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.

Awaffly good Christmas breakfast

My mother sent us a parcel for Christmas, all wrapped up in a big cardboard from you-know-who (the tax-dodgers). Unfortunately, the surprise was ruined just a leetle bit by the fact that the words 'WAFFLE MAKER' were printed in giant letters on the side of the box. Cheers Santa. Well, we've kept it in a cupboard and at least managed to pretend to ourselves that it is going to be a surprise.

I am however, delighted with this gift. I love waffles. Mum used to have a whacking great old waffle iron which always produced really delicious waffles, and I'd asked her if she still had it (we haven't got to the answer to that yet) which must have given her the idea. She rarely used it, because it was so heavy that it almost broke your wrists hoiking it onto the stove, but the results were always splendid.

So, having known for some weeks what I was getting, I've been able to plan for a waffly Christmas Day breakfast. Is anyone else old enough to remember the days when part of the surprise was 'will it come with a plug or not'? That is an improvement (take note, battery-less toy Christmas destroyers). I think one of the keys to a successful Christmas day is to get the children to stop eating chocolate santas for long enough to eat a decent breakfast that will sustain them for long enough to prevent a mood crash before the main event hits the table. Usually this would be pancakes in our house, but obviously we had to try out the new toy, so waffles it is this year. With cream and maple syrup. No pics yet, because that would be cheating. I'll add some after the event.


Whatever you're having for breakfast tomorrow (and I'd love to know what that is), I hope you have a very merry Christmas and a peaceful and happy 2013.

Breakfast lady xx

 Update: it works!

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Or out of a jar, or a packet...

When we were on holiday in France in the summer - and doesn't that seem a long time ago now - I picked up a jar of this Bonne Maman chestnut cream, which had been recommended to me by a friend.

You can get most of the Bonne Maman range in the UK now, but this one is rather elusive. I haven't tried Waitrose, which would probably be the obvious place to look, but I can't see it on the Ocado website, and I haven't come across it anywhere else.

 I'm not very familiar with the flavour of chestnuts as my mum never cooked with them when I was a child. They are used much more commonly in French cooking: you can buy chestnut mousse in multipacks alongside yogurt in French supermarkets and desserts such as the Mont Blanc are familiar to all French people. But they aren't used nearly so much in the UK, especially in sweet food. When I lived in London, it was common in the weeks leading up to Christmas to see freshly-roasted chestnuts being sold from stalls on the streets, but it's not something that I've seen in Scotland.  They do seem to have become more common at this time of year in supermarkets, especially vacuum-packed whole chestnuts, which many people use to make stuffing, and marrons glacés. I have no idea what people do with them - eat them straight? Use them for cake decorating? Bof, as the French would say, with a suitably Gallic shrug.

So, with only two weeks to go until Christmas, I've decided to crack open my jar of chestnut cream. I went out in search of chestnut flour, and managed to track some down at Whole Foods Market. 

So, on the menu for breakfast this weekend - chestnut pancakes with chestnut cream. Chestnut flour, it turns out, is ruinously expensive, so this is really a recipe for special occasions - perhaps for Christmas morning, when you want something that will fill the children up for long enough to fuel a long morning of playing with new toys while they wait for the Christmas dinner. If you can't manage to track down the chestnut cream, the slightly nutty flavour of the pancakes would marry well with maple syrup and cream, or indeed with a nice smoky bacon. If you really want to go to town on Christmas morning, it would be nice to add some fresh or stewed fruit - perhaps raspberries or blueberries - to cut through the creaminess.

A final point to mention is that chestnut flour is gluten-free, so if this is an issue for you, it would make a great alternative to normal pancakes, or indeed to all the dough-based baking at Christmas, while still being a bit special for a feast day.

Chestnut pancakes

You can make thick or thin pancakes according to your taste - I prefer thicker, American-style pancakes for breakfast, but if you like crepes better then adjust the quantities (ie add more milk, and leave out the baking powder) to make a thinner batter.

If you are making these for Christmas, you can prepare the batter the night before and leave it in the fridge. It's always good to let pancake batter stand before you use it, and it gets another job out of the way for the big day.

This quantity makes enough for about 6-8 medium-sized pancakes. That's plenty for our family, as the boys don't eat more than one, but you might want to double it up if you're feeding adults or bigger children.

100g chestnut flour
2 tbs caster sugar
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
220ml milk
1 egg
 ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
20g butter, melted and slightly cooled
60g sour cream or creme fraiche

1. Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together in a bowl
2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg, and add the milk, sour cream and vanilla
3. Make a well in the flour and add the wet ingredients a little at a time. A stick blender or a hand-held electric whisk is the easiest way to do this, but it's easy to mix it by hand with a balloon whisk or even a fork if you don't have one.
4. Let the mixture stand for at least half an hour.
5. Before cooking, add the melted butter and stir to combine well.
6. Heat a little butter in a frying pan (it needs to be very hot), and drop in a small ladleful of the batter. Cook until small bubble appear on the surface of the batter and then flip and cook on the other side.
7. Transfer to plates and add the topping of your choice (see above)

I've linked this post into the BritMums Blog hop - lots of lovely ideas in here for Christmas food, crafts and presents. Do have a look.

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).