Pancake pictures

Following on from this mornings post:

The dogs got half of one each:

I found some black and some green food colouring in the cupboard, so naturally I split the batter into 3 batches and tinted two of them.

The black ones came out blue grey:

But the green ones were pretty cool:

Enjoy the rest of your pancake day!

Vegan Pancakes

Today is pancake day, or Shrove Tuesday if you are a Christian. 

I was raised loosely Christian, but it's always been about the pancakes and not the religious undertones in this house, so as a Pagan I have no trouble celebrating pancake day. Well, that would be a lie, a lot of the time I'm oblivious to which day of the week I'm currently on, so it's quite common for our household to have Pancake Wednesday instead.

Last year I tried out two different recipes. One from good old Delia Smith, and a vegan recipe passed on by a friend via Facebook. I have to say the Delia ones were very greasy, while the vegan ones were lovely and light, and you didn't feel like you were missing out on anything at all.

I'm not vegan, but I was looking for a recipe that used soya milk, as I don't drink animal milk.

Here's the vegan recipe:

Ingredients:

• 150g plain flour
• 2tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt
• 2tbsp veg oil (I used olive oil)
• 5tbsp water
• 300ml soya milk
• 1tsp vanilla extract
• 2tbsp maple syrup (I didn't have any, so missed this out)

Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl, add the wet ingredients and beat into a batter. I use a whisk at this stage. Heat a frying pan and spoon or ladle small amounts of the mixture. You'll have to experiment to find the right amount for your pan. The fun part is trying to flip it over perfectly!

Once your pancake is cooked, top with anything you like, roll, and scoff the lot!

I usually choose from a combination of sugar, honey, lemon juice, or golden syrup.

What's your favourite topping?

P.s. Today is also International Women's Day, James Bond and Moneypenny have a message for you: 

Rosehip Syrup

I've finally made some rosehip syrup from the hips I gathered on my first foraging attempt. They weren't quite ripe enough so I had them in the freezer for a while and then thawed them out in the fridge before starting the syrup recipe. I didn't write down exactly what I was doing at the time but I'll give you a rough guide.

First I roughly chopped 250g of hips (you could possibly chuck them in a blender, or through a juicer to do it more quickly). Then I added them to a pan with 500ml of boiling water and let it simmer for 20 minutes. I strained this mixture through muslin, kept the rosehip water to one side, and put the solids from the muslin back in the pan with another 200ml of boiling water. I simmered this for another 20 minutes then strained it again into the first bowl of hip water.

I added 50g of sugar to the rose hip water and brought it up to the boil for 15 minutes. The only suitable bottles I could find were some empty Jack Daniels miniatures, so I boiled these in a pan of water to sterilise them. I poured the syrup straight into the hot bottles. Apparently they should keep unopened for quite a while. Each bottle should be good for a week once it's open. 

This was just a trial run. You'd need to scale the recipe up to get a good amount if you wanted it to last all year.

Meanwhile the turbo cider has been bottled. I'm not sure if I left it too long in the demijohn to get fizzy cider, I've bottled it with a teaspoon of sugar each to see what happens. It's not quite drinkable yet but it smells like cider.

Homemade alcohol

My favourite alcohol at the moment is Jack Daniels. Not that I've had much chance to drink since I passed my driving test two years ago, but even when I do want to I find it's horribly expensive. So I've decided to have a dabble at homebrew, not proper homebrew with beer and wine (neither of which I drink), but cheats homebrew in the form of sloe gin and turbo cider.

Sloe Gin

I've started off two batches of sloe gin. The first I made with the original sloes I picked and put in the freezer overnight. All the sugar has dissolved and it's changed colour. This one's been going for five days now:

The second I made with twice as many sloes and didn't bother with putting them in the freezer first. I made this one in a 2 litre jug that used to hold scrumpy. This is what it looks like after the first good shake, you can still see the sugar in the bottom:

Here's the recipe I used, you can scale it up depending how much gin you have:

Ingredients:

    * 1lb/454gm of sloes
    * 4 ozs/112gm of white granulated sugar
    * 70cl bottle of medium quality gin

Make sure you've taken all the stalks from the sloes, you could wash them if you like but I didn't bother. My sloes weren't near a road so shouldn't have been too polluted, and the gin will take care of any germs. Find a clean container big enough to take the gin and the sloes, you could buy a bigger gin bottle than you need and drink some first to make room! 
Prick each sloe with a fork before you drop it in the gin, add the sugar, seal and give it a good shake. Shake each day till the sugar has dissolved then shake maybe once a week or so. Store in a dark place to preserve the colour. After three months you can strain out the sloes (save them for eating with ice cream or try flapjacks) and drink the gin, or leave them in for a maximum of six months. The gin will keep for a long time and should mature well. Try to save a bottle till next year to compare!

Turbo Cider

Another experiment for me in homebrew land. I'd never heard of turbo cider before discovering it on the net a couple of weeks ago. The idea is to take ordinary cheap apple juice from the supermarket and make it into cider. No actual apples to gather/chop/press. 

There are many varied recipes out there for this one. You're best googling "turbo cider" and picking what suits you. At the moment I've got 3 litres of apple juice, 3 teaspoons of brown sugar, and 7g of wine yeast in a borrowed demijohn. I've sat in on a hotwater bottle and wrapped in fleece to try and keep it warm enough for the yeast to react.

If it looks suitably foamy tomorrow evening I'll add some more apple juice. If it works this could be a drinkable cider within a week or so....

Quiche

Over the weekend I've finally made a quiche (or two) as per number 5 on my list of stuff to try. I haven't done 1 to 4 from the list yet of course, no one said it was in order.... Although I have been puzzling my way through the skirt instructions today.

I settled on a combination of this recipe and advice given over the phone from my mother-in-law to be. The quantities I was told made 2 quiches, oops, so I halved them in the instructions below.  Here's what I actually ended up doing:

Cheese and ham quiche

Ingredients:

• Ready roll shortcrust pastry (I know, I cheated)
• Single cream 250ml
• Grated cheese (lots)
• Ham, chopped (I used sandwich meat)
• 1 egg
• salt and/or pepper if wanted

Method:

Preheat oven to gas mark 6.  Roll pastry out on a clean surface until it's large enough to line your dish, for this mine was about 20cm. Line the dish and prick the base all over with  fork, then cover with cling film and chill in the fridge for 30 mins (I just chilled it till I'd done this next step). In a bowl mix the cream and egg together, then add the grated cheese and chopped ham. I didn't have weights for these, I was just told to add enough that it "filled" the cream mixture. Lastly, add any salt or pepper, I only used pepper as the ham was quite salty. 

Pull the pastry out and remove the cling film. Line the case with baking paper and ceramic beans if you have them, I used rice. Bake the case in the preheated oven for 20 mins. (I stored the quiche mixture in the fridge at this stage). Once it's done turn the oven down to gas mark 2, remove paper and rice, and pour the mixture into the case. Return to the oven for 45-60 mins until it's set, then pull it out and wait impatiently for it to cool enough to cut.

Quorn Lasagne and Scotch Pancakes

No, not at the same time! I've been trying new recipes again. On sunday morning we woke up and realised there were no breakfast foods in the house, so I had a scout around in the cupboards and found a recipe for scotch pancakes on the side of a cream of tartar pot. I've bought them from supermarkets before but never made them myself so I decided to give it a go. Here's the recipe I used:

Scotch Pancakes (or drop scones)

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 275ml (1/2 pint) milk
• 225g (8oz) self raising flour
• 50g caster sugar
• 1 tsp cream of tartar

Method:

Beat the eggs and milk together, stir this mixture into the flour and sugar, add the cream of tartar and beat until you have a thick, lump free batter. Drop a generously sized tablespoon worth of mixture onto a greased or non-stick frying pan over a medium heat. Turn when the surface is covered in bubbles and cook until golden. 

For my pancakes I used soya milk instead of cows milk, and I didn't notice any difference to the taste. I found that dropping the mixture from about 3 inches above the pan made nice round shaped pancakes, while pouring it made oval shapes. I just eat mine warm with butter, do you have any other toppings? 

(I was too wrapped up in the process to take any photos so I'll hold this space for next time I make some.)

Quorn Lasagne

Last night I finally got around to looking up a lasagne recipe for the pasta sheets I bought months ago. I'm not that keen on eating red meat so I usually substitute Quorn products instead. I used this recipe from their website. I made mine as close to the above link as I could with what was in the cupboards. Again I used soya milk rather than cows milk and noticed no difference to the taste. We got four tasty portions out of it, we ate two last night and I've frozen the rest.

Yum, yum, yum.

A bit behind, some odds and sods

Once again, I've failed to blog for a while. I haven't really had any inspiration to blog, as I haven't done much of anything. I've been feeling really down over the last few weeks, maybe it's a bit of S.A.D, but the days are getting longer, so I should be cheering up now, not getting gloomier. (I can't type that word without a picture of Eeyore popping into my head, everyone likes a manic depressive donkey right?)

Anyway, there was a highlight last week, when I came downstairs and opened the front curtains to see a sparrowhawk sat in the front garden eating the remains of a blackbird. 

The overwhelming response I got when I've shown people the photos I took was "poor blackbird" but I thought the sparrowhawk was beautiful, and it's the first time I've seen one so close. It just sat there under my front wall while people were strolling past on the pavement, probably wondering why there was a crazy women in a dressing gown clutching a camera... It finally flew off with the rest of it's breakfast when a noisy Argos van pulled up and spooked it, haven't seen it since. 

I've also tried out a recipe I found on this blog for beer bread. I don't actually like beer, I was mostly just curious to see what it was like. It seemed to turn out ok from the recipe:

It tasted really sweet while you chewed it, and left a beer aftertaste when you swallowed. Quite strange. I decided I definitely don't like beer though, so I don't think I'll be making that one again.

Lastly an update on the plants. The broad beans are now out in the greenhouse and doing ok, despite being quite leggy. I'm going to start off the remainder of that packet sometime in the next week and see how they go. The tomatoes however are not doing so well, they're in the porch as it's cooler than the rest of the house and I don't think they'd survive in the greenhouse yet (6 panes of glass missing). After the first re-potting about half of them just died. I may have to buy baby tom plants later in the year, depending on how the rest survive... I also need to go through the seed packets again and start some more things off, the peas may be ok to plant now for a start.

I'll try to get back to some kind of productivity anyway, wish me luck.