The menu has expanded to almost fifty savoury dishes with a variety of mock meat and non-mock dishes, stir-fried, deep-fried and completely un-fried foods. Everything is vegan, and the menu is coded for gluten-free, raw, chilli-heavy and onion/garlic foods.

I've had an eye on other bloggers' meals at Loving Hut throughout the year, and it was darn difficult to settle on just one for dinner. Ultimately I went for the sizzling katsu duck ($14) doused in a sweet and sour plum sauce, topped with a few steamed vegetables. The mock meat was excellent with a tender, slightly fatty texture and crisp crumbing.

The fried chicken that so impressed me on our first visit now has a spicier sibling called the volcano ($17). It's an even heftier serve of mock meat doused in a three chilli-rated sauce that marks it as Michael's meal - I don't have the heat-tolerance to steal more than a bite!

The dessert cabinet's expanded with the menu, and we couldn't help but test it out too. Lower shelves hold homely goods like brownies and jam tarts, and the top shelf is reserved for some of the fancier cakes. (After we picked a couple of these, our waiter proudly mentioned that they're made by his partner.) This chocolate and hazelnut slice (~$6.50) was silky smooth and topped with a toffeed pecan and sherbetty powdered raspberry.

The Loving Hut staff were efficient and personable, even stopping by to check that our meals were OK - unheard of at a Supreme Master venue. On our chattering, seat-swapping table of eight I was oblivious to the half-empty food court atmosphere I've previously reported. The only shortcoming was ours and not the restaurant's: we were too enthusiastic about the deep-fried dishes and should have made more space for their fresher, vegetable-focused foods. Perhaps we can make amends next time.

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This shared meal has been mentioned in passing on Green Gourmet Giraffe and Veganopoulous.

You can read about our first visit to Loving Hut Northcote here.

Since then its received positive posts on vegawesome!, Veganopoulous (more than once), quinces and kale, Vegan Guide to Melbourne and Little Vegan Bear.

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Loving Hut
377-379 High St, Northcote
9077 1335
menu: one, two
http://www.lovinghutnorthcote.com.au/ 

Accessibility: Lookin' good! A very wide automatic door, flat floors and moderately spaced tables. We ordered at our table and paid at a low-ish counter. We didn't visit the toilets, but I spotted a disability-labelled unisex toilet down a wide corridor at the back of the building.