Scones on Sunday – potato scones
Posted: September 29, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: breakfast, potato, scones, Vegan, Vegan MoFo, vegetarian 7 CommentsI’ve been thinking about potato scones almost since MoFo started, they cover so many things I really like: potatoes, carbs, friedness. Yep, the potato scone has it all.
I found several recipes. The common factor in many seemed to be that the flour weighs about 1/5 of the potato. The simplest instructions were at scottishrecipes.co.uk but to a potato-scone-making novice they left out a few rather important bits of information, like whether to flour your rolling-out surface, or grease your griddle.
I knew I wouldn’t get through 500g of potatoes-worth of scones, so I cut it down to 300g, with a corresponding 60g flour. I peeled and weighed out the potatoes, cut them into fairly small chunks, covered them in cold water in a pan and boiled them until they were soft enough to mash. When they were done I drained the cooking water into a measuring jug, being fearful of the instruction that told me not to let them get too dry.
I mashed the potatoes with a pinch of salt and added them to the flour while they were still warm, and added a glug of olive oil. I cut them in with a fork, and the mixture did look a bit on the dry side:
So I added a dribble of the cooking liquid. Not a great idea. It was still a cohesive dough, but definitely on the sticky side. I ploughed on, scooping out half of the mixture and starting to roll it out on my silicone pastry mat. Disaster! (yes, I’m being melodramatic.) The dough stuck to the mat. I scooped it back into the bowl, turned the mat over and floured it, despite lack of instruction to do so, and put a bit of flour on the dough for good measure. This successfully rolled out into a rough circle which I then quartered.
The recipe also doesn’t say to grease the griddle, but I didn’t want to be scraping dough off my recently-re-seasoned cast iron pan, so I poured a good couple of teaspoons of oil in and swirled it around. The seasoning must have taken pretty well this time, because these didn’t stick at all, and in fact came out looking pretty good:
I’m not usually one for a big breakfast, but this is the last Sunday of MoFo, so I decided to treat myself. Beans in tomato sauce (with added chopped onions), mushrooms fried with a bit of oregano and smoked paprika, a tomato cut in half and warmed up in the oven, and some Linda McCartney rosemary and red onion sausages, and the scones as the king of the plate! Jolly good it was too. Since I usually only have cooked breakfasts when I’m on holiday, and because the sun is shining today, it was a great start!
Scones on Sunday – AKA what I didn’t have for breakfast
Posted: September 15, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: breakfast, scones, UK, Vegan MoFo, VeganMoFO, Worcester 6 CommentsYesterday’s post didn’t actually happen yesterday, it was something I prepared earlier, as I knew I wouldn’t have time to write while being busy enjoying the sights of the rather pleasant city of Worcester.
We left Leicester on Friday evening and drove up the motorway in rather horrible rainy conditions to arrive after 9pm. We didn’t get up to much that evening beyond nipping out for a quick drink just before last orders.
On Saturday we were meeting a couple of friends for the afternoon, but decided to go out for breakfast (especially because we were staying in a Travelodge, where it looked as though there was a set price of £8 for breakfast, which I’d probably baulk at paying even if they were offering me something better than boxed cocoa pops or dry toast).
Worcester has only 3 places to eat listed on Happy Cow, and we visited them all. Our breakfast destination was the Karmic Cafe, and it is here that I did not have scones for breakfast.
If we’d have had room later, I did fully intend to come back and try one of these, as they offered cream teas at the cafe, including the above vegan scones with jam and I think some kind of vegan cream and a pot of tea.
But these scones stood no chance with me in the morning, because if someone offers me a choice of the above, or a vegan version of a full English breakfast, guess which one I’m going to take?
2 hash browns, traditional tinned tomatoes, baked beans, veggie sausage and bacon, herby mushrooms, brown sauce and a couple of rounds of toast with vegan spread, with a glass of juice to wash it down. That was a good breakfast!
Before we left to come back today, we went to Boston Tea Party, and they also do a pretty nice breakfast. Of note were the rosemary potatoes, and the toast made from seedy bread, although the latter lost marks with me because it came pre-spread, whereas I prefer to use my toast to mop up bean juice.
Not pictured is the excellent blueberry and ginger smoothie I had with this. Totally worth a visit for that even if you’re not hungry.
Scones on Sunday – banana drop scones
Posted: September 8, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bananas, fruit, redcurrants, scones, Vegan MoFo, VeganMoFO 4 CommentsWell, the dinner yesterday was lovely. My clever friends had managed to find packets of ready-made vegan gnocchi at the Co-op, had made a great sauce to go with them, and a very tasty wilted spinach salad.
Some time passed. Cider, wine, sangria, beer and old-fashioned cocktails were consumed (not all by me!), and when we started flagging they offered us the spare bed so we didn’t even have to fork out on a taxi. Very comfy it was, too.
This morning we all felt a little delicate and in need of some fresh air, so I suggested a trip to http://www2.le.ac.uk/institution/botanic-garden to my significant other. What a great start to a Sunday, the gardens were beautiful.
When I got home, something greasy and starchy was definitely in order, so I made a batch of banana drop-scones. I googled around and had a look at a few sites to see how different people make their drop scones (also apparently known as Scotch pancakes, although I think of Scotch pancakes as having sultanas in them, which none of these recipes did), and I ended up loosely basing them on a (non-vegan) recipe over at http://www.be-ro.co.uk/recipe/showrec9.html as it was the simplest and had only one egg originally. Many of the others suggested 2 eggs, and fairly large amounts of raising agents, but I don’t need my food to be fluffy today, I was looking for comforting stodge. As I still have bananas to use up I thought I’d go back to the time-honoured vegan trick of subbing egg for banana, with the bonus of banana-flavoured drop scones sounding rather nice anyway.
Banana Drop Scones with Sour Redcurrant Sauce
Drop scone ingredients:
100g (3/4 cup) plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 medium banana (my scales weighed this at 82g)
40g (1/4 cup) caster sugar
Unsweetened soya milk as needed. I used about 160ml (2/3 cup)
1 tablespoon oil – I used rapeseed (canola)
+ oil or cooking spray for the frying pan.
Ingredients for the redcurrant sauce:
50g redcurrants
1 tablespoon granulated sugar (this came out very tart, which I thought was a great contrast with the pancakes, but if you don’t like tartness add another spoon or two of sugar).
1 tablespoon water
Method:
Sift flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into a mixing bowl
Mash up banana in a smaller bowl. Add some of the milk to the banana to get it to a sloppy consistency then pour it into the dry ingredients. Add more milk until you get to a thick but droppable consistency. Stir in the oil (or leave it out – the BeRo recipe doesn’t call for fat, but many of the other recipes had butter in them)
Turn on medium heat under a frying pan and add oil or spray with cooking spray (they do brown better with oil, I tried both ways). Leave to heat up for about 20 seconds.
Turn heat down and using a small ladle or a serving spoon, drop spoonfuls onto the pan. They will spread a bit, so leave space between them. Make them whatever size you like but they should be on the small side, I made mine about the size you could eat in 2-3 bites. Cook them for about 3 minutes on one side – bubbles will start to rise. Mine looked like this just before I turned them over.
Cook for another minute or two on the other side to brown. Remove from pan and if you want to eat them warm put them on a plate in a low oven while the rest cook.
After tasting the first drop scone I realised they were a bit too sweet for my taste, so I got out some redcurrants I had frozen a few weeks ago after they were given to me from my mum’s allotment.
I put 50g into a small saucpan with a tablespoon of sugar and one of water and boiled that for about 5 minutes to make a jammy sauce. This was nicely tart and played off the sweetness of the drop scones perfectly. Here’s a nice gory shot of the innards for you!
dropscone 
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