12 posts tagged “breakfast”

DrGourmet has changed the Blueberry Muffin recipe, which I used to have a lot for breakfast. The new one has loads more fibre, and I'm sure will be very nice. But I like the old one too! good job I printed it off. This quantity made 6 big muffins, at 174 cals per muffin. It doubled up easily, and you could freeze them individually, they defrost overnight in the fridge.

• 3 tbsps light spread
• 0.5 cup Splenda
• No-fat dried egg subsitute, 1 egg's worth, plus the liquid to make it up
• 2 tbsps non-fat yoghourt
• 0.5 tsp vanilla extract
• 1.5 cups plain flour
• 0.25 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 0.25 tsp baking soda
• 0.5 cup non-fat buttermilk
• 0.5 cup blueberries

Preheat oven to Gas Mark 5.

Cream the spread and Splenda til smooth, whisk in the yoghourt and vanilla.

Sift in the dry ingredients. Gently fold together, adding buttermilk and the required amount of water for the egg substitute. (If you're out of egg substitute, put 1 whole egg in with the yoghourt.) Don't overmix. Fold in the blueberries last.

Put in a muffin tin, with papers if you can get them.

He says bake 12-15 minutes, but that was never enough, I found half an hour was better.

Breakfast:

Beetroot-cured salmon, blinis, hardboiled quail eggs, creme fraiche, Ovruga fake caviar, chives and dill. Champagne or clementine juice, coffee.

Dinner:

Glass of Taylor's Chip Dry White Port, chilled.

Roast goose, goosefat roast potatoes, butter roast parsnips, sausages in bacon, sage and onion stuffing balls, plain boiled sprouts, petits pois, ginger cream sauce, port and redcurrant gravy. Choice of spiced pickled pears, sweet spiced prunes, cherry compote, cranberry and horseradish relish. Chateau Neuf du Pape.

Christmas pudding with cream or white sauce or rum butter. Orange Muscat Flora.

Coffee and Bendicks mints.

Late supper:

Winter apple, Comte cheese, clementine.

Phew.

I lik muffins for breakfast, and most of the recipes I have are sweet. These looked interesting and different, and come out at 204 cals per muffin. My normal blueberry muffins have 174, but I use non-fat yoghourt, low-fat buttermilk, sunflower spread, Splenda and non-fat egg substitute. So I expect with some tweaking I could get these down. Recipe makes 9 deep / large muffins. From delicious, September 2005.

• 2 tsp cumin seed
• 175 gms carrots
• 50 gms pumpkin seeds
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh coriander
• 150 gms plain flour
• 100 gms wholemeal flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 tsp bicarb
• 0.5 tsp salt
• some black pepper - doesn't list it on ingredients but is mentioned in recipe
• 200 ml milk (it doesn't say, but go for semi-skimmed)
• 1 egg (try soy egg replacement)
• 4 tbsps olive oil (think this might be necessary ... the lightest you can find)

Preheat oven to Gas 5. Line 9 holes of a deep muffin tray.

Dry fry the cumin seed until toasted. Put into a large bowl, and add the carrot (coarsely grated), the pumpkin seeds and coriander.

Sift and add all other dry ingredients.

Add milk, egg and oil, stirring lightly until just mixed.

Fill each muffin hole 2/3rds full. Bake for 20 - 25 minutes until risen and firm. Cool 5 minutes, turn onto wire rack. Best the day they're made but can be frozen.

We always have salmon over the holidays. Smoked, whole baked Crusader style with cinnamon and dried fruit, cold decorated with citrussy mustard jellied mayonnaise, or Russian pie with rice, hard-boiled eggs, dill and puff pastry. I like it with horseradish, too. We love beetroot as well, best of all being Russian beetroot caviar with garlic, prunes and brandy.

I've never tried making home-cured gravadlax, but this looks like an interesting place to start. From Good Food December 2005. Says serves 8 with leftovers, the calorie count is 306 per serving but that's based on 12 servings.

• 2 skin-on salmon fillets, about 3lb in total
• 8 oz caster sugar
• 5 oz seasalt flakes
• 3 oz fresh horseradish
• 3 medium raw beetroot, grated but not necessarily peeled
• 1 bunch dill, chopped

SALAD

• 1 frisee or oak leaf lettuce
• 4 medium beetroot, cooked, peeled and diced (that would be one vacuum-pack of pre-cooked)
• 2 shallots, finely chopped
• drizzle olive oil

DRESSING

• 1 200ml tub creme fraiche
• 1 lemon, juiced
• 2 tbsp fresh horseradish
• handful dill fronds, chopped

Check the salmon fillets for pin bones. Mix up all the other ingredients to make the cure. Lay out a double-thickness of cling film and spoon on some of the cure. Top with one piece of salmon, skin side down. Add most of the rest of the cure. Sandwich together with the other piece of salmon, skin side up. Add the last of the cure, wrap up tightly. Put in a container (like a roasting tray), and weight. Keep somewhere cool (fridge or garage if it's cold enough) for at least 3 days or up to a week. Check every day, pour away surplus liquid, turn the salmon, and re-weight.

On the day, unwrap the salmon and brush off the remaining cure. Slice into thin slivers. Mix up the dressing and toss the salad.

The salmon will now keep in the fridge for a week and can be used as smoked salmon.

This is back to the severe naughtiness with Drambuie Eggy Croissants, just a different twist. Again from a Baileys ad, in Good Food December 2005. Serves 4.

• 100 ml Baileys
• 2 medium eggs and 1 egg yolk
• 25 gms light brown sugar
• 50 ml milk
• 4 brioche finger rolls, sliced in half lengthways
• 25 gms unsalted butter
• Clotted cream and Chinese 5-spice powder to serve

Whisk eggs, yolk, sugar, Baileys and milk together until smooth.

Soak brioche for 20 mins, starting with the cut side down and turning over once.

Heat the butter and fry, 10 mins, starting cut side down and turning over once, til golden on both sides.

Top with cream and dust with spices.

This could be really gross. It doesn't have the orange tartness in the Drambuie version, which has orange zest in it as well. And it could be really sickly. But on the other hand ...

One of our houseguests this weekend has a problem with gluten, and although it's relatively easy to get suitable bread, and of course he can have eggs and bacon and stuff like that, I thought I'd look around for something a bit more unusual this time. In the Free From section of the supermarket they had an Orgran brand Buckwheat Pancake Mix, just add water, milk and eggs for the standard pancakes (plus instructions for making egg and dairy free versions).

We had 5 people for brunch, and the packet, made up with 3 eggs, made enough for 2 full size crepes each. I thinned it down with a bit more water after the first couple, made it easier to spread across the pan and get a more lacy, crisp effect at the edges.

Toppings included:

• sliced ham, gouda and optional stem ginger, a la Upstairs pancakes from Amsterdam. Everyone opted to have one of these to start, and one person opted for it again for round two
• smoked salmon, heated on the pancake and then smeared with lite cream cheese cold on the plate (I'd have added some mustard or horseradish or lemon, but it wasn't their choice, and hey, their pancake)
• sliced banana and maple syrup
• fresh blueberries, 100% chocolate nibs and maple syrup

The chocolate needed a lot of sweetener, it's cocoa mass with no sugar or fat in it, and can be VERY bitter (maybe whipped cream would have helped as well).

We found that the sweeter pancakes were better with a little butter melted under them in the pan towards the end, very tasty. DON'T be tempted to cook them in butter to start though. I used a very very heavy unoiled pan, and it was fine, but when we put fat in it, the pancake just cludged up immediately and I couldn't spread it across the pan base to get it thin.

They've all gone now, I can go back to bed.

Made these last night to go with a fillet steak in merlot-blackberry sauce , they probably weren't the healthiest side dish in the world, but better than the normal breakfast ones.

Roast a head of garlic in a low oven for an hour or so until squidgy.

Squeeze the innards out into a small heavy pan and add a medium box of white mushrooms, torn into quarters.

Cover with beef stock and 2 tsps butter.

Simmer until stock is evaporated, and mushrooms are cooked. (If not cooked to liking, add more hot water and keep going) then stir about while they brown. Crush any remaining large chunks of garlic.

Keep warm if you haven't done the rest of dinner yet. ...

Just before serving, reheat on a low heat and stir in 1/4 cup 4% (or lower if you can get it) creme fraiche, and lots of fresh ground black pepper. Simmer and stir to get the cream slightly thickened and a glorious autumnal brown.

John said he'd have liked more garlic, but the kitchen REEKED this morning - and the mushrooms a bit more done, they were chewy for him.

Made two veg portions, would have made 4 - 6 garnish portions.

If I hadn't been doing the merlot sauce for the steak, I'd probably have added some sherry with the beef stock, or at the cream stage to thin it a bit and used it as a sauce. Green peppercorns would be good, too.

Based on an idea by Phil Vickery in Delicious magazine, September 2004. This turned out to be 4 portions, which are currently chilling in the fridge. 2 breakfasts each for the next 2 days. If it's any good ... He reckoned 377 cals for his original recipe, this is probably less - he had 85gms caster sugar, 400gms yoghourt, 350gms fruit, 100gms Jordan's Original instead of the muesli, mixed with 140gms porridge. But it wasn't clear if that was weight in cooked porridge.

I made porridge with oats, in the microwave, using 80 gms of oats and the equivalent volume in semi-skimmed milk, and water, no salt or sugar. Let it cool slightly and stirred in enough sugar/salt free muesli to cover the top well, plus 200gms fat free yoghourt. Mixed well, added about 3 tbslps Greek Mountain honey and stirred in not so well, to ripple through.

Spooned about 2/3rds of this into 4 half-pint glasses.

Mashed 225gms fresh blackberries with about 1 tbsp lime juice and 2 tbsps Splenda, and let sit while the porridge was cooling.

Top the porridge mix in the glasses with the blackberries, juice and all.

Add the rest of the porridge.

Swirl with a knife to ripple the fruit through - it won't reach through to the bottom.

Chill overnight and see what happens ...

Note: talk to NM about whether this could be gluten-free, or at least tolerable? might have to do something about the muesli. Could use blueberries when blackberries are out of season, or frozen would be mushy already.

In Amsterdam on holiday we went to the Upstairs pancake house on the Grimburgwal, where we had a large crepe-style pancake each, with thin bacon in large slices cooked into it, topped with thin slices of gouda-type cheese, and finished off with a handful of chopped stem ginger in syrup piled into the middle. Could have been a savoury, could have been a sweet - would make a great breakfast. You could use a really good smoked ham in place of the bacon, any swiss type cheese would work. Grated might even work better.

Bacon Cheese and Ginger at the Upstairs Pannenkoekenhuis