Buddha's Day and Multicultural Festival 2010

Alternate title: Yumyumyum!

I remember seeing Cindy & Michael's post last year about the delicious food at Buddha's Day, so I really wanted to go this year. Everything was fun, but the food! So good! Lemon chicken! Hooray! I'm not 100% sure if everything was vegan, but I shall say again, it was SO GOOD!

Busy busy! But most food was ready to go, so the queues weren't very long.

Mock prawns! I have avoided these until now, because I was never a big fan of the real deal, but these were great. Some vegies (I think carrot & radish?) plus water chestnut (crunchy!) wrapped in yuba & noodles & deep fried! Great! I actually tried to replicate these last night with not so much success - oh wells!

These were cooked by Buddha’s Light International Association of Victoria.

LEMON CHICKEN!!! By Fo Guang Shan Melbourne, which I believe is a college run by Buddha's Light. I think they have vegetarian classes. Yummm.

Beef noodle soup! I can't remember who made this deliciousness, I actually really loved the broth, but the noodles weren't so great, and the mock-beef was a bit too beefy... hmm.

And... sticky rice balls! Okay this was more of a rice log, and it doesn't look like much, but it was filled with a long stick of some kind of fried gluteny mock-chicken type thing, toasted sesame seeds, and some teensy bits of mock-pork. So good! So sticky! (I got it all over me). This was also by Buddha's Light.

The food was all so delicious, and if I could figure out if Buddha's Light ran cooking classes, I'd totally be up for it!

If you want the food, you can go next year, or try Fo Guang Yuan in Melbs.

Fo Guang Yuan
Buddha's Day

Global Vegetarian, Ormond

Global Vegetarian is a little bit of a mainstay for Monash Uni students - it's on the famous(ish) 630 bus line and it's cheap, so when I was at uni I used to go there a lot. Some people LOVE it, I was never so much of a fan.

Basically the thing you either love or hate is a salty seasoning they use, I don't know what it is, some kind of stock powder maybe? but they use it in every dish so they all taste very similar. So a mee goreng tastes similar to a laksa which tastes similar to a pasta...

We had a mee goreng and a laksa. The mee goreng... I know I've had it before, and should know what to expect. It was fine, noodles, sauce, vegies - but there was really very few flavours other than soy and their salty flavour thing. A bit of chilli would have been nice?

The laksa was nice. Kind of like a green curry soup, lots of noodles, steamed vegetables, tofu & gluten chunks. Good for comfort food. And each main is only $9.80, so that's quite comforting too.

Global Vegetarian
499 North Road
Ormond
03) 9578 9566

tempeh & baby corn noodles

We have an electric stove so I find it very tricky to cook stirfries. I have devised a method which works well for tempeh & tofu stirfries - For this one I fried some onion, garlic & tempeh for awhile. I then carefully and slowly added some plum sauce, kecap manis, mirin and soy sauce. If I add them slowly on my stove then it goes okay, if I add them too fast, because my stove doesn't get very hot the whole thing just starts to stew. Ew.

So, when the liquid had burned off I added some baby corn, bok choy & noodles and twiddled them around for awhile.

Then with salad on top. This is the pre-salad shot so you can see the tempeh.

And I am so sorry about the photos. Daylight savings is killing my food photography.

tempeh burgers!

Primasoy tempeh is definitely my favourite tempeh - I love getting it at the market because you get to speak to the makers directly, it's always fresh, and they sell their yummy tempeh goreng (tempeh deep fried in an awesome pea-flour batter). You can buy little sachets of the batter mix at the market, which I did.

And clearly I'm getting really into this cold weather, with no raw dishes for ages! Oh well.

Our burgers contained:
Tempeh goreng
Avocado
Tomato
Alfalfa
Sauce...

So good! We went to Brumby's bakery to get bread rolls - I don't usually buy bread, so it was such a novelty to be asked if I wanted to buy 6 rolls which meant I got the 7th free? Of course! Hooray free things! This was a mistake. I have now eaten far too much crappy white bread and am going wheat-free for awhile so my digestion recovers.

You know what they say. Once you've been macrobiotic for 3 months one Summer you can't go back to wheat & dairy & nightshade without paying.

barley & lentil soup

Yum! It's just a simple vegie soup, barley & lentils cooked with vegetables including fried onion & garlic, carrot, celery, parsnip & potato. With lots of fresh herbs, pepper & ginger.

This soup came around because I went to the St Kilda Farmers Market. I hadn't been for awhile and needed to stock up on bulk Mount Zero lentils (I love them because a- sometimes the cute Mount Zero guy is there, b- they always cook really well, and c- they're locally grown - in Tottenham, cute name!). So I was a little sad that all they had left was lentil & barley mixed together - apparently that morning, in the dark, they had a little accident, so it was cheap!

I'm always suspicious of unhulled barley because usually when I've tried to cook it it's still been really tough, but the Mount Zero one is fabulous! I soaked the lentils & barley overnight and then cooked for for maybe 30 mins before adding to the soup - very good!

leftover sushi plus vegie box resolutions

So, as you may have gathered, we get a weekly vegie box full of lovely organic vegies & fruits. When we started getting it I was always very enthused about thinking up what to cook, but lately it's been slipping a bit, and last week there was a sad incident involving a bunch of spinach, half a bunch of silverbeet and the compost bin.

So, I used up all the leftovers (plus some tempeh) and made sushi, and vowed to have all future vegies end up in my (and Chris's) tummy and not the compost. So, I finished up all our old vegies in sushi form! So we could begin vegie box resolutions afresh.

Sushi type A contains tempeh fried with carrot & lots of fresh chilli, with teriyaki sauce.
Sushi type B contains silverbeet & onion with soy sauce.

The next morning I bought tempeh! At the St Kilda Farmers Market!
And this is our new vegie box.

I know this is all getting a little confusing, I really need to do posts the day I take the photos!

New posts this week featuring celery, capsicum, beans, carrot, zucchini, onions, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, banana, apple & pear! Mmm.


And finally. This is embarrassing. Chris and I tried to go dumpster diving because I have never been before and really wanted to go - we went to 3 places and their dumpsters were all locked away! Better luck next time.

curry chicken noodles!

So it's been a long time since I actually ate chicken, I'm not sure what it really tastes like anymore, so I'm guessing that Fry's Chicken Strips (which my local supermarket just started stocking) are more in the tastes-like-chicken food group that so very many ingredients seem to fall in to?

Anyway, these were kinda good! Like when you watch teevee and see an ad for KFC and you kinda want the KFC but you're vegetarian/vegan - let this be your new KFC. They tasted totally junky, so the part of me who really appreciates macrobiotics and raw food was appalled, but the part of me that gets sucked in by television advertising was totally into it.

Chris cooked. The bowl contains:

Rice noodles,
Onion & carrot cooked in red curry paste & coconut milk,
Chicken strips! and spring onion cooked in a bit of the oil that floated to the top of the red curry (the rest we scooped off, ew),
Alfalfa,
Pickled ginger.

And it was SO GOOD! I have been bugging Chris to cook it again. Maybe I will go bug him now. Oh and we squeezed lime juice over the top too.