Pancake Round-Up

My laptop charger arrived today! :) I don't think it's completely solved the problem unfortunately, but for now at least, it has provided me with computer access so I'm happy! :)

I hope you've all having a great pancake day?

Lots of pancakes have been eaten here...

It started with regular pancakes before the others went to school/uni - 200g plain flour, 2 eggs, 2 tbsp oil and 600 ml milk to make these beauties...

I had 2 rolled up with lemon juice and sugar...

Yum. Although a lot smaller than usual - the "non-stick" pan we normally use for pancakes decided it had enough this morning so we had to use the mini pan instead, they were quite cute, although it did cause much frustration for Liam (the pancake maker) as we were eating them twice as fast, whereas it was still taking him just as long to make them!!

I can't remember if I've told you about the water problems we've been having in the house recently? On Sunday they were doing roadworks and managed to burst the water pipe outside our house...so no running water on Sunday night. Then on Monday we came down to find water dripping from the ceiling in the entrance hallway, right by the light! So our landlord's brother came round last night to have a look and stop the immediate leak, then was back again this morning to finish fixing it. By the time he left at 10.30am I was starving again - 2 mini pancakes is not enough for breakfast!! So I used some of the remaining pancake batter to make a banana fritter/thick banana pancake... It went from this rather unappealing mess in a pan...

to this after half frying, half grilling (I didn't trust myself to flip it!)...

to this...

It tasted amazing, especially with the maple syrup. These photos don't really do it justice!

So good. And it's got fruit in it so it's kind of healthy right?! Who cares? It's pancake day...any excuse! :)

For lunch, I wanted to stick with the pancake theme, so decided to have a 2nd attempt at socca. Those of you who remember the disaster that was me trying to pan-fry socca, will not be surprised that I decided to oven bake it this time! I just mixed 55g chickpea flour, 110ml water and 10ml sesame oil (as I was going to be serving it with houmous) and put it into a cake tin...

and baked it in the oven at about 180C (I already had peppers roasting in the oven so just put it in with them) for about 15 minutes...

not bad...you'll have to wait a minute to see whether it came out of the pan ok!

Luckily for me, baby decided to have a super-long nap today 10.30am-1.30pm, so I had plenty of time in the kitchen to make the banana pancake (above) and lunch. As well as the socca, I roasted some peppers and made houmous. I decided on caramelised red onion houmous as it's my favourite shop bought flavour. I sliced and fried 2 small red onions, then blitzed them up with a tin of rinsed chickpeas, 1.5tsp sesame oil, 40g tahini, 2 garlic cloves and 5ml lemon juice..
.

plus water until the houmous reached desired consistency...

this is good, nice sesame flavour, but the onion tasted raw...I'll have to cook it for longer first next time...

So, time to plate up lunch. Not surprisingly, the socca didn't manage to come out in one piece (I'd forgotten to grease the pan which wouldn't have helped!!)

but once it was topped with houmous and roast peppers you couldn't really tell...



although admittedly it didn't really look much like a pancake then either! Ah well, it tasted good...socca didn't really have a strong taste but had a nice texture...any taste would have been overpowered by the "raw" onion flavour anyway!!

This afternoon, I snacked on non-pancake food...namely 4 chocolate biscuits (oops!) and a maple walnut latte...but non-pancake photos aren't going into my post today or it'll go on forever! Having not had access to my laptop recently, I've kind of got out of the habit of photographing every little thing I eat...I might stick to just posting photos of my main meals in future, unless I eat/make any interesting snacks of course! :)

For dinner, another version of pancakes... goat's cheese and leek crepes...which were based on a recipe in The Vegetarian Cookbook...

and were meant to look like this...

I simplified the recipe down a bit, cutting out salt pepper etc as I don't like using salt in cooking and we didn't have the other things. So I ended up just gently frying leeks in butter and oil...

Before assembling the pancakes. The recipe just calls for "savoury pancakes" and, in my experience, shop bought pancakes tend to work better for savoury bake recipes. However Waitrose were out of stock of their fresh crepes, so Liam bought dry good pancakes from Tesco. Bleugh...much smaller, thicker, and way too sweet despite saying they were suitable for sweet or savoury! Had to make do though, especially as our pan was in no way up to making more pancakes!

First I added the leeks...

then goat's cheese on top...

before rolling them and putting in baking dish...

Whenever I've made savoury pancakes in the past, I've put a white sauce on top of them before baking. However this recipe didn't suggest that so I just went with it as I was tired and wanted a quick dinner!

After about 5 minutes in the oven...

it was time to serve up...

typically I served mine last and it split everywhere. Daughter's looked slightly more attractive...

...or maybe not...they tasted better than they looked!! Everyone else really enjoyed these (baby scoffed the pancake super fast but wasn't keen on the leeks!) but I couldn't get past the sweetness of the pancakes. I ate a bit of the filling when I was prepping them though and that was yummy...I'm in a loving goat's cheese phase at the moment! :)

After dinner, Liam and daughter had yet more Tesco pancakes, this time with Nutella, banana and whipped cream...

but I contented myself with a few fingers of Nutella, then waited until the children were in bed before using the last of the pancake batter from this morning up.

My final pancake of the day... a blueberry and vanilla version of this morning's banana pancake... not quite the American style pancakes I'd planned to make (I ran out of time/sacrificed them for the banana pancake earlier!) but delicious nonetheless...served with Rachel's Greek style coconut yoghurt...

Yum. So many pancakes! I think my favourite was the banana pancake, but they've all been prettyy good! :)

Have you managed to enjoy some pancakes today? And are you giving anything up for Lent?

I made a last minute decision today to give up shop-bought processed sweet treats (...and breathe!) so, importantly!, I'm still allowed raw chocolate (some on its way to me in the post at the moment!) but not bought chocolate, bought cakes, bought biscuits etc...and if I make my own sweet treats I will try to replace the white sugar with a more natural alternative. A bit of a wordy one, but hopefully means its not too restrictive (I don't see anything wrong with having a sweet treat now and again, even in Lent) but will make me think about what I'm giving up, and also focus me back to healthy eating again...I think I need it after today's load of white flour pancakes!! Delicious, but so full and bloated now!

Sweet Potato and Cauliflower Curry

This morning was yet another morning of Liam going in to uni really early, I'll be glad when this project gets handed in on Thursday! Once everyone was where they should be (school, sleeping in cot) I treated myself to a Vanilla Chai Latte...

I haven't had this before - someone recommended it to me in Waitrose - it was so tasty! :) full of sugar and other cr*p no doubt, but delicious all the same!

Then it was time for breakfast. You'd think after all the chocolate oat cookies yesterday, the last thing I'd want would be chocolate porridge! When I was comparing the tastes in my post yesterday however, I realised I hadn't had cocoa porridge since I switched over to this blog at the start of January! (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I couldn't find a post on it anyway!) With the wind howling and the rain pouring down outside, chocolate porridge sounded perfect to me! I sweetened it with a little Sweet Freedom and topped it with a coconut sauce made of 10g coconut flour, 60ml Kara coconut milk (I was surprised how coconutty this flour smelt/tasted, basically like ground up desiccated coconut...I don't know why I wasn't expecting it to really) and fresh raspberries...

This was perfect! The cocoa porridge was lovely and rich, but the coconut sauce and raspberries lightened it up so it wasn't sickly, yum!

Unfortunately I can't say the same for lunch. I was finally going to make Socca. I decided to go with the same toppings as Laura, so I got my kale, mushrooms and courgettes...

and my chickpea flour...

and my tahini based sauce...

so what went wrong???

This is why I normally leave the pancake making to Liam!! I was so disappointed! :( completely my fault as everyone else seems to have great results with socca. I'm planning to try the oven baked socca next - hopefully I'll have less chance of messing that up!!

I tried to eat the vegetables on their own with the tahini sauce...

but bleugh, I think they'd been waiting so long for the socca to be ready that they were completely over-cooked to the point of inedible... I hate wasting food but I could not eat this :(

Lunch instead was a satsuma with 3 of Mama Pea's dough balls...

and another chai latte...

all delicious, but a bit sweet for a normal "lunch"...I was a bit worried it would lead to me eating everything else in sight, so I had a nap when baby did instead...any excuse to catch up on sleep! :)

Mid-afternoon our Asda order arrived. Nothing particularly exciting (I save that for my health food shopping trips!!) but the fridge...

and cupboard (with baby at the bottom trying to grab the tinned pears!)...

and indeed the unpictured freezers, fruit bowl etc are now full...I need to have a good sort out tomorrow!!

Whilst sorting out the shopping I also had a slice of seeded toast with peanut butter.

Then it was time to make dinner, one of my favourites. Sweet potato and cauliflower curry. Vaguely based around this curry recipe.

Sweet Potato and Cauliflower Curry
(serves 2-4)

• cauliflower (I usually use approx 400-500g)
• sweet potato (approx 500g)
• tsp oil
• 1-2 tbsp curry paste
• 1 can chopped tomatoes
• some kind of coconut addition! I usually use a can of coconut milk or coconut cream, or a sachet of creamed coconut depending on what I have in the cupboard

First chop (or in my case, get Liam to chop!) the sweet potato and cauliflower...

and grab the curry paste (lazy option, you could obviously make it with diced onions, ginger, garlic spices etc instead...I sometimes do but have tended to go for the paste since having the baby a year ago, oops!), tinned tomatoes and coconut milk...

No photos of the cooking process as the steam messed up the photos, but in short...

• Heat pan/wok
• Add a little oil
• Fry off a couple of tablespoons (or more/less to taste) of curry paste
• Then add the sweet potato and cauliflower and stir to cover in curry paste
• Add tin of tomatoes and tin of coconut milk (plus extra water if necessary) and simmer until vegetables tender

 This took me about half an hour, with lid on the wok, but just check to make sure the sweet potatoes are nice and soft before serving.

This doesn't really need rice with it, but I had a little anyway...

Yum, I love this so much! It's not normally quite this orange in real life!! Liam brought home a "posh" camera from uni that he is borrowing until Thursday to photograph his projects. The quality of the photos is great but not sure what it's done to the colour!

The camera - a Nikon D40 SLR - also took great photos of the chocolates I ate this evening. Booja Booja banana truffles...

time to try one...

Yum. I loved the texture of these, so soft and squidgy!! I'd hoped they would have had more of a banana-y taste, you could definitely taste the cognac but the banana didn't really come through. Delicious though...I managed to eat the entire box in about 10 minutes, oops! Love this photo too - I wish my camera could do the focus on foreground with blurry background thing! I also wish I'd had use of it yesterday to photograph the chocolate oat cookies - I couldn't get my camera to focus on the close-up to show the texture properly. The camera is very bulky though, wouldn't be much good for slinging in my bag when going out and about!

I'll just have to take extra care over the presentation of tomorrow's dinner to make the most of having another opportunity to use the camera before Liam has to give it back to uni!

This post reads back a bit disjointedly - an accurate reflection of my mind today perhaps - days when I don't have enough contact with other adults, I tend to just spill lots of random thoughts out at the first opportunity! Sorry, hope you managed to make some sort of sense of it!! Tomorrow is toddler group, and a chance to catch up with other mums, so hopefully I'll be sounding a bit more "normal" tomorrow!!