Banana Maple Porridge with Buttered apples

Recently when I had Chloe I was lucky enough to be staying at Freemasons Hospital who have a ‘wing’ at the Park Hyatt which I stayed at for a couple of nights, much, much nicer than the hospital I can tell you, don’t get me wrong, Freemasons is nice but it is still a hospital as opposed to the Hyatt which had huge rooms, no one barging in whenever they felt like it, King size beds, a spa & lots of other luxuries including of course a fantastic menu to choose from! Michael & I also spent our wedding night there so it was nice & nostalgic for us to be staying there again (yes he stayed with me of course). Anyway the reason I’m telling you this is because while I was there I was hooked on there Banana Maple porridge on the menu which I had every day I was there, it was sensational so when I was flicking through Bill Granger’s Sydney Food book & saw a recipe for the same well of course I was dying to try out immediately. I’ve never made porridge from scratch before, normally I go the easy way & just add water & pop it into the microwave. This was a bit more time consuming but well worth the effort, it was sensational, I love it & cant wait to make it every weekend. It tasted exactly like the Hyatt’s so not sure who stole who’s recipe? The buttered apples on top were nice & of course I got to use up more Granny Smiths but next time I think I would just serve with some sultanas & extra banana a la Hyatt & save myself the extra effort & pan to wash up. Also I didn’t serve with extra milk as suggested as didn’t think it was necessary. Yet another winner from Bill’s brekky collection.

Banana Maple Porridge with Buttered apples

1 cup rolled oats
1 ½ cups boiling water
1 cup milk
a pinch of salt
1 tablespoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 banana, finely sliced

to serve
buttered apples (below)
2 tablespoons maple syrup
warm milk

Place oats and boiling water in a medium saucepan & stir to combine. Let oats sit for 10 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients to oats in the saucepan & stir again. Bring slowly to the boil over medium heat. Reduce heat & bring mix to a simmer. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring often. The banana should almost dissolve. Remove from heat & let the porridge stand, covered for 2-3 minutes before serving.

Spoon into bowls, top with apples & extra maple syrup & a jug of warm milk on the side. Serves 2.

Buttered Apples

30g unsalted butter
½ kg hard sweet apples, peeled, cored & thinly sliced
1 tablespoon caster sugar

Place butter in a frying pan and melt over medium heat. Add the apples & sprinkle with sugar. Cook gently until the undersides of the apples are pale golden. Turn very gently to avoid breaking & cook until golden & translucent. Serve warm.

Apple Latkes

Another apple recipe from Nigella Lawson’s Feast. It appears under the Festival of Lights chapter, another celebration I know nothing about though the book informs me is properly called ‘Hanukkah’, its of the religion Judaism & they make a lot of latke’s. The variety I’m trying are sweet rather than the more traditional savoury variety. The recipe is supposed to make about 20 x 5-6cm latkes, as I was making just for the 2 of us for brekky I made about 10 giant ones. Having never had these before I thought they would be more like an apple flapjack however I was very wrong, they tasted very much like a doughnut & very wicked, absolutely delicious!

Apple Latkes

1 egg
100ml Greek yoghurt plus 75ml semi-skimmed milk or 175ml natural yoghurt
150g plain flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon bicarb soda
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons caster sugar
250g apples (about 2)
vegetable oil for frying
maple syrup or icing sugar & ground cinnamon for serving

Beat the egg with the yoghurt and milk or just the yoghurt if you’re using the plain normal variety, then set aside. Combine the flour, baking powder, bicarb of soda, cinnamon & sugar in a bowl. Peel, quarter & core the apples, then grate them.

Pour the egg-yoghurt mixture into the flour bowl, tip in the apples & fold together.

Pour enough oil to come to about 5mm up in a frying pan and put on the stove to heat. Dollop spoonfuls of the batter into the sizzling oil, a rubber spatula will help you scrape the batter off the spoon & press down the little latkes in the pan. Don’t worry about making them perfectly round. Fry for a minute or two, until golden brown on the underside, flip then fry for another minute on the uncooked side. Remove to a tray lined with kitchen towel to blot excess oil & continue to cook until all the batter is gone.

Buttermilk pancakes with Caramelized fruit.

Sunday morning for brekky to use up my left over buttermilk from last weekend some more pancakes were in order, I found another recipe using buttermilk in Bill Granger Bill’s Food. Buttermilk is low in fat, there is not much sugar in the mix & it is served with fruit so I could even kid myself that I was being healthy once again. As with all of Bill’s breakfasts, these were great, seems l & easy too. The fruit was supposed to be plums which of course aren’t around yet so I used nectarines, these were nice & even gave a bit of a bitter tang for contrast, think sweet juicy plums would work even better. Oh & this week I halved the recipe & was still heaps for the 2 of us.

Buttermilk pancakes with Caramelized fruit.

250g (2 cups) plain flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
a pinch of salt
2 tablespoons sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
750ml (3 cups) buttermilk
75g unsalted butter, melted
unsalted butter, extra for greasing the pan

To serve

Caramelized fruit
Maple syrup
Yoghurt

Stir the flour, baking powder, salt & sugar together in a bowl. Add the eggs, milks & butter & whisk to combine.

Heat a large non-stick frypan over medium heat & brush a small mount of butter over the base. For each pancake, ladle 80ml (1/3 cup) of batter into the pan & cook for about 2 minutes until bubbles appear on the surface. Flip & cook for another minute. Transfer to a plate to keep warm while cooking the rest.

To caramelize fruit, heat a frying pan over high heat, cut the fruit in half, remove stones, sprinkle cut side with sugar & fry cut side down for about a minute.

Serve in stacks with fruit, yoghurt & maple syrup.

Banana and Date Bread

Last week the latest edition of Donna Hay Magazine was delivered to my door & flicking through I knew I just had to make of this luscious sounding bread which even sounded remotely healthy, I mean it did have fruit in it so it must be good for you right? After popping it in the oven to cook for a tantalizing 1 hour & 10 minutes of the most lovely aroma wafting through the house, I did a bit of spoon licking, let me tell you the raw mix was pretty damn good, lucky I tried it after starting the cooking or none might have made it into the pan! Also I have to mention that one and a half cups of bananas is a lot at today’s prices so I was very lucky to score a bag of lady fingers at Coles going for $4.00 a kilo, they weren’t even that brown but were just perfect for mashing up for the cake mixture. The end result was divine, dates and bananas are another perfect combination I’ve decided, the cake was nice & moist on the inside & had a crispy outer shell, Michael and I both scoffed heaps while it was still warm out of the oven.

Banana and Date Bread

125g unsalted butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 ½ cups plain flour, sifted
1 teaspoon baking powder, sifted
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 ½ cups mashed banana
¼ cup maple syrup
1 cup chopped dates

Preheat oven to 160c. Place the butter & sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until pale & creamy. Gradually add the eggs & beat well. Fold through the flour, baking powder, bicarb soda, nutmeg & cinnamon and stir well to combine. Stir in the banana, maple syrup & dates. Spoon the mixture into a 7 x 32cm lightly greased loaf tin lined with non-stick baking paper. Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Allow to cool in the tin & slice to serve.

Pancakes USA Stylie

Well after I can’t remember how many gorgeous photos of pancake blogs lately, Matts being the last, I finally gave in & made my own. Normally I make very thin crepe style pancakes but for the stack I obviously needed some fat little babies so I looked through my books & Jamie’s recipe for USA stylie pancakes from Happy Days was about the only one for which I had all of the ingredients handy without having to make a dash to the shops. In this recipe the egg whites need beating before adding which personally I thought didn’t seem to make that much difference & was one step that made these a bit on the fiddly side. They did taste quite yummy though, especially drenched in maple syrup & yes Vanilla Ice Cream!

Pancakes USA Stylie

3 large eggs
115g plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
140ml milk
a pinch of salt

First separate Add the flour, baking powder & milk to the egg yolks in a bowl & mix to a smooth batter. Whisk the whites with the salt until they form stiff peaks. Fold into the batter. Heat a good non-stick frypan on medium heat. Pour some of the batter into the pan (I buttered my pan though the original recipe doesn’t call for this) & fry for a couple of minutes until bubbles appear on the top, flip with a spatula & fry until golden on both sides. Serve with whatever takes your fancy.

French Toast ala Ange

This morning for a lazy Queens Birthday morning I whipped up some french toast the way my family has always made it, with cheese on top! Seriously after eating it this way all my life I cant imagine having it sweet or with bacon & maple syrup, that just seems wrong to me.

The way I make it is to dip some bread in milk, then dip in beaten eggs, then pop it into a hot oiled frypan & fry on both sides until crisp & golden. Then serve with grated tasty cheese on top, try it someday, yum!

Ginger & Ricotta Flatcakes with Honeycomb

Yesterday I had my family over for brunch before heading out to the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show with my mum. I cooked up these flatcakes which sounded yummy, they took a bit more effort than just your average pancake so needed an excuse to cook them, would not go to the effort for just Michael & I. The reason I picked these was that I had a lovely chunk of fresh honeycomb that I picked up a couple of weeks ago. The end result was very nice, the coconut gave them some added flavour as well as a nice texture, I couldn’t really taste the ginger though so would maybe increase the quantity next time. The family were impressed & at 3 per person they were actually very filling so even though the recipe was for 4, I fed 5 without any empty stomachs left at the end. The recipe comes from my cute pocket sized Lust book

Ginger & Ricotta Flatcakes with Honeycomb

150 g (1 cup) Wholemeal Flour
2 tablespoons caster sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
55g (1 cup) flaked coconut, toasted
2 teaspoons ground ginger
4 eggs, separated
310ml (1 ¼ cups) milk
500g ricotta
200g fresh honeycomb, broken up into chunks
4 bananas, sliced

Sift flour, sugar, baking powder & ginger into a bowl & stir through coconut. Make a well in the center & add combined egg yolks, milk & 350g of ricotta. Stir until a smooth batter forms. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form, fold through mixture.

Drop 3 tablespoons of batter into a lightly oiled or buttered pan & cook until small bubbles appear on top, flip & cook other side. Serve 3 flatcakes topped with a spoonful of ricotta, a chunk of honeycomb & sliced fresh bananas. We also poured over some maple syrup & some of us even added a scoop of ice cream!

Banana Maple Syrup muffins

This morning I whipped up this batch of muffins from Marie Claire ‘Cooking’ for brekky, will take the leftovers in to work tomorrow for a morning treat for everyone. They were incredibly simple to make, really it was pretty much just measure & stir & the taste was really delicious, and as the bananas were chopped rather than mashed you could really taste their flavour when you bit into them.

Banana Maple Syrup Muffins

2 cups self raising flour
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ cup sugar
300g (10 oz) sour cream
1 egg
3 tablespoons maple syrup
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 bananas, chopped

Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Whisk together balance of ingredients in another bowl. Add the banana/wet mixture to the dry mix & mix until just combined. Spoon mixture into a greased ½ cup capacity muffin tins and bake in preheated 200c oven for 25-30 minutes or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Serve with extra maple syrup. Serves 12.