Panjacks and flapcakes

So many recipes and opinions! Thick or thin? Leavened or unleavened? Plain or augmented with superfoods? I've made them all! But here is a simple recipe for a moderately fluffy Sunday morning treat.

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda (not baking powder)

2 tsp cream of tartar

pinch of salt

1 egg beaten

2 cups milk

50g butter

You can use self-raising flour and omit the soda and cream of tartar.

Mix the first four dry ingredients in a large bowl. Make a well in the middle and pour in the beaten egg and milk. Mix, preferably with a whisk, until you have an homogenous batter.

Melt the butter in a skillet/frypan. I like to brown it a little for the extra nuttiness in the flavour. Stir the melted butter into the batter.

Allow the batter to stand for at least 15 minutes before you cook the pancakes. 

Heat the frypan on a medium-high heat - make sure the pan is very hot before you add any batter. Pour about 3/4 cup of batter into the middle of the pan and tilt the pan to spread the batter around the base. Once you see about half the surface covered in bubbles, it is time to flip the pancake. 

Each side should take about 1-2 minutes. If it takes longer, then turn up the heat. If the bottom is burnt before the bubbles have formed, try reducing the heat. 

Pile up the pancakes on a plate - put them in a low oven if you want to keep them warm. Try getting two or more frypans on the go if you think you are quick :)

Serve with butter, maple syrup, lemon wedges, jam, whatever... Have fun.

Soren's ANZAC Mess

A simple to make biscuit with a long shelf life and a contested origin, the ANZAC biscuit is sacred to Aussies and Kiwis. Altering this recipe may lead to legal consequences.

This recipe is the result of reading several different recipes and trying two different batches. The main difference in the second batch was a bit more water. My authoritative sources include the Australian Women's Weekly the Country Womens Association the Australian War Memorial and my mum. They are all pretty similar, mix-it-and-bake-it. Most only have one cup of oats. I think of this as an oat biscuit, so I like the CWA recipe with two cups of oats.

Baking with kids is great fun. They love getting their hands into the mixing bowl, it creates a, relatively contained, mess, which all kids love to do, and cooking always instills a sense of pride and self-reliance. Plus they get to share the bounty, and bragging rights, with their friends.

Ingredients

Wet stuff:

• 125 grams butter. Buy a 250g block and use half.
• 2 tablespoons (60ml) golden syrup or treacle. Don't listen to people who say you should grease the spoon. Don't deprive someone of the pleasure of licking it clean. 
• 3 tablespoons (150ml) water (update Jan 22)

Dry stuff:

• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda, don't mistake it for baking powder). 
• 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar. This is the acidic ingredient that makes the soda fizz. If you can't find it, substitute a tablespoon of lemon juice and use one less tablespoon of water.
• 2 cups (320g) rolled oats. Not quick oats.
• 1 cup (150g) plain flour
• 1 cup (220g) firmly packed brown sugar
• Optional: 1 cup (90g) desiccated coconut. 
• Pinch of salt

Note - I used the cup and spoon volume measurements to make this recipe, not the weights. I can't vouch for the weight conversions, so I recommend using the volume measures. (Update June 22: I have made this recipe a few times now using weight measures. I consequently updated some of the weights and am now more confident about them). You can work with a single measuring jug. A large-ish teacup rather than a coffee mug will do in a pinch. You can test that your chosen cup roughly fills a litre bottle with 4 cups. 1 cup = 250ml.

Equipment

Measuring jug or cup measure (or scales)

Tablespoon - a dessert spoon is a little small, so use a little extra if that's all you have. 

Teaspoon - if using one from your cutlery drawer, slightly round the ingredients

Baking tray - I used two trays, but you could also do this in two batches with a single tray. The tray from the griller will do.

Oven

Mixing bowl with 3 litre capacity.

Baking paper - not waxed, or greasproof paper.

Saucepan or microwave-safe bowl for melting the butter.

Mixing spoon, though hands will do just fine.

Method

A 10-year-old could probably manage the measuring. For younger kids, I measure everything out in separate bowls before they start. That way they still get to add everything to the mixing bowl.

1. Melt the butter with the golden syrup and water. You don't need it to be super hot to melt the butter. It should be warm, but not too hot when you add it to the dry ingredients, so it can be safe for small hands.

2. If your oven has a fan (most modern ovens) preheat to 190 degrees C. 200 if no fan.

3. Mix all the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.

4. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the butter mixture all at once. Mix well. It should be sticky and goopy. My first batch was a bit dry. It still made good biscuits, but they weren't like my mum used to make.

Allow the dough to sit for half an hour before baking.

Goopy. 
Try to monitor how much dough goes into mouths - that raw flour can't be very digestible.

5. Lay a sheet of baking paper on the tray.

6. Roll the dough into little balls. If you do it with wet hands, it stops the dough from sticking to your hands. But good luck getting the kids to worry about that. Leave plenty of space between the biscuits because they will spread out. I experimented with flattening some, but they were indistinguishable from the non-flattened ones when they cooked.

Size

7. Bake for at least 15 minutes. You may find - like I did - that the back of your oven is hotter than the front. If so, turn the tray around and put it back in for another 5-10 minutes until you have a nice, even caramel colour. I always loved the especially crispy, almost-burnt, edges, so don't be afraid to leave them for a few extra minutes. If you like 'em crispy, flip then over with a spatula and bake them for another 10 minutes.

8. Let them cool down on the tray. Don't worry about collisions, they tear apart easily. Store in an air-tight container. In theory, they last months. In practice, you may need to make a double batch to test the theory.

My first batch. The mix was a bit dry and that resulted in a chunkier, crumbly biscuit. If you like them that way, just reduce the water to 2 Tbsp and be sure to flatten them before baking.

Serving Suggestions

Serve with a glass of milk.

Soften some ice-cream by letting it stand for 20 minutes. Sandwich some between two biscuits.

Sweet Fig and Jumper Pottage

I have always loved the combination of meat and fruit. One of my favourites from my mum's repertoire is Apricot Chicken. Thanks to the providence of my backyard fig tree, I am literally buried in figs, so I have made this unctuous, sweet and savoury kangaroo stew several times in the past month, and I love it.

Ingredients

• 400g Kangaroo loin or rump. Kangaroo is a wonderful strongly-flavoured, very lean meat. It is wild-caught, so it can have some variability. I consider it an ethical ecological choice of meat in Australia.
  
  
• 1 litre of stock. I use my vege stock which I make from scraps each week. I don't like supermarket stocks. They are generally low quality and expensive for something so easy to make.

Green Grocer

• 3 carrots
• 1 onion
• 3 stalks of celery
• 3 bulbs of garlic (at least)
• 2 cups fresh figs (about the same volume as meat). You could use other fresh or dried fruit instead. Use about 3/4 cup if using dried fruit.
• 1/2 tsp of rosemary leaves, plucked from a neighbour's garden

Dry Store

• 1/2 cup plain flour
• Salt
• Pepper
• 2-3 Tbsp Rice Bran Oil (or other light-flavoured, high smoke point oil or fat)
• 2 Tbsp red wine vinegar or 1 glass of red wine

Method

These techniques are common for stews of all kinds: Flour and seal the meat, cook out your soffrito (Italian), or mirepoix (French) of root vegetables, add the sealed meat and other flavouring, and add a good stock.

• Chop the onions, carrot and celery into small dice (brunoise). If you aren't so handy with a knife, it is fine to use larger sizes (paysanne, or "peasant" cut). 
• Peel and chop the garlic and keep it separate from the vegetables.
• Halve the figs and remove the stems and any blemishes. I also remove the little "arse", which can be a bit hard, and any "scars" from where they have rubbed on the branches of the tree.
• Cut the meat into large cubes. The cubes will shrink a little with cooking. The goal is to end up with a bite-sized cooked article.
• Put the flour in a plastic bag with some salt and pepper. Add the meat cubes and smush it around with your hand to coat the meat. You could do this on a plate or bowl, but I find this method quite neat. I keep the leftover flour in the freezer for up to a couple of months so I don't go through so many plastic bags.
• Heat up your stew pot and add 2 Tbsp of oil. Get it to smoke point before adding the meat. Add a single layer of meat - otherwise you will cool the pan too quickly. I have a stew pot that is just big enough to do this in a single batch.
• Brown the meat well. This will both flavour and colour your stew. Remove the meat from the pan with a slotted spoon.

• Brown the vegetables. You may want to add a little more oil if the pan is dry. 
• Add some salt and pepper at this stage. 
• Add the garlic to the pan with the rosemary for a minute or two.
• If using the paysanne (larger) cut of veges, add a tablespoon of flour at this stage. The brunoise (small cut) will melt into the sauce and thicken it a little. 

• Add the figs and meat back to the pot. 
• Add red wine or red wine vinegar. If using wine, then let it reduce by half before moving on to the next step. If you like a little flash, you can flambé the wine once it comes to the boil.
• Add the stock. Let it come to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer for 2 hours.
• Correct the seasoning with salt and vinegar/lemon. Correct the consistency - a little more stock if it's too thick, or a cornflour slurry, if it is too thin. I like this kind of stew quite thin.

Serve with potato dumplings (kloesse), doughboys, baked potatoes or rice and some garden peas.

Potato Salad in the key of E Flat

This is one of endless variations on the same theme. In principle: hot potato mixed into a salad slightly warms the other ingredients and greedily drinks up a generous dressing.

Serves 3-4 as a meal

* 4 whole potatoes - for this variation, I prefer floury potatoes because I want them to break up a bit more. If you have waxy potatoes, decrease the amount of dressing a little as they won't absorb as much

* 1 whole egg

* 1 Tbsp white wine vinegar

* 3 Tbsp good olive oil

* 2 tsp hot english mustard

* 1 garlic clove

* 4 cups of hard vegetables - Your choice, but some combination of celery, red onion, carrot, celeriac, fennel, cucumber

* 1/2 cup of chopped herbs of choice - I had parsley and oregano to hand

* 1 tin of sardines

* 1 Tbsp capers

* Salad leaves to serve.

Roast the potatoes for 2 hours in a hot oven. Put them straight on the oven rack or put them on a layer of rock salt on a tray. Give yourself about 30 minutes to throw the rest of the salad together before the potatoes are ready.

Rub the inside of a large salad bowl with a cut garlic clove.

Whisk the vinegar, oil, mustard and egg together. Just bung them all in together, we aren't making a mayonaise. Note - you probably don't need salt in this salad because of the capers and sardines, but you should have a pepper grinder at table.

Chop the vegetables into easily manageable pieces for the plate and toss them in the dressing.

Take the potatoes, piping hot, from the oven. Quickly slice them into larger-than-bite-sized pieces and toss them into the dressing. This will partly cook the egg and thicken the dressing. The potatoes should fluff up around the edges during the mixing and absorb more of the dressing.

Add the herbs, capers and sardines and mix well.

Serve with a separate bowl of washed salad leaves. Put some salad leaves on the plate and spoon some of the potato salad on top.

Give a fig

So many figs! What can I do with them?

I've been picking about 1kg of figs each day from my bank yard tree. I gave them away to neighbours, ate as many as I could fresh, cooked an unctuous kangaroo casserole with them, made cocktails out of them, I even tried freezing them (didn't like the mushy result). One day, I ate so many figs that I had a pretty bad stomach ache (hey, I now know where that line is. 26 figs is too much YMMV). 

Finally, I had to resort to a conserve. I try to avoid conserves because of the vast quantity of sugar they demand. But, as far as effort goes, it is certainly the most accessible way to preserve fruit. 

I have to thank Useful Knowledge (youtube) for the proportions and encouragement.

Yields about 4 litres of finished conserve. Make sure you have enough jars!

* 4 litres figs (measured in 2x2L yoghurt buckets. One was full of my frozen, halved figs, the other was overflowing with whole fresh figs.

* 1.5 litres sugar (measured, roughly, in same bucket)

* 1 litre water (ditto)

* 1 lemon, juice and skin (so use organic)

* 1 tsp tartaric acid (cream of tartar)

Optional: 3-4 vanilla pods/vanilla essence

Optional: 2-3 Tbsp butter. I prefer without. Butter carries the flavour nicely, but I can always add butter to the end dish without any flavour difference, and leaving it out makes this a good offering to the vegan gods.

Cut the stems off the fruit and cut off any rough/tough patches of skin.

Bring the water to the boil and dissolve the sugar.

Add the fruit, lemon juice, lemon peel and tartaric acid (and vanilla if desired).

Boil for 2 hours.

Test a little syrup on a cold plate - draw a line through the cold syrup. When it's ready, it should hold a line for 3-4 seconds.

Roast your bottles in a hot oven for 10 mins and pour boiling water over the lids/seals.

Ladel the figs into the jars and seal.

Serve with rye bread, ice-cream or both (really - try it!).

sauerkraut

This is my first attempt at fermented vegetables. I got advice from various sources including https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/simple-sauerkraut

One whole drumhead cabbage. About 1.8kg

2tbsp coarse sea salt

tsp caraway seed

1 tsp pepper corns

Wash everything! Hands, bowls, utensils jars.

Core and finely sliced the cabbage.

Layer the cabbage with salt in a large bowl

Massage the cabbage for about 10-15 mins until the salt is dissolved, the cabbage is limp and the juices are flowing.

Toast the caraway and pepper corns and add them to the cabbage.

Put it in a sealed container, preferably with an air lock.

Ferment for at least 5 days. If you don't have an airlock, "burp" the jar every 12 hours.

You'll need about 2 litres of fermentation space. I squished it all into 1.5 litres and it is leaking brine.

Update: 26/3/2021

My fermentation stalled. I think because there was to much salt. I edited the quantity above to 2tbsp instead of 3. 

I drained some brine off and added some boiled water. Fermentation started again about a week later.

I kept it in my wine fridge at 16 degrees for another 2 weeks. It's been in my fridge at 4 degrees for the last couple of weeks. I had a trepidatious meal with kangaroo sausages and mashed potato. No side effects so far.

Also, overfilling is a risk for infection as the brine comes out the air lock. Leave a couple of cm gap in the top of the jar.

Update 30/9/2021

So that last batch worked out ok but not great. I would have liked a stronger ferment, and I want to avoid the stall in future.

I put another batch together last Saturday. It hasn't started bubbling yet. I put a little less elbow grease into the massage step, so I typed up with a few tablespoons of boiled, cooled water. Watch this space.

Eggplant and Lentil Curry

A good old standby. I always stock curry, rice and beans in the cupboard, and, though I really like to use eggplant in this dish, you can use whatever veggies you have available.

Ingredients

Makes enough for 4-5 hungry people.

Green Grocer

2 good sized eggplant

1 large onion

2 large carrots

green vegetable of choice. For convenience, I often use frozen peas or frozen spinach for this dish, but broccoli or fresh beans would be great.

Optional: 1 litre of vegetable stock

Dry Store

4 teaspoons of curry powder

4 cups of brown lentils. Red or green/yellow lentils are fine, but they will lose their shape during cooking.

3 cups brown rice

400g Tin of tomatoes crushed or whole

2 Tbsp frying oil

2 Tbsp high quality oil, ghee or butter

salt to taste. I often season this with Nam Pla (Thai Fish Sauce) for more umami, but that renders the dish unsuitable for vegetarians.

Method

• Either soak the lentils overnight or simmer them for 15 minutes in a separate pan
• Bring the rice to the boil and then turn it right down to the lowest setting for 40 minutes.
• Chop the onion and carrots paysanne (rough cut ~1cm cubes) 
• Fry the onion and carrots in the frying oil over a high heat. Add a little salt at this stage for a deeper flavour.
• Chop the eggplant into 2cm cubes.
• When the onion and carrots have a little colour on them, add the eggplant and get a little colour on them. The eggplant will soak up all the oil. If it looks a little dry at this stage, add some enough oil to give the eggplant the 'wet' look
• Add the curry powder. Stir to coat everything. Fry for a minute or two until the smell of the curry gets toasty
• Drain and add the lentils
• Add the tomatoes - if using whole tomatoes, gently crush them with your hands before they go in the pot
• Rinse the tomato tin with stock or water and add to the pot
• Add extra oil/butter/ghee. 
• Simmer gently for about an hour. The lycopene in the tomatoes will dissolve in the oil/butter/ghee and give it a rich red colour. 

Notes

Serve with a raita - I make one with finely diced cucumber and yoghurt.

The President's Peaches

No, not that president, these ones. I've had their hit song, "Peaches", running around my head for a day now on account of the 20kg of peaches I picked of my neighbour's tree (with her permission).

I agonised over what to do with this bounty. I don't have the right equipment to can peaches. Canning, or pickling them in sugar (aka jam) both require peeling the fruit and I'm a bit overwhelmed by that prospect. Forget about trying to eat them all fresh - after the first dozen, I was over that idea. So, I settled on trying a few different ideas:

• Lavashak - Iranian style fruit leather
• Peach jelly - "jelly" referring to a jam without the fruit solids
• Dried Peaches
• Peach syrup - for Ice blocks and drinks

Here is roughly how I made the jelly and the syrup. This made about 2 Litres of jelly.

Ingredients 

Green Grocer 

10kg peaches. They don't have to be super ripe, in fact, the acid in the less-than-ripe fruit is essential for getting it to set.

Many recipes say to use lemon juice for extra acidity, but I had enough unripe fruit to provide sufficient acid.

I also found recommendations to use refined pectin to be sure the jelly gels. I don't have anything against it, but its not something I had to hand. I did it the hard way and got to bed at midnight.

Dry Store 

1kg sugar

Method

• Remove the stones and roughly cut the fruit.
• Put fruit in a big pot with about 2 litres of water
• Bring to the boil, simmer for about 10 minutes, then strain. I used a wire mesh strainer and pushed through batches of fruit. You could do it all at once using cheesecloth and leave it overnight to maximise the yield.
• Return the juice to a clean pan
• Bring to the boil and add the sugar
• Simmer robustly until setting point - you can read about this elsewhere. I kept testing by dropping a bit onto a cold plate and seeing if it made wrinkles. It took about 2 hours as I had to boil off quite a bit of extra water.

Notes

There is a real art to jam-making. I've only tried a few times and I don't always get it right. Take a look at the articles linked above. They certainly improved my jam game.

I took off some of the syrup for ice-blocks and drinks once I judged the sour/sweet balance to be about right.