All Day Breakfast

Here we are again in my small kitchen waiting to embark on another food adventure. Today we are going to try a canned product called, "All Day Breakfast." Yes, that is right, I said canned product. Who knew you could find breakfast in a can. Maybe this is a leftover from war rations or food rations stored in a bomb shelter but either way, I found it while on a trip to one of our local food stores. 

"All Day Breakfast" in a can.

At first, I walked past it hardly even noticing it. I then found myself circling back around to have a more thorough look. At the time, I thought that this was curious but probably not good eating so I put it down and left the store but after thinking about it for a couple of days, I couldn't get over my curiosity and headed back to the store and bought a couple for David and I to try.

So today my blog is going to be a bit different. In the past, I would make some food and then write about the experience. Today, I am going to write as we go. Right now I have my oven heating, once again making a guess as to which setting on the oven is correct. As I read the ingredient label, hoping to get a sense of what we will be eating, I am a bit perplexed at the ingredients. It says, "Cumberland Sausage (5%), Bacon (5%), Black Pudding (3%), and Beans (7%) in a tomato sauce, topped with pastry". Now stay with me here, but if you do the math that is only about 20% accounted for and the other 80% is a mystery. Can't Wait!

Oh look, the oven is ready so let's go!

I just used the can-opener to open it. I am not sure I will be able to use this hand again for several days. Let me put it this way, if you are an elderly person whose only food source is this canned breakfast, and all you have to do is use your can-opener to get to this goodness then you might starve. It was really difficult to open. Maybe it was my can-opener but couldn't they have made it a pull top? Anyway, it is in the oven at 200 C/fan. It says 25 minutes but I think I will keep an eye on this.

Lids off, ready to bake. 

You know, the British never cease to amaze me. I haven't tasted it yet but look at the pastry. I looks like a puff pastry and as it tested it with my finger it was just that, flaky. It smells a bit like a can of heated SpaghettiOs, that I would often eat as a child. Whether this is a good thing or not I am not sure. I certainly hope that it is not SpaghettiOs with a puff pastry.

Right from the Oven 

Where to start? I just tasted it. Now I know that I am a foodie and often critical of food. If you take me to a restaurant, I will enjoy the dinner but I often find that I am making food notes in my head of what I would or would not have done in preparation of my food order. I don't think that I will buy this particular food product again unless the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us and I am getting ready to hide in my bunker with enough food supplies to sustain me for a long period of time.

While the crust was flaky on the top, it was mushy closer to the sauce. The meat was indistinguishable. I couldn't find any bacon, the meat I was looking forward to eating, and there was only a scattering of beans in a loose tomato sauce. David and I both only took a couple of bites and decided that the science project was now over. 

The only issue now, we were both excited for a second breakfast so I think that I will be making us another version of "All Day Breakfast", for lunch. Maybe one that includes eggs and bacon.

 

-Becky

Baking in UK: Part 3 - Staffordshire Oak Cakes

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?)

With bacon and aged English Cheddar Cheese

Becky

Food in UK, Part-4: English Granola

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. 

-David