Mostly about greens, part 2

You'd think that seaweed I mentioned the other week would be a pile of green slime by now, wouldn't you? Well, no, turns out it's preserved in salt and good until July, thereby giving me weeks to get round to deciding what to do with it.

A few months ago I went to visit the lovely people at Breadshare in West Lothian, and they showed me a packet of their new product - seaweed oatcakes. The baker explained that they are great for cooking in a cooling bread oven, once your day's baking is over, thereby using the energy you've already paid for - canny Scottish bakers (actually, he wasn't Scottish, but never mind)!

 Last weekend, a new shop opened in Glasgow called Locavore. It's a great place: they sell veg bags of seasonal produce, as well as locally-sourced produce, and aim to be a hub for local food production, with cookery classes, community gardening etc. And as my beady eye scanned the shelves, what should I spot but a basket of Breadshare oatcakes. So I snapped them up, and have hardly stopped eating them since. They are deliciously crumbly, with a hint of seaweed. Yum. Oats and fish have a long association in Scottish cooking - oatmeal-coated mackerel and herring is still a popular dish. So the addition of seaweed seems perfectly natural. And an oatcake topped with smoked mackerel pate or a sliver of smoked salmon is a fine thing indeed.

Interesting (if somewhat revolting) fact: in the days when the herring fleet used to follow the migration of herring round the British coast, teams of fishwives (and fishgirls) used to follow the fleet round the coast from Shetland right down as far as Yarmouth, spending time in the different ports, gutting and packing the herring in barrels of salt. The salt used to eat away at the webbed bit of skin between their fingers, and they would stuff the resulting holes with oatmeal, which is often still used to help skin complaints such as eczema.#truefact I admit it's not terribly appetizing, as facts go, but I kind of love the fish and oatmeal and sea connection, as applied to healing - there is a completeness to it that appeals to my inner organiser. I must also declare a slight obsession with the lives of the fisherfolk of Scotland. It must be my Aberdonian genes. If you look at old photos of the herring 'quines', they all look as if they are having the time of their lives, despite the fact that it must have been back-breaking work for little financial reward. See here for example:

or here:

What a hoot!



Anyway, I digress (as usual). I decided that I would try to replicate the seaweed oatcake in my own oven, and here is the result:

My recipe is based on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe here, with a few tweaks. I used rapeseed oil rather than olive oil in an attempt to keep my recipe local in the spirit of Breadshare and Locavore. I also used slightly more oats and oatmeal (150g of each), as I was going to be adding in the wet seaweed. I've reduced the amount of salt in the recipe too, on account of the seaweed. I just added a handful of seaweed (what my Scottish mother would refer to as 'a goupinfae'. I've no idea how one goes about spelling that, but it means something like 'oh you know how much, as much as you need, a sort of dollopsworth'), which I had rinsed, squeezed out and chopped fairly finely. Finally, I didn't use flour for dusting the worksurface as I wanted these to be wheat-free. I'm really pleased with them. Next stop cheesy oatcakes. How I LOVE a cheesy oatcake!

Oatcakes are so easy-peasy, so very good for you (esp if made, as here, with rapeseed oil), and very quick - you can rustle these up in about 45 minutes start to finish.

Turns out also that once you start rinsing the salt of it sort of expands into long gloopy strands, so I actually still have loads left. Watch this space. Seaweed, it's the new kale.

My new beehive!

With super efficient speed, the BBKA sent my Adopt a Beehive pack (it arrived the very next day) and here are some of the goodies that came with it:

There's even a photo of the bees that I've 'adopted' (you can just about see it on the right of the picture) - I seem to have got a free beekeeper into the bargain - he's called Phil.

Now, you will also notice that I got a pot of honey in the pack, so I've been thinking of something I can make to spread the honey on. It's been a bit of a manic week, and next week's not looking much better, so I'm thinking soda bread.

We once spent a very exciting week in a cottage on a farm in Dumfries and Galloway. Exciting mostly because the farm caught fire on the first night we were there (yeah, see? Told you it was exciting), and MrB was forced to be all manly and go and help the farmer try to contain the fire until the emergency services arrived. You can probably imagine the bitter disappointment of two small boys waking up to discover that they had not only slept through a FIRE, but also through the arrival of a giant red fire engine. They've never quite forgiven us for not waking them up.

Anyway, the upshot of all this excitement was that the fire knocked out the electricity in our cottage for a couple of days, but the lovely farmer's wife kindly kept us supplied with fresh eggs, and soda bread which she'd baked in her Aga. I always associate soda bread with rural living (the Irish connection, I expect), so it seemed very fitting to be handed a lovely warm loaf all wrapped up in a clean tea towel each morning. It really needs to be eaten fresh, so supermarket soda bread is always horribly dry in my experience, and not worth buying. It is, however, an absolute cinch to make, because it doesn't contain yeast, so there's no sitting around waiting for the dough to prove. On the contrary, in fact. Because the bicarbonate of soda (which is what makes it rise) starts to react as soon as the wet ingredients are added, it's best to form the dough and get it into the oven as quickly as you can. So, if you have never made bread, then I urge you to try this.

I fancied a slight twist on a normal soda bread, so I used oats in mine. This is Dan Lepard's recipe from Short and Sweet, as featured in The Guardian. Just the thing for breakfast, with butter and honey, or for lunch with a big chunk of good cheese and a pint, or a bowl of soup, or some smoked fish. The possibilities are endless!

Oh, and by the way, and nothing at all to do with soda bread or honey, I've also just taken delivery of these two handsome fellows, beautifully packaged in little boxes (I'm coming over all Dr Seuss with the foxes and the boxes...) from Mrs Fox's. I can hardly wait to get the Christmas tree now! Their online Christmas shop on Folksy is just lovely - really worth a look.

Breakfast of champions?

Beyond excited. We snaffled us the last four tickets to the opening Saturday of the new Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome which has been built here in Glasgow ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Mr Breakfast is excited at the prospect of seeing live track cycling. The boys are excited because we are excited, and because we made them watch all the cycling in the Olympics whilst whooping loudly as Team GB did the do. I'm excited mostly because the day is going to feature the actual oaken thighs of Sir Chris of Hoy himveryself.

This got me to wondering about sports nutrition and what 'proper' athletes have for their breakfast. Mr Breakfast is a mad keen road cyclist. And when I say 'mad keen', I mean he spends all our disposable income on skin suits, and time trial helmets that make him look like something out of Flash Gordon. We have strange little garments made of black neoprene delivered in plain packages to our house, along with boxes of those little sucky tubes of whatever-it-is that you see them drinking on the Tour de France.

Any ideas? He claims there's nothing kinky about them, but I'm not so sure. They squeak when he puts them on.

Mr Breakfast has also been reading up on sports nutrition. As a result, he ordered himself some steel-cut oats and has been making himself 'proper' porridge before his club runs. I don't know what makes steel-cut oats any better nutritionally than plain old pinhead oatmeal from the supermarket, and he has failed to provide a satisfactory explanation, despite my swinging lightbulb-style interrogations.  I'm not even sure what the difference is between a steel-cut oat and a non-steel cut oat. I presume it means that the former is cut into pieces by, well, steel, but why that should be better for either the oat or you than one that is chopped in any other way remains a mystery. Do please enlighten me if you know.

I am going to make it my mission for this week to find out what Chris Hoy eats for breakfast. If it's not steel-cut oats, I'm going to cancel that internet order.