It has been a long month of no new baking. In my defense, my kitchen looked like this for a good part of the time!. Notice no oven, cooktop and no sink so that meant no cooking. I hope you have taken time to read David's posts about the remodel and have seen my beautiful new kitchen. So on to cooking.
Kitchen chaos
As a reminder, I am taking my recipes from, "Paul Hollywood's British Baking" cookbook. Todays recipe is Staffordshire Oatcakes. Staffordshire is from the Midlands, in the area of Birmingham. Again, one of those areas I would love to explore more when life returns to normal.
This recipe caught my eye from the very beginning and was recommended by one of David's friends as a a local food we should try while we are here. It is a griddle cake using relatively simple ingredients with the addition of yeast as the leavening agent. The only preplanning necessary was the ingredient, "fine oatmeal". I was not sure what this meant. I figured that it was like oat flour but when I looked in the grocery store I couldn't find anything that was called fine oatmeal. I did hear that some of the porridge oats are pretty fine but I decided to take matters into my own hands and make some oat flour. This did require the use of my daughter in law's blender. After a few whirs in the blender I had fine oatmeal. If you are looking at the picture of the ingredients, that is what is in the glass jar and the oats I used are behind the jar.
Ingredients
Also notice that I switched to salted butter but since the recipe called for salt I used a bit less that the amount of salt that was called for in the recipe. The other thing to notice is the fact there is no sugar in this recipe. If you are like me, you think pancake when I say it is a griddle cake but these are more like a crepe than a fluffy pancake, with the exception that this recipe has no eggs.
Batter
This was an easy recipe. It did require some planning ahead. After mixing all the ingredients, with the exception of the melted butter, it needs to sit for 1 1/2 hours for the yeast to do its thing. This wait period gave me time to think about what fillings to roll into my griddlecake. Paul recommends crispy bacon and cheese. I am not sure where Paul shops but I have yet to find anything that resembles "crispy" bacon. There is a bacon here called 'streaky bacon" which I suppose is the closest a person can find to American bacon but I would not really call it crispy. I also looked at the photograph in the cookbook and to me it looked like traditional English bacon, more like Canadian bacon, so that is what I used.
Cooking
In keeping with the tradition of crepes, the first attempt at cooking one was not pretty and was used to tear apart and sample and while none of them came our perfectly round, they were acceptable with the last one being the best of them all. (This picture is of attempt number 3).
Take a minute to listen to the bacon frying in the pan. After years of innkeeping, I can't smell and hear bacon cooking without thinking of one thing.....eggs. So while I did eat my first oatcake with Paul's suggestion of ham and cheese, (as pictured below), I also added eggs to my second and it was also delightful. David, not forgetting they are like crepes, rolled Nutella and jam into one. I am pretty sure he liked it by how fast he ate it.
All in all, I would definitely make these fun oatcakes again. They were a light, slightly fluffy way to wrap up food and eat. Thanks Paul for another great bake. (Can I call it a bake when no oven was used?)
A few weeks after moving into our new flat, Becky wanted to make some of our homemade granola using our favorite recipe from the B&B. This was our "Coconut Cardamom Granola" (sorry that recipe never appeared in the Blue Goose Inn cookbook, for whatever reason.) Anyway, it's always been my personal favorite and we were both craving some. So we set out to the stores with our shopping list of ingredients. It was nothing too unusual, but did include three ingredients that proved nearly impossible to find: ground black cardamom, dried coconut flakes and slivered almonds. This recipe also used pistachios and Canadian organic maple syrup as sweetener and flavoring. While we could find pistachios and maple syrup here, they were both quite expensive and the maple syrup just didn't have the same flavor as the one we used back home.
We struggled making a couple of batches of this granola using substitutes we could find including desiccated coconut, which was too fine in texture and grinding our own whole cardamom pods. Whole Cardamom pods are available at most larger groceries, but the only place we ever found the actual ground cardamon after lots of Googling was at a specialized Indian spice shop that had been closed due to the lockdowns. After all the hard work, it just wasn't the same, so we had the idea, why not adapt the recipe to local ingredients we can actually find easily here and this can be our new "English Granola"?
The first thing we wanted to change was the spices. We needed something that was more English and more readily available. We kept seeing something in the spice sections and baking isles of the grocery called "Mixed Spice". This turns out to be something very English yet very similar to what we might call "Pumpkin Pie Spice" in the USA. There are many variations on the recipe, but it usually is a special blend of such ingredients as cinnamon, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, mace, cloves and coriander - more or less depending upon the brand or recipe. It can be found everywhere and it seemed like a perfect candidate to spice up our English Granola.
Mixed Spice blend
Next up was the sweetener. We decided we wanted to substitute Golden Syrup for the maple syrup, to make it more English. Golden Syrup is also something that is very English and very easy to find and much more economical than maple syrup. This specially refined cane sugar syrup was developed by chemists from the Lyle factory in London in 1883. It is quite unlike anything we have in the US and has a distinctive butterscotch-like flavor, reminiscent of Werther's Original butter candy. A perfect choice for our English Granola.
Lyle's Golden Syrup
While the slivered almonds also proved nearly impossible to find locally and whole and sliced almonds were easy to find, we kept some almonds in the recipe and we decided to substitute cashews for the pistachios, since they are more readily available here and we could even buy them in the bulk food section at the store for quite a bit less per pound than they might be in the USA.
Of course all these substitutions set off the fine balance of the granola recipe. The first batch was under-done and too sticky. After Becky made a number of fine adjustments to the balance of ingredients and cooking process, I think she has perfected a great new recipe - at least it's now my personal favorite.
The actual recipe remains unpublished for now. As I am not the actual chef, nor do I play one on TV or at a B&B, it is possible that some of my details in this story may be in error.
Now over here, takeaway restaurants may look a bit different from what you're used to in the USA. Many of these little family businesses are located within the home that often fronts a busy street. There is usually just a small lobby and counter, with a kitchen in the back somewhere. The owners typically lives in the house too. This model has proved to be very adaptable for the harsh lockdowns in UK as they have no inside or outside dining anyway, everything on the menu was already designed for takeaway and nobody has to travel to get to work. Many of these little shops are called "Kebab" shops. They often have a little of everything on the menu besides great kebabs including pizza, burgers, fish & chicken.
The shop below is one we walk past every day on our walk to see the grandkids. We haven't eaten there (yet) but it seems typical of this "jack-of-all-trades, takeaway" genre.
Solent Kebab takeaway
Now there are also more specialized restaurants that try to do one thing well. Fish & Chippies are one type that are very popular here. There seems to be one in every neighborhood. Here is Mother Kelly's Fish & Chips. It's also along our daily walk and one of the few that actually has a large indoor dining area. They have always done take away, so adapting to the lockdown was less painful for them.
Mother Kelly's Fish & Chips
Now Indian food is a big thing over here too. After all, chicken tikka-masala is the national dish of Britain now, beating out bangers and mash or fish and chips! Some of the best Indian food we've ever had was in Oxford (on a previous trip) at 4,500 Miles from Delhi. So expectations are high for Indian takeaway. Initially we were disappointed with the local choices. The shops we tried in and around Portchester and Portsmouth seemed to be produce curries that were overly sweet and lacking the depth and complexity of spices that we've come to love. One day I saw a thread on the local community facebook group that was discussing favorite Indian take away during the lockdown. Through the recommendations of the locals we discovered this little hole-in-the-wall shop near the train station called Leith Tandori that finally fulfilled the promise of flavorful Indian take away we've craved. We've ordered from them many times and it has always been great.
Leith Tandori takeaway
Now a little closer to our apartment, we also have a little strip of take away shops. These are just a five minute walk from our flat and there are three excellent choices right together including the Golden Bridge (Chinese) New Shahee Tandori (Indian) and Blue Ocean (fish & chips). So even while we are remodeling our kitchen in our flat, we always have convenient and tasty take away nearby.
Golden Bridge, New Shahee Tandori and Blue Ocean - takeaway dining
Now we're about a month away from the opening up of some new out-door dining choices, according to the promised reopening schedule by Boris Johnson. We're looking forward to the many fine dining restaurants located near our flat with large outdoor dining on the board walk over in Port Solent. Doesn't this look like a great place for patio dining?
Port Solent harbor & boardwalk
Yet, we are still in England, in the spring time. so this might be a better perspective on what outdoor dining might be like in on April 12th:
