Apple, Cottage Cheese and Walnut Pancakes

This is my variation of a recipe published in Bon Appetit Magazine. I’ve changed it to include walnuts, increased the apple amount to 1/2 of an apple and scaled it down to two servings. Maple syrup on them is good but the pancakes are fine as is. Any apple seems to work, these were made with Cosmic Crisp.

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Chicken and Spring Onion Burger…

…or, a healthy bit of plagiarism!

This recipe is a bit of a fraud; it’s my take on Paul’s Chicken & Rice Sausage Burger. The major difference is the use of chicken breast instead of thighs – I’m on a low-saturated-fat diet – and the addition of spring onions, also called scallions.

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These are a real favourite – get the recipe…

Barbecue Snack Sticks

This fermented snack stick uses both a barbecue rub recipe and a commercial sauce. The sauce, while low in pH, is not sufficient to lower the pH to a safe range without fermentation. The sauce in the recipe, Sweet Baby Ray’s Original Barbecue Sauce, was chosen for its wide availability. If desired, it can be replaced with a similar sauce.

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Get the recipe…

Barbecue

Other than a couple of sauces and rubs, I’ve not posted about barbecue, mainly because we don’t do a massive amount and often don’t cook the classics: briskets, ribs and pulled pork.

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That said, we do cook some and now that Paul’s part of Local Food Heroes – he lives in the home of BBQ, the southern US of A – it’s about time we started!

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Beef Burger

Raise the subject of beef burgers on any barbecue forum or social media site, and you open a can of worms! From those for whom the smash burger is everything to those who insist on a certain mix of beef cuts, those who won’t season until cooking is finished, and those who add everything but the kitchen sink!

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Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a lightly seasoned burger made of chuck beef that I’ve ground/minced myself, but in the real world, that’s not always possible.

A burger from supermarket mince? How…

Mushroom and Porcini Soup

In 2014, I wrote:
“Until recently, I’ve never been really happy with using water instead of stock for the vegetarian soups; vegetable stock powder invariably gives a celery flavour to the whole soup, and to be honest, even when I’ve made vegetable stock, I’ve never been really happy with it.“

“However, I think I’ve found the answer, at least for mushroom soups. Dried Porcini absolutely transforms them. I’d never bothered with it until now because of the price. But recently I’ve been looking for things that help to lower my calorie intake and have been surprised; it’s not always the lower-calorie items that are best. For example, you get far more ‘bang for your buck’ from, say, high-calorie Stilton than a reduced-calorie cheese. Just try it: tiny pieces of Stilton will add flavour, whereas you’d need double the amount of the lower-calorie product. Well, when I was thinking along these lines, I also realised that the same applies to using very small amounts of expensive items, and there’s no doubt that Porcini is expensive: £60 – £80 per kilo, but if you only use 10 g it’s only 60p, or about 10p per bowl.“

That’s as true now as it was then; well, except that the price is £110 – £125 a kilo now!

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Food, Curing and Sausage