Celebrating autumn - and why I shop at markets

The pith, the nutshell, whatever edible euphemism you like - I shop at markets because:

• I hate what corporatism is doing to nations and peoples. 
• I despise marketing, which maintains the above.
• I will not buy junk, and so most shops (supermarkets and retailers generally) do not acknowledge me as they have nothing worthwhile on offer.
• I despair at the cult of the lowest common denominator.
• I refuse to buy imported produce. Having grown up in England, I appreciate Australia as a primary producer par excellence, and it is criminal to eschew home-grown food for something laden with food miles.
• My tastebuds are still very much intact.
• As a full-time student in the midst of a career change, I have a risibly tight food budget. That story on News Ltd's website about sticking to a $35 weekly food budget? Luxury!

I shop opportunistically. I trawl the Vic Market close to closing time at the weekends, and I make good use of the slightly tired (but perfect for my purposes) half-price produce at places like Wholefoods. In spite of monetary constraints, I manage to eat a fair bit of organic produce. 

I shop seasonally. Boxes of mangos, trays of tomatoes in the summer. Bags of apples, magnificent heads of cabbage in the winter. 

I have a fridge full of pickles from when I got proper gherkins for $2. My mother's larder has the jam I made with the last of the summer apricots. 

Today yielded quinces for $1 a kilo, to be slowly roasted with wattle seed as an accompaniment to homemade bread, coconut yogurt, muesli. 

Best of all, a bag of pine mushrooms for a hysterically trifling $2. To be devoured, by me, in an act of greed justified by the grim weather and my last hurrah before I am off to the back of beyond to finish my rural GP placement (in a town surrounded by farms, but with no greengrocer, and where pickup trucks line up every night outside the fast food outlets - proof this country has a completely warped attitude towards food).

Christmas 2013

Yes, I know. It’s mid-March. But I have only just got round to transferring pictures from my iPhone, itself a complete novelty for me, and found these.

It was a relatively warm Christmas in 2013. My mother avers that Christmas in Melbourne is always 25˚C and overcast, but we’d had a spell of hot weather and it was a bit more summery than that.

Neither of us is particularly bothered about Christmas, and we’ve never done it conventionally. Turkey etc has only appeared if we went to relatives’ homes for Christmas, and I’ve not eaten meat since I was about 13 anyway. Moreover, quite a few Christmases have been spent with other vegetarians.

My proposal for the 2013 Christmas was plant-based dishes, and some meaty/cheesy accompaniments for my carnivorous mother, in a kind of mezze-ish arrangement.

As usual, the inner North came up trumps for interesting and reasonably-priced provisions. On the (vegan friendly!) plate are:

Organic baby spinach + organic orange salad;

Organic heirloom radishes (purple, red, white) with Mount Zero salt;

Tomato, red onion, avocado;

Roasted Japanese eggplant with pomegranate arils;

Roasted asparagus (which was a ludicrous 25c a bunch) and roasted chopped almonds.

Plus gigantic Macadamia nuts; Edwards pumpkin seed sourdough; fruit loaf (can’t remember which bakery - either Philippa’s, La Madre or Zeally Bay, courtesy of the Brunswick IGA).

For Madam Carnivore, Chianina bresaola and Fromager d’Affinois with truffles (from DOC Delicatessen), plus butter from Isigny Ste-Mère.

Dessert for the omnivore was Pavlova. I bought half a kilo of cherries from the Vic Market, paid a (relatively) scary sum for red currants, and got some wildly cheap strawberries (not cheap in taste, fortunately). The pavlova recipe was nothing special - Google will yield many, all basically the same. I might have used ACV instead of white vinegar, but otherwise no fiddling there. The cream was vanilla bean cream, though I had originally planned to use marscapone.

I gorged myself on cherries, nearly (but not quite!) sickening myself of them in the process. 

I think the most significant lesson from this was that the odd luxury item, like a pomegranate, can make an enormous difference to a dish. Realistically, a couple of dollars on the odd special ingredient shouldn't be kept only for Christmas. So I will probably make the eggplant dish more often. 

Echt Apple Pie

This, I apologise, is not remotely vegan, but easily veganised.

I spotted Bramley apples at one of the Vic Market’s organic stalls last week, and promised my mother that the next time I visited I would make a proper apple pie. Happily, when I went to get said apples, I saw that new season Cox’s were also available. Hurrah for freedom from the tyranny of Royal Galas (my particular bete noir) and other mainstream apple varieties.

According to St Delia, and others, the best apple pies involve two sorts of apples: Bramleys, which are unpleasant raw but turn into velvety fluff when cooked; and Cox’s. (Incidentally, the Wiki page needs correcting - it’s not the case that Cox’s are unsuitable for cooking.)

Pleasingly, Delia’s recipe (in her Winter Collection) uses parsimonious quantities of fat and sugar, and a colossal quantity of apples. Intriguingly, she also uses Cheddar cheese in the crust.

I made a number of variations to her recipe.

For the pastry, I used all butter, rather than half butter and half lard. I omitted the cheese, because the only cheeses in the house were completely unsuitable. I also substituted about 80g of the plain flour with lupin flour, because it was there and because I could. (This ups the protein content slightly.)

For the filling, Delia recommends scattering semolina over the pastry base before alternating layers of sliced apples with sugar and studding with the odd clove.

I mixed together apple cake spice (Gewurtzhaus), sugar, vanilla sugar, cardamom pistachio sugar (Gewurtzhaus again!), ground linseed/flaxseed.

It was appallingly steamy in Melbourne, so I had to work quickly with the pastry. Fortunately it rolled out beautifully. Just under half was used to line a glass pie dish (though metal would be better), and a scattering of the ground flaxseed mixture went on top, followed by layers of apple and the flax/spice/sugar mix. The remaining pastry was rolled out, draped over the top, sealed and covered with egg wash.

In view of the weather, the pie was refrigerated while the oven heated up.

I had to ignore the cooking time, since my mother’s oven is markedly cooler than it pretends to be, and it was well over an hour before it was ready. 

And obviously vanilla ice-cream was mandatory.

What was good about this recipe is that, apart from the tedium of peeling, coring and slicing the apples, the rest was dead easy to assemble. No blind baking. No pre-cooing of the apples. In general, not a lot of faff.

I’ve yet to try vegan pastry making, but presumably it would be easy enough to veganise with appropriate non-animal fats.

Admirable brunch at Admiral Cheng-Ho, Abbotsford

I’ve longed to go to Monk Bodhi Dharma for ages, but somehow found the thought of getting to Balaclava too exhausting (despite it being my old bagel-sourcing stomping ground). So you can imagine my lazy delight when its North side sister cafe, Admiral Cheng-Ho, opened up. Moreover, it promised a ridiculous array of foods I can, and would want to, eat.

My dear brunching companion R expressed enthusiasm at going to the Admiral’s on what turned out to be a lovely late summer Sunday.

Cycling in from Brunswick, I wondered whether I was in the wrong end of Johnson Street, frantically checking the street numbers, since there did not appear to be any likely site for a cafe. Admiral Cheng-Ho is on a quiet intersection, in a part of Abbotsford where it is probably the most interesting thing around.

The cafe itself was not at all quiet. At 12.30pm, it was packed and though we didn’t have to wait for seats, we did have to perch at the bar. This did allow me to watch the coffee making with interest, and note the intriguing selection of blends on offer.

I have one (at least one) annoying trait when it comes to eating out. One is a tendency to be indecisive. This is obviated by some cafes where there is only one vegan GF option - usually toast. Yawn. Not so in the inner North, of course. Thankfully, the intarwebs can usually proffer a menu before I go somewhere, so I can suss out a) if it’s worth my while and b) try to narrow down what I might eat.

At Admiral Cheng-Ho, virtually everything was a possibility. If I could have stomached it, I’d have done as my dining companion did and ordered the quinoa pancakes. These looked amazing - three fat pancakes, a spoon of butterscotch sauce, soil, and some fabulous looking “cream”. R graciously let me have a taste, and the pancakes were superb, though I detected a slight bitterness to the butterscotch. This might have just been me, though, as everyone else (virtually every other customer) was happily hoovering up the lot.

On a colder day, I’d have gone for the umami mushrooms. Something to look forward to in winter. I also scratched the avocado option off the list, since it’s something doable at home.

What was not favourable for a DIY approach was the granola - which I can never quite get right when I make it myself. 

This was more impressive when it came out than I imagined, since all the elements were house made. One of my peeves is cafes offering a particular brand of muesli or granola, dolloping on some yogurt and then charging $15 for something I could do myself, thanks, for a lot less money. (The acme of this mind-bending laziness is cafes offering Kellogg’s cereals for more than a whole box of the rotten stuff would cost. Seriously - are people really so chumpy?)

I don’t typically have granola, as it is too sweet and oily, and I’d prefer not to precipitate GORD and diabetes in the one meal. The Cheng’s granola was buckwheat based, with a subtle banana flavour. There was no tooth-gritting sweetness, nor greasy coating on my mouth, and it kept a pleasing crunch even as I took a terrifically long time to make my way through the bowl. On top was grey goo, that was also apparently banana based and completely delicious, irrespective of the appearance. Plus banana, strawberry, flowers (!) and a jug of hazelnut milk which was so clean and pure in its taste it was obviously house-made.

In hindsight, hilariously unphotogenic (brown rubble and grey goo!) but utterly delicious. And just as well I overcame my antipathy towards bananas a couple of years ago.

What I really liked was having a delicious meal that didn’t leave me feeling like I was going to die from excess, but which could keep me cycling round town for the rest of the day.

My long black was also excellent, but I’d have been surprised if it wasn’t.

Anyway - I really enjoyed it and there is more than enough to tempt me back again. The lunch offerings (soups, amazing looking sandwiches) and enormous (apparently vegan) muffins etc also looked impressive.

Given all the excitement on the internet and in other media, Admiral Cheng-Ho doesn’t really need my thumbs up, but it gets it anyway.

Suzy Spoon’s Vegetarian Butcher, Newtown

I had what could have been a very stressful micro-holiday in Sydney shortly before my end-of-year exams in November, consisting of about 19 hours in the city, a large portion of which was spent sleeping and commuting, in order to go to my cousin’s wedding. The wedding itself was fabulous - my first time at a Sikh ceremony, so it was a delight of beautiful silks and excellent vegetarian food.

I didn’t have a lot of time left before my flight back to Melbourne, so I decided that going to art galleries etc was out of the question and my best bet was to visit areas en route to the airport.

This involved walking around Surry Hills in the glorious sunshine (Melbourne having been dour and un-springy), conveniently passing Gelato Messina (before its Smith Street opening, thereby getting a slight headstart on the hype - yes, it is good) and the Bourke St Bakery.

With even less time left, I made sure that the airport navigation traversed Newtown, so I could have quick look at Suzy Spoon’s Vegetarian Butcher. I was almost overcome with indecision as to what to get, though once I’d eliminated anything non-GF, that made it easier.

My borderline-pathological obsession with burning my mouth off meant that the chilli sausages were probably a shoo-in.

I realise that one can make sausages at home, and I’ve a few recipes bookmarked, but owing to my ineptitude I doubt that I can do something as good as these. I was impressed by the spookily accurate texture, taste and apparently authentic casings.

I stupidly forgot to eat these plainly - i.e. with bread/a roll, and sauce. They were, however, excellent chopped up and mixed through spaghetti and kale. For me, the chilli was relatively subtle, but I am apparently a freak who regards Sriracha as "mild".

Hopefully someone in Melbourne might be able to continue what The Radical Grocery started, and bring more of Suzy Spoon’s small goods south of the border.

Menu Malapropisms

Cafes and restaurants are obviously the new greengrocers, if we're talking about the mangling of language e.g. "apple's 5p a pound".

I'm not going to waste my time, on a gruesomely hot evening, explaining why getting language right is important. If you don't choose your words correctly, or botch grammar, or include/omit punctuation marks, you risk being misunderstood.

My current irritation is moreish*/moorish.

Both adjectives may be used with respect to food. Both with quite different meanings. Substituting one for the other only confuses a diner.

Less contentiously, my mother's plum trees have gone berserk this summer, and produced a bountiful harvest of what I presume are Mirabelles. This comes a few weeks after we gorged ourselves on the first good crop of mulberries, and ahead of an imminent glut of mammoth figs, passionfruit and blackberries. So have a picture of some plum jam in the meantime:

*I happen to hate this word anyway. It seems lazy.

Vegan Tuna

I'm surprised at how little I've used jackfruit, particularly given how spectacular the results are. Probably the main reason I don't use it more is because it's essentially devoid of protein - so I would only have it if I've had plenty in other meals on that day.

In view of the mad hot weather, culinary boredom, and the acquisition of three more tins of jackfruit, I decided to try something different.

In cooler times I would go for the pulled "pork" recipes, and I didn't much feel like anything complicated by breading and frying (which ruled out the Fat Free Vegan's crab cakes). Other recipes used more ingredients than I could be bothered to assemble, leading to a completely lazy recipe as follows.

The results are more delicious than the (lack of) effort deserves. Also better than it looks - I won't spell out the analogies.

You will need - a bowl, and a processor/blender (I used my Vitamix).

Into the machine add:

• 1 tbs Dijon mustard
• 1 tbs Old Bay seasoning (I found a low sodium version at USA Foods)
• 1 tbs apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 tbs vegan "fish" sauce
• 1/2 tbs Bragg's
• 1 finely scissor'd up length of kelp
• 2 dry bay leaves
• a dash of smoked paprika
• 1 tbs nutritional yeast
• 1 can corn kernels

Process on low speed until just combined and still a bit chunky. 

Drain the jackfruit into a bowl, and pull the lumps into small bits/shreds. Add to the corn mixture and process on low speed for about 30-60 seconds. Again, just to combine and still with texture.

And that's it. 

Obviously this could be used to make tuna sandwiches, if that's your thing, but I also suspect it would be a good mimic for spicy tuna sushi rolls and so forth.