Beanz meanz mines

Cooked breakfasts mostly make me feel like heaving. Unless, ironically, I actually feel like heaving to start with, in which case sausage and beans and a mug of builder's tea is just the ticket. The only time I can countenance a fry-up is after a heavy night of boozing, and since I can't bear the perfect storm of child + hangover, it's been a long time. I used to love picking up the Sunday papers and sitting with my best pal, grunting occasionally, in a greasy spoon on the Essex Road.

But I do feel that any self-respecting blog about breakfast needs to address the issue of the Full English. Or indeed the Full Scottish, which is the-same-but-different. My version would be pretty far from a proper Full English, because it wouldn't EVER include eggs. I have a long-held hatred of eggs. The same best friend will tell you 'Mrs B hates eggs, fairs, and horses'. In fact, I don't actually hate horses, I am just not a horsey person. And I like the idea of a fair, but not the expensive, vomit-inducing reality of a fair. But I really do hate eggs. So, for me, it's sausages, baked beans and chips, which is not at all traditional. If you're waiting for a recipe for the perfect scrambled eggs, it may be a long wait.

Since I don't 'do' cooked breakfasts, I'm cheating rather, because I've been drooling over a recipe for 'proper' baked beans for a few days, and I'm going to cook them for dinner, whilst presenting them to you as an idea for breakfast. When I put the haricot beans in to soak it all looked rather frugal, so at Mr B's insistence I doubled up the quantities and it now looks as if we may be eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for about a week, so I don't feel as if I'm cheating too much.

If you say 'baked beans' to a Brit, they'll almost certainly think of a tin of Heinz beans, but I want to try out proper baked beans, made from scratch. I think a tin of beans is actually a pretty great thing - I was probably about 75% baked bean when I was 10, and I still love beans on toast for dinner every now and then when the cupboard is bare. Only one of my children likes them though (same old...), so I'm hoping to lure my sausage-loving younger child in by depositing big chunks of smoked sausage in the beans before I give them to him tonight. It's a long shot.

We have finally come to the end of our Laura Ingalls Wilder odyssey - Laura's married, had a baby and burned her house down (did Ma teach her nothing about kitchen safety? Apparently not). Those pioneers ate a whole heap of salt pork, and used that to make their baked beans. The recipe I've used is by Rose Prince, from her lovely book The New English Table, with a few very minor tweaks, and uses bacon instead of salt pork, which is certainly easier to get hold of, and probably less fatty than salt pork. It also includes tomatoes, to make the result closer to our familiar British baked beans, although these wouldn't have been used in American baked beans. Fusion cuisine, if you will. My Little House Cookbook tells me that Puritan housewives would have sent their baked beans off to the local bakery to be cooked on a Saturday, to provide a hot meal for Saturday night and leftover cold food for the Sabbath, when work was forbidden.

I fear many of you are now sitting reading this with that scene from Blazin' Saddles in your heads, but fear not. Beans are great: cheap, nutritious, easy to cook, and perfect for a cold winter's night, with sausages or fried eggs. The fried eggs are Rose Prince's suggestion; obviously I would never suggest them myself.

I found it surprisingly difficult to get hold of dried haricot beans - the main supermarkets only had the tinned kind, and I didn't want to use those for this, because it requires long slow cooking. As ever, the magnificent Whole Foods Market came to my rescue. So, if you can't find dried haricot beans in your local supermarket, try a whole food store.

Proper baked beans

It's almost as easy as opening a can really.

1. Soak about 350g of haricot beans in cold water overnight then drain (that's 350g beans in the  sieve above - that makes enough for about 4-6 big adults depending on what you're having with them).

2. Chop a large onion, and about 4 slices of back bacon - I used unsmoked. Don't chop it too small but cut the onion as finely as possible. Fry these in olive oil until soft. Use a heavy-bottomed casserole with a close-fitting lid (a cast iron casserole is ideal if you have one).

3. Add a 500g carton of passata, the beans and a big spoonful of molasses, add water so that the beans are well covered, and bring to a simmer. Cover the casserole with the lid and put in a lowish oven (about 150C) for about three hours, or until the beans are cooked.

4. Half an hour before you want to eat them, add a big dollop of mustard, a couple of tbs of worcestershire sauce and a little salt and return to the oven.

Post-match analysis: just in case you think my children are freaks who adore everything I lovingly prepare for them, the bean-hater was in no way fooled. When I insisted that he at least try it (after eating FOUR sausages), he put one bean in his mouth, whilst simultaneously wailing, weeping and shouting 'I can't eat it, I can't eat it!'.  The bean-lover was just about OK with it, though he regarded the addition of bacon with great suspicion.

Pioneer pancakes #2

So, to the results of the American pancake experiment. Ms Walker gives two variants on pancakes. The first is fairly similar to a standard pancake recipe, so I thought I'd try the second, which is for buckwheat pancakes of the type Almanzo dished up for Pa with ham.

Many years ago, I spent a joyous weekend in Rennes filling my face with those delicious buckwheat crepes that Brittany is famed for, and I'm very partial to a blini, which is probably the closest to this pioneer pancake that I've tasted, as they're also made with a leavening agent and often with buckwheat flour. These rustic American pancakes are closer to their East European cousin the blini than to our regular weekend blueberry pancake. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

So, to start with, we need (apologies for the US/Imperial measurements. I'm going with these, as I have measuring cups, and <whispers> cups are much easier than faffing about with the scales):

2tbs molasses

1oz yeast

2 cups buckwheat flour

1 cup wholewheat flour

½ tsp baking soda (= bicarbonate of soda)

½ tsp salt

1tbs dripping

¼ lb chunk salt pork

½ cup brown sugar

I'm an inveterate fiddler with recipes, so I adapted this slightly. Firstly I used quick yeast; the equivalent charts reckon that 1oz fresh yeast is approx 3.5tsp. I'm not going to start hunting down salt pork - it's only used in the recipe to grease the pan, so I figure I can live without it. I used bacon fat instead, as I fried up some bacon to go with the pancakes.

The recipe starts with an overnight sponge.  So, start by mixing the molasses with ½ cup of lukewarm water and then sprinkling the yeast on top. After leaving that for a few mins, add another 2 cups of water and both flours. Then cover with a cloth/clingfilm and leave overnight.  If you have a particularly warm kitchen (over about 20˚C at night), refrigerate the mixture. This is not a problem I ever have, sad to say. Here's my sponge:

I'm about to create another yeast-based explosion...

I returned an hour later to find it like this:

I was expecting to come into the kitchen the next morning and find it making its way across the kitchen floor. But in fact it had dropped back a bit and was looking lively but a bit more subdued. Thank goodness.

Next day, remove 1 cup of the sponge (you can keep this refrigerated and use as a starter for another batch if you like). Dissolve the bicarb and salt in ½ cup hot water and add the dripping/lard, then beat this into the sponge until well mixed.

Heat your griddle or pan (Ms Walker puts it so nicely: 'until it makes water drops dance') and then grease the pan (with the salt pork if you have tracked this down). Then cook as for a normal pancake. Traditionally, the first pancake is a 'blanket' pancake, that can be used to cover the pile as they are prepared, and is bigger than the rest. As the pancakes are stacked, sprinkle some brown sugar on each. The recipe says that this quantity makes about 24 3-4" wide pancakes. Even at their most ravenous, my family wouldn't eat that many, but I made larger pancakes and found that the quantities weren't outrageous. My mum was here too, but she's not exactly Desperate Dan when it comes to quantities.

The finished pancakes are darker than regular pancakes, and heartier, but got a resounding thumbs-up all round. Smallest Of All even discovered that he loves bacon (especially when it's slathered in maple syrup, I dare say, but anyway, it's some sort of result to get them eating anything new, to be honest). No eggs or milk, so definitely a more rustic kind of affair, but if my poncy lot will eat them with any degree of enthusiasm, then I'm sure they must be quite good.

Just the thing if you're heading out west. Which we were, as it happens, but not quite as far as Dakota. Happy trails!

Next time, Moomin-style pancakes, with pine needle sauce (I jest).

Pioneer pancakes and blackbird pie

Just back from a week of R&R. We were out of phone and internet range (I know - quaint, huh?) and a bit distracted by the views so no blogging for a few days. It was good to walk off a few of the heartier breakfasts:

Now, to pancakes. Once you start with pancakes, it's difficult to know where to stop. I guess because they're so quick and economical to cook, they feature in the cuisine of more or less every country in one form or other.  However, when I think of breakfast pancakes, I think of thick American pancakes, which are a regular weekend breakfast for us. We usually use Nigella's recipe from Domestic Goddess as our default, and plop in a handful of frozen blueberries while the batter is still wet in the pan. Once the pancake is cooked, the blueberries are done. We usually serve with a wee bit of maple syrup and cream. It is the weekend, after all.

We've been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books with the children  recently.  If, like me, you were reared on the slightly saccharine 70s TV version, I encourage you to read the books - their life was a lot more rugged than the TV version. In fact, they're currently stuck in the middle of a particularly hard winter in Dakota territory, where all the food has run out and poor old Ma Ingalls is reduced to hand-grinding wheat to make bread (in a tiny coffee grinder). Wait though. You think that's bad? This is shortly before the bit when Pa's hair gets eaten by mice. While he's still wearing it. Like I said, rugged. It kind of puts Sainsbury's supply issues into perspective. Anyway, I digress. The Ingalls family were keen on pancakes. In the big woods of Wisconsin, the family tap their own maple syrup and eat pancakes with this. Sometimes, Ma makes them into little pancake men. She does it freehand; do not make the mistake, as I did, of trying it with a gingerbread man cutter in the pan. You're liable to end up with a one-armed civil war veteran of a pancake. Later on in Dakota, Laura's future husband, Almanzo Wilder, rustles up a big pile of buckwheat pancakes for Pa Ingalls with molasses and ham from his family's farm. The rest of the town are starving at the time, and I note that Pa doesn't seem to mention to his family when he gets home that he's just had a slap-up feed chez Wilder.

When we started reading the books, we were a bit confused by some of the dishes mentioned, many of which are unfamiliar to my 21st century British ears, so I picked up a copy of Barbara M Walker's Little House Cookbook, which is great fun. It describes all the dishes in detail, and gives recipes for many of them. Including, should you feel the urge, a recipe for blackbird pie. As it's apparently illegal to kill blackbirds in the US, she suggests using starlings, with the rather chilling caveat, 'Starlings cannot be bought; they must be hunted'. The local starlings are safe, since I don't have the wherewithal to go a-huntin', but I thought I'd try and make some proper pioneer-style pancakes. If they're horrid, it'll at least teach my children to appreciate what they have, which Ma Ingalls would consider a fine lesson.

I'll post the results of the pancake extravaganza in a couple of days, once the hard drive with all my photos on it has returned from a wee trip to London...