A Wee Scottish Brekkie

Our haggis burst.

One second merrily bobbing away in barely simmering water, the next spilling its mealy guts into the pan. The pale casing constricted, growing opaque as it exuded its contents into what was seconds before clear water.

I fished out the quarter sized haggis, sliced it down the centre, spooned out the insides and plated it up onto a pile of buttery mash and roasted carrots. Underneath was a slick of creamy chicken velouté. I’d read somewhere that a whiskey based sauce was terribly gauche. Strictly for tourists only.

The meal was delicious enough for us both to comment that we should certainly be eating haggis more regularly and rue the fact that there was considerably less on the plate than there should be.

But what of the remainder, currently swelling and clouding the water in a pan on the hob?

The water was sieved and the resultant sludge strained overnight. By morning the swollen oats had turned sticky transforming the gloop into something resembling a cake. Some was spooned into the cats’ bowls – cupboards bereft of feline food – the rest moulded into a neat patty and fried in a little oil before being crowned with a poached egg.

The breakfast of Scottish champions. Which explains an awful lot.

Leftover Panettone

Looked at objectively, panettone, a yeast-risen bready cake enriched with butter, egg yolks, sugar and dried fruit, is not a health food. But up against our own Christmas pud, the Italian festive offering looks like a lo-calorie Weightwatchers special.

Having said that, the sheer size of these vast, billowing, pillow like cakes does mean that there is inevitably some still floating around this side of Epiphany.

There are a number of recipes that advocate using it in place of sliced white when making a bread and butter pudding. Admittedly this does sound delicious albeit a little, shall we say, involved? Time-consuming? Elaborate?

A far better option is to dip it into an egg and sugar mix, fry it in some nicely foaming butter then finish it off with a light dusting of cinnamon. And more sugar. And maybe a little whipped cream. Health food no longer.

Bury Black Pudding

Going back two or three generations, East Anglia is my ancestral home. My grandfather maintained that we could (loosely) trace our lineage back to that most famous nuisance Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt.

In that sense, since moving back to Cambridge, I’ve returned ‘home’.

But I was born and bred in the North West. My accent may be softening (or non-existent) but I still feel an affinity for this part of the country.

There are a few culinary traditions that seem to be unique to the region: Eccles cakes (a flaky pastry cake housing a lightly spiced and tightly packed collection of raisins), Lancashire oven bottoms (a soft bread roll), chip barmcakes (said bread roll stuffed with chips and possibly a splash of thick gravy. Carb-tastic) and black pudding.

There are many variations of ‘blood sausage’: Spanish Morcilla, French Boudin Noir, or the Boudin Rouge from Louisiana. But the best come from the large Lancashire market town of Bury (‘Buh-reh’) just north of Manchester.

Made with pigs’ blood, thickened with oats and pork fat, it is then spiced, stuffed into natural casings and steamed, transforming the colour from a vibrant red to the familiar black.

They are then left to cool before being sold in large slices or the famous horseshoe shape.

Before consuming, they must be cooked again either gently boiled or fried in a little butter.

Which is what I did this morning. Along with a couple of rashers of bacon and a fresh egg. Not the healthiest way to start the day but a hell of a lot tastier than a bowl of muesli.

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A Happy Omelette

I was feeling slightly rough this morning. Perhaps something to do with too much Guinness and some bizarre shooters containing (I think) Amaretto and Baileys.

Tea and marmite on toast provided temporary relief. Likewise for a shower and a shot of espresso. But both were short lived and for a while I thought bed was the only way to go.

In a final effort to fight off the ill, I thought that something vaguely greasy, eggy and fried might do the trick. Remembering there was still some pork cheek leftover as well as a small finger of cheddar, an omelette seemed the logical conclusion.

It’s not often eggs come with surprise messages from one’s girlfriend (or boyfriend) but today mine did:

And that, more than anything else, made me feel better.

Mind you, the omelette helped, as well.

A healthy breakfast: Bircher Muesli

Whilst I tried to be fully experimental while we were in Thailand, totally embracing the culture and venturing forth into the murky world of alien and obscure foods (most of which were delicious), there were some moments when familiarity was necessary in order to make me feel human.

Being adventurous is essential. Exploring the culinary underbelly of wherever you are makes for a far more interesting cultural experience. But when a deep-set hangover is pressing at your temples and rising up from the pits of an altogether unhappy belly, congee, century eggs, fish sauce and chilli are seriously illness-inducing.

After a night on the infamous Khao San Road, merrily powering through chilled towers full of Thai lager and smoking away at a seemingly endless shisha pipe, such a hangover presented itself with the force of a rampaging bull. This was coupled with blocked ears, a pulled muscle in my side thanks to an enthusiastic sneeze and a decidedly painful stomach. In short, I was in no condition to try anything that looked remotely unfamiliar.

I was willing to forego breakfast altogether, hoping that by midday the symptoms may have dissipated and I could have attacked a tray full of fried rice or some mysterious grilled meats on a stick but then a shining breakfast shaped beacon of deliciousness presented itself.

A bowl full of Bircher Muesli and a selection of dried fruits and nuts and seeds with which to customise it. This was exactly what was required. Cooling, easy to digest and packed full of everything necessary in order to rid my body of the self imposed illness that was crippling me at the time.

Since then I’ve been meaning to create some of this early morning ambrosia in order to indulge on a daily basis and yesterday, after cleaning out some of the kitchen cupboards, I came across some oats and finally got round to it.

It’s so easy to make and keeps almost forever in an airtight container. Just mix a few handfuls of oats with whatever dried fruit you have (I used the leftover raisins and cranberries from the breakfast muffins). Add some nuts and seeds, a little sugar and a sprinkle of cinnamon and you have your own Bircher muesli. The ratio should be about fifty per cent oats, fifty per cent tasty things. The beauty of doing it this way is that you can customise it to your exact tastes, a privilege you would pay through the nose for if you ordered it online.

If you want to enjoy it like a cold porridge, mix a couple of handfuls with milk in the evening and leave it in the fridge overnight. Come morning add a mashed banana, a grated apple and a dribble of honey and you’ve got a hearty and delicious breakfast. If you mix it up in the morning, it will be more like muesli in texture, but no less delicious.

Breakfast Muffins

I’m a big fan of muffins. A good blueberry muffin, slightly warm, with a spoonful of vanilla yoghurt is a real treat, especially when the fruit is fresh and the berries burst in your mouth with a little explosion of juice and flavour. I’ve also been a long time fan of Prêt a Manger’s breakfast muffins that were, until not that long ago, amusingly named Morning Glory Muffins, and I’ve been meaning to attempt to replicate them for a while now.

They are chock full of nuts, seeds and dried fruit and have helped me get through many a morning hangover whilst still feeling healthy and without having to resort to a full fried breakfast. They also go really well with coffee and with a Bank Holiday weekend ahead of us I thought I would try to make a batch of these muffins as a weekend treat.

The first step was to try and find a basic recipe for a muffin. One that wasn’t too sweet, too greasy or too complicated. A recipe that was versatile enough to add items to and remove items from without any detriment. This proved to be considerably harder than I expected and I can safely say that, after hunting through hundreds of books and websites, no such recipe exists.

I was also adamant that these muffins would be actual muffins. Most recipes seemed to result in little cakes that refused to rise up over the top of the cases, giving nothing more than a pathetic little dome of cake and a dense body underneath. I wanted a blooming mushroom cloud of muffin, spilling over the top of the case like the flesh of an overweight teen girl ballooning out over the top of a pair of low cut jeans.

This is the holy grail of muffin making – a light cup cake shaped base with a delicious cloud-like top that looks as if it is trying to escape its humble origins. But as a beginner I was unsure how to achieve this feat. I could use industrial quantities of baking powder but I didn’t want the end product to taste like bicarbonate of soda. I was also using wholemeal flour, not noted for its anti-gravity properties. And judging by the photos accompanying the various recipes I consulted, it seemed unlikely that I was going to achieve the desired effect.

And then I had a eureka moment. Instead of mixing the wet ingredients into the dry ones as one complete lot, if the egg was separated and the white beaten, like a meringue, before it was folded in at the last possible moment, then the muffin should be full of the necessary air to rise up like a nuclear explosion. The theory was good, but many sound theories have failed in application. Communism works, in theory, said Homer Simpson. But buoyed by my own Archimedes moment, I was awash with confidence.

And so, with wanton abandon I mixed flour (wholemeal and white) with some oats, a generous quantity of dried fruit (pineapple, cranberries and raisins) and seeds (pumpkin, poppy and sunflower), some brown sugar and a little baking powder before adding the ‘wet’ constituents: milk, egg yolks, vanilla yoghurt, oil, grated carrot and orange juice. The whole lot was mixed together and as the oven was heating up, I went to work with the egg whites, whisking them up until they were transformed from a liquid dribble into a billowy mass.

Once the whisked egg white had been folded into the muffin mixture and divided equally between 12 muffin cases, they went into a hot oven and I crossed my fingers.

There was no superstition necessary, however, and after twenty minutes they had risen up and over, just like muffins should. These were no pathetically domed specimens, little cupcakes vaguely masquerading as muffins. These were bona fide muffins worthy of any bank holiday breakfast table, to be served with steaming coffee, a little butter and plenty of late morning sunshine.

Breakfast Muffins

150g of plain flour
150g of wholemeal flour
50g of oats
50g of caster sugar
3 teaspoons of baking powder
A generous handful of seeds (poppy, sunflower and pumpkin)
One orange, zested and juiced
One carrot, finely grated
Two eggs, separated
150ml of vanilla yoghurt
100ml of sunflower oil
Two handfuls of dried fruits (dates, cranberries, raisins)
A pinch of cinnamon or mixed spice
A little vanilla extract

Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl (flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, seeds, fruit and spices). Gradually incorporate the wet ingredients (oil, yoghurt, orange zest and juice, carrot and egg yolks) until you have a batter.

Whilst the oven is heating up (200 degrees) whisk the egg whites until they have at least doubled in size and form billowing, cloud like white peaks. Mix a large spoonful of the batter into the egg whites and then gradually add this mixture to the batter. Try not to overwork the mixture as you will knock out all of the air that you worked so hard to attain.

When the oven is up to temperature, spoon enough of the mixture into waiting muffin cases so that they are almost too full. When they rise in the oven they should have no other place to go except up and over.

Bake them for about twenty minutes or until they are cooked all the way through and a gentle brown colour on the top.

The basic recipe can be personalised any way you wish: Lemon and poppy seed, banana and fudge, cranberry and orange, blueberry and vanilla. Feel free to play around with it and please do let me know how you get on. I’d love to see some pictures. Also, feel free to replace the wholemeal flour with plain white flour if you want an even lighter muffin.

Breakfast time and some very old eggs

In keeping with my anthropological approach to eating whenever I am away I eschewed the regular looking breakfast items and went straight for the steaming bowl of what looked like wallpaper paste.

Eggs and bacon are all well and good but whenever I eat anything like that for breakfast I feel so sluggish and tired, like I want to head straight back to bed, rest a hand on my belly and watch some inane television. This was most definitely not what I wanted to be doing during my holiday. I wanted to be suppressing boundless energy and racing from temple to temple and market to market. Not snoozing in front of Mythbusters in an air-conditioned hotel room.

So steaming wallpaper paste it was. If this was full of enough goodness to keep generations of Asian farmers fed then I was sure it could keep me sated for the next few hours, no matter how many over-zealous tuk-tuk drivers I had to fend off.

I assumed that this rather unappetising looking gloop was congee, a breakfast staple round the whole of South East Asia. To the side were a number of bowls of condiments. I rather like this DIY aspect of Thai food, being able to adjust your meal to your exact tastes. Like it spicy? Not a problem. Prefer things a touch sweeter? Go right ahead, my good man.

Unlike here in the UK, there is much less differentiation between breakfast and the other meals of the day. It is not unusual to have fried rice or even noodle soup at an early hour, perhaps thickened with a little egg. Congee is made by cooking rice for a long, long time. Occasionally if you fail to put the kitchen timer on and you forget about the pan of basmati bubbling away, it can take on a somewhat glutinous feel as the starches and grains break down. Well, if you do that for about an hour longer then you have congee, almost like a rice porridge.

And it is delicious. It is warming and filling in the way that you would expect from a bowl full of pure carbohydrate but it really comes alive when you get creative with the condiments. The usual array of flavour options are there (salty fish sauce, astringent white vinegar, sweet sugar and fiery chilli) but these are joined by other tasty morsels such as fish balls (balls made from fish, not trout testes), chicken balls (ditto), crispy fried shallots, thinly sliced green pepper and thousand year eggs.

Now, thousand year eggs do appear on my list of things to try but if I am being perfectly honest they are not up there with kobe beef and oturo tuna. They don’t even come as far up the list as a New York hot dog or genuine boudin noir. They are hovering somewhere between deep fried chicken feet and a Domino’s Meateor Pizza – things that I might eat given the opportunity (and if my curiosity was in need of something a little more adventurous), but not something I would go out of my way to nibble on. They are a frightening looking foodstuff. If you took an x-ray of a raw egg, asked a three year old to colour it in and took a photograph of the result, the negative of that photo would look similar to a thousand year egg.

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

What we know as the white is not white at all. It is a translucent brown colour reminiscent of recycled glass. The yolk, far from being an appetising yellow, is grey. And hard. Depending on how old the egg in question is, the smell can be no more than a tickle of ammonia to an eye-wateringly sulphurous tang. Century eggs tend to be milder whereas the millennial counterparts really are a force to be reckoned with. Governments in need of an alternative fuel source need look no further than these potent little ova.

They are made by wrapping regular eggs (that taste so very good fried or poached or boiled or scrambled) in a mixture of salt, lime, mud, clay and straw and then leaving them. For ages. Occasionally they are even buried in the ground for several months before they are deemed edible. And here they were staring me plainly in the face, at breakfast.

So, along with a spoonful of all the other delicious extras, I gingerly (oh, thinly sliced ginger was in there as well) added a couple of pieces of strange-shiny-brown-grey-sulphur-egg to my congee. For good measure I stocked up on chillis – my rationale being that the heat from these tiny nuclear strength peppers would render impotent the flavour of the eggs, if necessary.

And it was necessary. The very moment I put this odd, quivering brown and grey jelly to my mouth I knew it wasn’t going to end well. The subtlety of the congee was simply lost amid an explosion of rancid sulphur, like a box of old eggs had been cooked in a catalytic converter. Everything about this bizarre foodstuff was repellent – the flavour, the texture, the smell and the appearance. I didn’t listen to it but I dare say if I had, it would have sounded disgusting as well.

Just to make sure I wasn’t being blinded by preconception I tried another piece. That ended up in the same place as the first one: in a tightly folded napkin. The heat from the excess of chilli became a welcome distraction but I can safely say that, as far as I am concerned, century eggs and all their ilk can stay buried firmly in the ground.

Breakfast, Swedish style

I have a theory. Like the best theories, it is simple and concise and able to spark much debate as to its veracity and plausibility. Perhaps it is little more than the ramblings of a self-confessed gastronome attempting to add a modicum of legitimacy to a burgeoning obsession but I shall, nevertheless, share it with you now as a stimulus to further discussion.

I am willing to hear counter arguments and even consider the possibility that it might be nothing more than utter bunkum, but I have a feeling that a great many of you will agree.

It runs thus: the very best way to begin the process of understanding a new country or culture is not through examining their social structure, rituals, rites of passage or sexual practices. It is by looking at the food that they eat.

I firmly believe that by consuming three meals you can gain a more immediate and precise understanding of wherever you are than by reading any number of guidebooks. Only by sampling the local foods and flavours can you start to scratch the cultural surface and begin to delve deeper into the social miasma that a mere few mouthfuls ago felt so alien.

As a result whenever I find myself somewhere new, it is not the art galleries, museums, guided tours or buildings I am interested in – it is the local food. In the spirit of adventure I try not to be constrained by pre-conceptions or my own short-sighted cultural relativity. Granted there are some things that I would only eat if faced with the possibility of a long, slow and painful death from starvation, but they are few and far between (and for an entirely different post altogether). Now is the time to discover the food of my ancestral land – and what better place to begin than at breakfast.

Breakfast is the cornerstone of cuisine. It sets the day in motion and creates a springboard for whatever follows (usually lunch). It is usually a hurried affair, a far cry from the glory days of breakfast when an aristocratic diner could idle over tea and toast and eggs and bacon all served by the staff from silver platters. A freshly ironed copy of The London Times provided an excuse to avoid conversation aside from a muted commentary on the affairs of the day.

Sadly, I don’t live in an episode of Jeeves and Wooster so have to make do with toast and a large espresso with a glass of juice as a concession to health. But on holiday it is possible to linger over the first meal of the day a little longer, as if you are living in a world of perpetual Sundays (how I wish that were the case).

For some reason that remains elusive to me at this moment, I’d become convinced that the Swedes enjoyed a breakfast consisting mainly of coffee and pastries and so on our first morning – which also happened to be my girlfriends birthday – I confidently marched into a café ready to show off my knowledge of Swedish breakfast practices.

My request for two coffees was met with an approving nod from the chap behind the counter. So far so Scandinavian. My supplementary request for three pastries of his choice was met with a look of mild confusion and a glance at his watch before he shrugged his shoulders and removed a selection of tasty but totally unbreakfast-like items from the huge display. We were presented with a slab of chocolate cake, a glazed raspberry tart and a warm cinnamon roll. The first two were unexpected and came with a frightening amount of whipped cream. The third was more what I had in mind but I was willing to be proved wrong and we merrily tucked into this selection of Swedish breakfast treats.

The cinnamon roll was perfect with strong black coffee (the Swedes are the second biggest coffee consumers in the world, only the Finns neck more of the stuff), warming and steadying . I thought it would be an ideal hangover breakfast, like an edible hug. The others, although tasty, were just wrong at half nine in the morning and left me feeling a little sluggish while my poor digestive system struggled to deal with the cream.

I analysed this breakfast in conjunction with my theory. What did this tell me about the country I was in? Swedes are greedy, have a sweet tooth, aren’t particularly health conscious and most probably skirting a fine line between obesity and morbid obesity. Something was clearly amiss because not one of these conclusions appeared to be true.

I relayed this story to my Swedish mother. ‘Why on earth did you have cake for breakfast?’ she said.
‘Because that’s what they do over there. Isn’t it?’ I replied meekly
‘No, what gave you that idea? If people have cake at all, they wait until about three o’clock. Maybe late morning on a Sunday. And even then it is usually retired women who only do it as an excuse to gossip. Breakfast is usually yoghurt with cereal and fruit.’

This explained a lot. My disappointment at being wrong was offset by my delight that my theory still held water. And that we’d got to eat cake for breakfast, something I recommend everyone try at least once.

Pan(ettone) Perdu

W. Somerset Maugham once quipped that to eat well in England, you should have breakfast three times a day. I am assuming that he was referring to the Full English rather than a bowl of muesli, half a grapefruit and a glass of broccoli and garlic juice or whatever is de rigeur at the moment. I am also assuming that he was quipping in an era when obesity, coronary heart disease, type two diabetes and other such ailments were viewed as aspirational conditions rather than with the scorn lavished upon them today. Or perhaps they just didn’t exist.

Either way, I don’t think that eating two fried eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, tomato, black pudding, baked beans, hash browns and fried bread three times a day is the most balanced diet, nor am I willing to attempt this in a very British version of ‘Supersize Me’. I just don’t think eating all my meals at the Little Chef will have the same impact as Morgan Spurlock managed with his Herculean McDonalds effort, although the prospect of a documentary called ‘Olympic Alex’ does have marginal appeal (the Little Chef’s largest offering is called, somewhat amusingly, The Olympic Breakfast but despite this I’m not sure it will be the official meal of the 2012 games, given that it contains enough calories to power a coxless four for a week).

Nor will it do much for my arteries, health, weight or general well being (unless Channel Five wish to make a documentary about it in which case I might consider it). Also, why is he called the ‘Little Chef’ when he is clearly a couple of burgers short of being morbidly obese? Anyway, I digress.

Thankfully, things have improved greatly on the gastronomic front since Somerset Maugham made his astute observation but breakfasts in this fashion remain a uniquely Western concept popular solely in Britain, Ireland and America whilst the majority of Europe seems to get by on little more than a swift coffee and cigarette.

Admittedly, few of us now have the time to create such lavish and heart stopping starts to the day, and even if we did the collective health consciousness of the nation would prevent most of us from indulging in such a fashion. However, there are occasions when breakfast can be a real treat as opposed to a hastily burnt piece of toast eaten on the bus. Sundays lend themselves particularly well to this sort of fayre as do national holidays and New Year’s Day was no exception.

I know the turn of the year seems like a while ago, but I remembered this particular treat only yesterday and felt I had to share it with you. Plus I’ve cooked nothing of repute recently and this is one way of climbing out of a self-induced culinary chasm. French toast, or pain perdu as it is called in France, is a fairly light in terms of the amount of work involved. It’s also a great way of using up bread that would otherwise be thrown away (or lost, hence the French term – ‘lost bread’). With a little imagination it can also become a luxurious treat: dusted with a little cinnamon and icing sugar and served with a hot chocolate is one option.

Another, and the one we went for on New Year’s Day was to substitute the bread for thick slices of Italian panettone which, when dipped in beaten egg and fried in butter, goes supremely well with thick strawberry jam and steaming hot, black coffee. It may not have been the healthiest start to 2008 but it was a great way to see in the year