Farmhouse breakfast Week #5

After a day of bread and marmalade making yesterday, today I wanted a breakfast that is a bit quicker to rustle up. And it doesn't come much quicker to rustle up than *sound of trumpets* - muffins!

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Way back in the 1980s, I made a Tarte au Citron for the first time (bear with me), from a friend's recipe book when I was staying with him in NewYork. Ever since then, I've been labouring under the delusion that the book in question was Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins' The Silver Palate Cookbook, an American classic of the time. A few years later, I bought another of their books, the equally lovely Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, and finally last year I got around to buying the book that I thought the recipe was in. And guess what? No Tarte au Citron. There is a lemon tart but it's definitely not the one I made all those years ago, which contained apples and was absolutely delicious.

So I'm still no further forward in my quest for the original recipe. I should probably just ask the person whose cook book it was, but then that would mean I'd have to stop buying random cookery books, which would be no fun at all. However, I'm now the owner of two cookery books  that are among my favourites. Rosso and Lukins were onto the idea of the cookery book as bedtime reading years before Nigella's How to Eat. A few of the recipes do have a rather 80s vibe, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and if it is, there are plenty more timeless things in there to make up for it. These are such charming books - pretty illustrations, cute little panels of ideas for ways of serving things, just lovely.

Almost lovely enough for me to overcome the sinking feeling I have every time I read the words 'a cup of butter'. I mean, really? Is this the best way you can come up with to measure butter, America? Flour, sugar, OK, but butter? In a cup? And putting in brackets afterwards 'one stick' doesn't help me either. And, if I may say so, simply proves my point. What is wrong with scales, for goodness' sake?

Anyway, all of this to say two things: 1. have a look at the books if you get a chance 2. the recipe I've chosen is adapted from the maple-walnut muffins from the Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. As you'll see from the recipe, the main change I've made to the original is to substitute pecans for the walnuts, mostly because I love pecans, especially with maple syrup. The cream makes the recipe a bit naughty, I grant, but you could probably substitute buttermilk, or even milk for a healthier option. Muffins are accommodating that way. The maple syrup gives a lovely flavour and means no additional sugar is needed, and the oats, the dates and the walnuts make this all quite substantial and breakfasty. The maple syrup means that the muffins aren't tooth-ache sweet either, but have that lovely smoky maple flavour. And note - only 3 tbs of butter, so no cups to scratch your head over.

Maple-pecan muffins

makes 18-20 muffins

1 1/3 cups pecans, broken into bits
3 tbs butter, at room temp

2 eggs
1 cup double cream
1 1/3 cups maple syrup

1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 cups rolled oats (try to get the more robust, less powdery ones - maybe jumbo oats)
1 tbs cinnamon
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 cup chopped ready-to-eat dates

1. Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Line muffin tins with cases.
2. Toss the pecans and butter together and spread on a baking sheet. Toast for 10 minutes in the oven, stirring occasionally. keep an eye on them - nothing worse than burnt nuts <ahem>.
3. In a large bowl, beat together the eggs, cream, and 1 cup of the maple syrup.
4. In another bowl, mix together the flour, oats, cinnamon, baking powder and bicarb.
5. Add dry bowl to the wet bowl and mix until they are just combined and no dry flour is showing. Mix in the dates and 1 cup of the pecans with the last few strokes.
6. Fill the cases about 3/4 full then sprinkle the rest of the pecans over and then drizzle the last 1/3 cup of maple syrup on top.
7. Cook for about 20 minutes - check with a skewer - if it comes out clean they're done. Note that these muffins don't puff up quite as much as most, so don't worry if they are a wee bit flat on top.
8. When they are cool enough to handle, remove from tin and cool on a wire rack.

Best consumed fresh and warm, but you can freeze them.

Farmhouse Breakfast Week Day #2

Bitterly bitterly cold here today. It's trying so hard to snow but we're still more or less flake-free. So, a winter warmer of a breakfast was needed before the walk down to school.

Back in November, I was making porridge for St Andrew's Day and Bike Lights in the Fruit Bowl's Super Magic Porridge was the inspiration for this morning's breakfast: porridge made with almond milk, ground almonds and dates, with a little sprinkle of cinnamon. I'm not normally one for fiddling too much with porridge, but this was delicious - and just the ticket for a freezing cold morning. Especially one where I also have the dreaded tax return to get crossed off my to-do list for the day. Argh.

You don't need a recipe for this one, really, do you? It's porridge, made with almond milk (I got the unsweetened kind from Whole Foods Market). I added a couple of spoons of ground almonds and a handful of chopped dates as I was cooking it, and that's it really. No added sugar necessary, dairy free, if such things are important to you, quick, warm and delicious.

Now, all I have to do is go all the way back to school with the lunch money I forgot to hand in, make a cup of tea and HMRC, I'm all yours.

Happy Monday everyone.

Pimp your porridge for St Andrew's Day

Today, in case you've missed it, which is entirely possible, is St Andrew's Day, so in celebration of the occasion, I'm doing a Scottish breakfast. I could of course have gone in several directions here. Scotland is arguably the spiritual home of breakfast - Dundee marmalade, Arbroath smokies, Loch Fyne kippers, oatmeal porridge, heather honey, Stornoway black pudding, you name it, and breakfast-wise, the Scots are probably right on it. But today it's freezing outside so there's really only one place to go, and that is porridgeville.

I was reading a funny post by Claire over at the Crumbs blog the other week about how she feels she's a middle-class pariah because she doesn't like porridge. And it's certainly true that the humble oat has made a big comeback in recent years. You can hardly move in the cereal aisle now for variations on the oat-based cereal - rolled oats, oatmeal, oat bran, oats in clusters, oats in flakes, oats in bix (the less said about Oatibix the better- whoever invented that needs a good talking to. Bleuch.), porridge in individual pots with honey/blueberries/raspberries/apples/cinnamon/you name it. And let's  not forget my own childhood favourite Ready-Brek - 'Central Heating For Kids' - which now looks to me uncannily like dandruff. And that's before we even get started on the muesli shelves. But on a cold winter's day, it really has to be back to basics - a steaming bowl of porridge. My grandfather was brought up in the early years of the last century in a West Highland crofting family, and I was regaled from an early age with tales of him being sent off to school (no doubt barefoot...) across the hills with a slice of porridge in his pocket to last him a few days. I have no idea if any of it was true, but what is true is that porridge was, and still is for many, a staple of the Scottish diet.

The basic recipe, as any true Scot will tell you, involves oatmeal rather than rolled 'porridge' oats, salt and water and a bowl of cream on the side. F Marion McNeill, in the wonderful old Scottish book The Book of Breakfasts, tells us that 'a Scot nearly always declines porridge outside of Scotland' whilst also admitting that even here in Scotland, porridge is often not what it was. She blames modern milling and storage methods, and tells us that when she was a child (she was born in Orkney in 1885) the meal was poured into a meal chest and the children were stood on the top and told to tramp it down until it was tightly packed for storage.

She gives this recipe:

"PORRIDGE

oatmeal  salt  water

Allow for each person a breakfastcupful [a wha'?] of water, a handful of oatmeal, and a small saltspoonful of salt. Use fresh spring water, and preferably, home milled-meal, coarsely ground. Bring the water to the boil, and just as it approaches boiling point, add the oatmeal, letting it fall in a steady rain from the left hand whilst you stir it briskly with a spurtle (porridge-stick) or wooden spoon. When the porridge is boiling steadily, draw the pot to the side and put on the lid. Let it cook for 20-30 minutes, according to the quality of the oatmeal. Let it cook for at least ten minutes before you add the salt, which has a tendency to harden the meal and prevent its swelling if added at once. On the other hand, never cook porridge without salt. Ladle straight into cold porringers or soup-plates, and serve with a small individual bowl of rich milk or thin cream. Each spoonful of porridge should be dipped and cooled in the milk or cream before being conveyed to the mouth.

Note: Children often like a layer of sugar, honey, syrup or treacle, or of raw oatmeal. A morsel of butter in the centre of the plate agrees with some digestions better than milk.
Porter, skeachan, and brisk small beer used to be popular accompaniments to porridge.
Porridge may be made with milk or whey instead of water, and with barley meal or wheaten meal instead of oatmeal."

Translation for sassenachs:
Porringer (this one's quite posh)
Skeachan
A spurtle

Now, I think we can make several assumptions here. First up, I'm assuming that most of you don't have the wherewithal to grind your own oatmeal. Or indeed the inclination. I'm also going to hazard a guess that you don't drink porter with your breakfast. I suspect that it is also a bit more difficult to get hold of decent oatmeal in England than it is here, where every supermarket sells oatmeal in different grades.You're looking for coarse or pinhead oatmeal to do it in the traditional way, and you should be able to get it in a health food store if your local supermarket is not forthcoming. Mr Breakfast, regular readers may remember, maintains that steel-cut oats are the absolute best, but they aren't easy to come by in the shops, and if you're going to be as obsessive as him you may need to go online to get them.

Secondly, I think most people are a little less puritanical in their breakfast habits these days. I actually prefer my porridge made with water too, but I think I'm probably a bit of an oddity in this respect and that most people probably use milk, or a mixture of milk and water to make their porridge.

And finally, most people are more than happy to add all sorts of wonderful things to their porridge to make it a little more interesting. When I mentioned to a few people that I was writing this post, I was given some lovely ideas for fancying up your porridge. Here are a few of them:

Alison at Alison's Garden loves porridge for breakfast. As you'll see from her blog, she's outdoors in all weathers, so she starts the day with 'organic jumbo oats with added oat bran, cooked with water, finished with a liberal sprinkling of cinnamon & fresh fruit'. Yum.

Bikelights in the Fruit Bowl has posted her 'super-magic porridge' recipe. I've never heard of adding ground almonds to porridge, but what a great idea - it sounds delicious. I'm sure Ms McNeill would throw up her hands in horror at the thought, but hey. That's progress. Constant process improvement, as they say in the big bad world of business.

For porridge cheats, one of my friends highly recommends Dorset Cereals Proper Gingerbread Porridge. And she's a proper highlander, so I figure she should know her oats from her onions. It has pieces of gingerbread and dates in it and it does sound good - ginger is always great for warming you up on a cold morning and the combination of dates and ginger sounds like a winner to me. Being a cheapskate, I'm wondering how this could be done in a homemade way, without having to actually, you know, make  gingerbread. Ginger essence? Ground ginger? Hmm. I feel an experiment coming on.

Another Scot, Rachael at Tales from the Village, tells me that she likes hers made with milk and brown sugar, which is exactly how my Scottish mum used to make mine when I was little. I loved the way the brown sugar went all fudgy and would eat my way carefully around the brown blob in the middle so that I could save that bit for last.

Nowadays, we usually have ours fairly simply. Firstborn likes a banana thinly sliced into his as it's cooking, so that it melts away into the porridge and just leaves it all 'bananary'. He then likes a wee swirl of maple syrup on top (and cream if  he can get away with it). As an alternative, he'll accept a handful of raisins thrown in as the porridge is cooking.

So, how do you eat yours? However you like it, Ith gu leòir, and Happy St Andrews Day!