christmas disaster

so even when you're celebrating a low-key christmas in china with five of your friends, and all the food has been cooked by someone else and you just have to pick it up, there is still room for a christmas day kitchen disaster:



merry christmas if that's your thing! and remember to put the lid on your pumpkin puree, even when you're only heating it up for five minutes. although who has pumpkin puree at christmas? i mean really.

shenton park cat haven (and the dog refuge, too)

Shenton Park Cat Haven is looking for forever homes for some adorable but homeless cats! They are seriously oversubscribed and though since that news article went up they've had a whole heap of cats adopted, the oversubscription continues.

If you can't give the gift of a home but are looking for a present for someone, you could also consider making a donation to the Cat Haven or to the Dog's Refuge (also in Shenton Park).

If you want to make a Victorian-based donation, there's The Lost Dogs' Home in North Melbourne or Edgar's Mission.

There is a possibility I have left my donation-presents until the last minute.

christmas day noms

This was our first Christmas away from our immediate families. Usually it's all go go go, from Christmas Eve through to sometime Boxing Day, but not being in close proximity to family meant that in the end, we had a very quiet couple of days.

After a very simple breakfast of field mushrooms on toast, I got started on some cooking and D got started on some cleaning (pausing every three minutes to send another IM). I prepared filling for Cindy and Michael's revolutionary vegan sausage rolls (vausage rolls) on Christmas Eve, but that was the extent of my advance preparations.



I'd not prepared a roast meal before, not on my own, so I smsed D's mum to ask her advice regarding roasted potatoes, drank some Pimms, and then got started.



In the meantime, our guests turned up, with delicious supplies! JS brought these amazing and simple cherries, which had been dipped in melted Lindt chocolate, and then frozen. The ice in the middle of the cherries made this simply superb, and I ate a lot of them.



She also provided some wreath-shaped brushetta! These were served with tofutti cream cheese, tomato, spring onions, capers, and parsley, and were also amazing!



A trick I learnt from my dear friend Dr.G is the roasting of giant field mushrooms, so when I saw some for sale at the markets on Thursday, I knew that they would be added to the roasting pan. I also roasted butternut pumpkin, and potato.



Other additions to our lunch time feast were potato salad, pasta salad, the Sanitarium vegie roast thing, and of course the vausage rolls. It was all of deliciousness!



We rounded out the meal with fresh berries and sorbet.

Finally, much later in the day, D and I ventured outside of the house to Enlightened Cuisine, where we had delicious Chinese noms for a moderately filling dinner with Kristy and Toby.

Hooray! I love whole days of eating.

ba cheng for duan wu

I’ve grown up calling a lot of things by a lot of different names. I say yao chao guai, but I also say you cha kuih, and most often I say 'crunchy stuff.' There was that time in the car when we kept talking about gula, and try as we might we couldn’t remember what it was in English. This mixing of words comes from being from Penang, where the town is quite Hokkien but my family is Cantonese and of course it’s in Malaysia and most people speak English.



Today is Duan Wu Jie, or the Rice Dumpling Festival, or the Dragon Boat Festival, or 端午节, or double fifth. On Duan Wu Jie, we make ba cheng, tie it up and hang it up, and then throw them in the river. I buy my ba cheng, and I eat it all up, no river-throwing for me (but also no dragon boats). The idea is to ward off bad health and things, and it’s either a commemoration of this old advisor, whose body was protected from fishes by zong zi in the water, and by the rowing and beating of drums, or it is part of the Madame White Snake mythology.

Ba cheng is also zong zi, it’s usually wrapped in lotus leaf but a variation for us heathen South-East Asians is banana leaf or pandan leaf. Ba cheng is glutinous rice with a tasty filling, mushrooms or chestnuts or red bean paste or an assortment of things. My favourite filling is mushrooms, chestnuts and fake chicken, a hold over I suppose from my childhood when my favourite filling was chestnuts and chicken (I like mushrooms a lot more now than I did then).



These ba cheng this year are from Lotus, I steamed them in the leaves for ten minutes before unwrapping and nomming.

christmas noms and associated

Spent the day yesterday sprawled around D's parents' house, hanging with various family members (D's and mine) and eating a lot of food.



Woke up just in time for breakfast out on the back patio, champagne Australian sparkling wine and juice and hashbrowns, baked beans, mushrooms, and delicious baked tomatoes. It's a fun way to start the day, but at the same time it's a little bit odd, because it's always such a lot of food at a relatively late time (0900) - how am I supposed to be hungry in time for lunch at 1300 if I've only just eaten a whole lot of hash browns?



The traditional Christmas meal doesn't cater very well for vegans. I've omitted from the above the meat-related elements, but breakfasts are easy. Australian Christmas lunches however tend to, for the most (though not entire) part, fall in to one of two categories: heavy on the roast, or heavy on the seafood. This trend is so all-encompassing that even my own family, eating mostly Chinese food at home, still cooks a roast once a year, on Christmas day. D's family also tends towards the roast traditions, with sides of roasted or steamed vegies.



Roasted vegies are incredibly tasty, but they do not make an entire meal. This year the roasted pumpkin and the roasted potatoes were fantastic, soft and tasty and I gleefully ate quite a lot, but the highlight was the lentil pie that D's nan made for us.



It uses a flavoursome tomato base, and is filled with lentils and a variety of vegetables, topped with mash potato and brushed with nuttelex. I cannot wait to try making this pie recipe, I nommed this right up.



D's nan also made a fantastic apple pie for dessert, which we had with fruit and delicious local icecream.



We hung around into the evening, sitting around in the backyard and trying to decide whether to play the Game of Life. I attempted a batch of jam drops, which were a bit overcooked due to the oven there being fanforced. I also made up a batch of potato salad to supplement dinner, because dinner is often just left over cold meats from lunch with some salads, or in our case left over lentil pie.

The potato salad turned out okay, it was a bit of a made-up creation as the only vegie stock D's parents had contained milk products (boo). I substituted in a little generic soy sauce, some chilli flakes, and a tiny smidge of mustard. I say 'generic soy sauce' because they only had the one, one of those bottles that says 'soy sauce' and rudely doesn't specify if it's dark soy or light soy or some sort of blend.



Slowly more extended family members trickled in to partake of playing pool and table tennis, making fun of one another and eating left over food. The mozzies appeared just as the dessert did. D's mum made a vegan trifle just for us, using some stale banana cake I made last week, berries, agar-agar and some vegan custard. D says it was super tasty, but I have never been a fan of trifle.



My sister gave D a whole lot of chocolate. This pile is not entirely made up of it - also in this pile is chocolate from our friend Moonbug, who is in the UK at the moment, and a couple of blocks from Sheeba a couple of weeks ago. We are pretty set for chocolate for the next little while, but a note for people posting chocolate to Australia - it's summer here, so it melts!

On the cookbook front, D gave me My Sweet Vegan by Hannah, and E + C gave me Vegan Italiano, which I already own so there is a visit to Dymocks in my near future.

Spent today lounging around the house, doing a bit of cleaning and watching the cricket.

moon festival

As a child, on moon festival my house was filled with people and our tables were laden down with food. I remember our procession, a line of little children of varying heights, our tummies full and our lanterns lit and carefully held before us. We paraded around my parents’ property line, around the back and down the side until we came full circle, our lanterns held for the moon to see. Afterwards, there’d be more food, and perhaps some sulking if a lantern had caught fire. I went through so many lanterns this way, burning little holes in the cellophane of my butterfly (it was always a butterfly), but it was okay, because there would always be next year’s lantern.



It has been years since I celebrated Moon Festival, but I really wanted to celebrate it this year, so as the fifteen moon of the eighth lunar month approached I invited a dozen friends around and D and I spent a day in preparation, cleaning and cooking and buying new outdoor furniture.

I was rushing around, cooking things, and D was flitting about chatting with people, so neither of us had a chance to take any photos of the food. I’ll probably put up some of the recipes for these eventually. There are no specific foods that are served at Moon Festival – the emphasis is just on the having of food, its abundance, and the sharing of it with your friends.

On the table: laksa, lontong, gado gado, satay mushrooms, char kuay teow, nasi goreng, chickpea rogan josh, potato rendang, yao chao guai and gai lan in a garlic soy sauce. After dinner snacks were passion fruit melting moments, mooncake, oreos and kuih bangkit.

It was so delightful being able to share this with my friends, even though most of them only knew what google could tell them about it.