The Festival of MrB

Every year at about this time, just as we've polished off the last of the Christmas cake and got smallest breakfastboy's birthday capers out of the way, there dawns what has become known as 'The Festival of MrB'. Not just a one-day festival this. It lasts at least a week and basically involves everyone being extremely nice to MrB, food and presents.

Now this year's Festival is a bit special. It has a zero on the end. And, falling midweek as it does this year, it allows him to have not one but two whole weekends of fun-filled MrB-centred action. This weekend is half term here, so we're off for a long weekend of fun with some dear friends and a grown-up stay in a swanky hotel. I will obviously be paying very close attention to the breakfast dept and reporting back to you on my findings. Assuming that I actually make it as far as the dining room after a night of karaoke (not my idea dear reader, or indeed MrB's), and the cocktails that will obviously be required to get through that. And me virtually a teetotaller. Should it get messy, expect a very thorough analysis of the room service options. Or a very nice photo of a glass of Berocca. I'm not too optimistic, given that one of the people who will be there once presented me with a carrier bag of chocolate bars and a tub of multivitamins with the words 'there's dinner'.

But the festival is already in full swing and so we had friends up last weekend too. A full English breakfast was commissioned for the morning after. I was interested to see how bacon, sausages, tatty scones and baked beans fitted in with the 'training schedule', but this information was not forthcoming.

But it got me to wondering what exactly constitutes a full English. Not tatty scones, for example, which are a decidedly Celtic thing I think, and I think that many people would be affronted by the baked beans. MrB, meanwhile, objects forcefully to the very notion of black pudding, despite being a committed carnivore. And here in Scotland, there is a thing called a 'full Scottish', which as far as I can gather is exactly the same as a full English, only the sausage is square and the black pudding may be white. To me, the word 'full' suggests that you really ought to include all of the possible options, but I guess the joy of it is that the list is fairly extensive and so it's possible to pick and choose and still have a plate heaving with food. Anyway, here's my list:

sausages
bacon
black pudding
eggs (fried or scrambled)
grilled tomatoes
grilled or fried mushrooms
baked beans
tatty scones or hash browns or saute potatoes or fried bread. Or toast I guess?

Any advances on that list? To be perfectly honest, the very thought of it makes me want to heave. But each to his own. Especially with a birthday in the mix. I nibbled my toast and gazed upon the ravening menfolk as they devoured their meaty breakfasts. He'll need to do a whole heap of turbo training to work that amount of cholesterol off.

And Tea. It has to be tea, doesn't it? MrB would sooner drink dishwater than tea at breakfast. He can't start the day without his cup of full-strength freshly-ground Joe. But it's all wrong. <shakes head>. Even I know that.

Bon weekend tous!

Farmhouse Breakfast Week #6

Hello all.

Burns Night tonight, sleet falling, so what could be better than a floory mornin' roll and Scottish bacon, a dash of brown sauce and a slice of tomato?

My friend Rachel is the world's greatest maker of bacon sandwiches, and she would argue that this here roll should ideally be replaced by chunky slices of toast, and most days, I would completely concur. But today my sons have been sent off to school in their tartan scarves and smallest breakfastboy is being forced to repeat his performance from the Burns Competition that he took part in before Christmas. Much to his disgust. There are kilts a go-go out in Glasgow today, despite the weather, and so it has to be Scottish all the way. No recipe required, just a frying pan and a knife. And look at my pretty new plate. It could probably do with something a little more elegant than a bacon butty for its first outing, but never mind.

I leave you with this - Shirley Henderson reading Robert Burns' Dusty Miller which seems a suitably breakfastaceous ditty for Breakfast Week.

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.

The Magnificent Tunnock's

Tunnock's (and the apostrophe is intended, grammar fans), for the uninitiated, is a Scottish institution. Generations of Scottish school children have trotted off to school with a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer in their lunch box, and tea with a Tunnock's Teacake is a regular ritual for many a Scot.


I've been desperate to go and see the factory in Uddingston ever since I read about it in this book, (a great choice if you're looking for a quirky guide to Scotland, by the way). And today I finally got my chance. The company is still very much family-owned, and they are kindly donating some teacakes and wafers to our school Christmas Fair this year.  So, I jumped at the chance to go and collect them and get behind the doors of the factory. Yippee! I was beside myself with excitement.

And let me tell you, it is a proper biscuit factory - just what you'd expect from reading Roald Dahl. I only made it as far as reception (the waiting list for the factory tour is a year long), but it was full of lovely friendly staff and had the most insanely brilliant display cases, full of wee models made out of various Tunnock's biscuits.

Here is a helicopter made of teacakes:

Here is Andy Murray in caramel wafer form:

And here, for some inexplicable reason, is a cat with a teacake on its head.

Across the road there is a bakery (which apparently runs at a loss, but they just like having it), with a little tea room in the back selling the usual cafe fare, along with the whole Tunnock's range - including all sorts of exotica that you don't usually see in the supermarket (Florida orange wafers, Meringues, and Cream Wafers for example) as well as the better-known Caramel Logs and Wafers, Snowballs and Teacakes. The front window is stuffed with yet more of the strange little models. It is one of the most wonderfully eccentric places I have ever been, and cheered up an extremely wet Monday morning.

I was a little late for breakfast at the cafe today, but the tea was proper builder's tea (see the picture atthe top), and the presence of bacon rolls on the menu will lure me back very soon. Like I need an excuse. Mug of strong tea, bacon roll, Tunnock's Caramel Log. That there is a pretty perfect breakfast, despite the conspicuous absence of any of my 5-a-day.

Chocolate is more or less a vegetable, no?

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).