Nut butter smoothie pancakes

Nut butter smoothie pancakes

by | Feb 26, 2019 | Dodgy Dairy, Lots Of Little Leftovers, Quick Quick, Recipes, Skill

Leftover nut butter smoothie into … pancakes?!

At the moment I’m enjoying my dinners a little too much, so I’m not hugely hungry for my brekkie. So, nut butter smoothies are a good breakfast – a banana, a huge dollop of peanut butter and loads of milk. One portion of fruit (and using up a manky banana), some protein and calcium. Perfect.

I thought that my kids would be all over this smoothie, but, it was shunned.

I popped the leftovers in the fridge on Friday morning, in a classy pint glass. Monday morning came around, the smoothie still there and I thought – really? Could I?

Yes, friends. Oh yes. Really yes. These are hands DOWN the best pancakes I’ve made and I’ve made a few. So, I might even make too much smoothie next time, seriously.

Pancakes are on my mind, TBF. So this week is Pancake week! Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday, should be the Patron Saint of StorrCupboard day; maybe I’ll make that a thing. Ann Storr, Patron Saint of Leftovers? It’s got a bit of a ring …

Leftover Nut Butter Smoothie Pancakes

Ann Storr
Print Recipe
Prep Time 10 mins
Cook Time 15 mins
Total Time 25 mins

Ingredients
  

  • 225 grams plain flour
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • pinch salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 30 grams unsalted butter
  • up to 250 ml nut butter smoothie
  • around 50 ml milk

Tools

  • Scales
  • Mixing bowls
  • Measuring jug
  • Fork
  • Balloon whisk
  • Frying pan
  • Teaspoon
  • Oven-proof dish

Instructions
 

  • Mix flour, baking powder and salt together and set aside
  • Add smoothie to jug and top with milk until you have 300ml
  • Whisk together
  • Crack the eggs and whisk until fully mixed
  • If you’re using a big jug, add the flour mixture straight in and beat until smooth
  • If you don't have a massive measuring jug, pour the smoothie/milk/egg mixture into a bowl and beat until smooth
  • Melt butter in the frying pan and stir through the mixture
  • Turn your cooker to medium hot
  • ** Put frying pan on the hob and add a pinch of butter - sort of 2 peas worth
  • When the butter sizzles, pick the pan up and swirl it around so the butter is all over the bottom
  • Pour the batter on - enough so the pancake is about 6-7cm across (I can only cook 3 a time in my large pan)
  • Turn the heat to medium
  • The pancakes are ready to turn when little bubbles appear on the surface. Using your flipper, flip them!
  • Mine are rarely perfect circles, so don’t worry about that
  • Cook for about a minute. They’re done when they are golden on the bottom
  • Place in the oven-proof dish, pop in the oven and start from **, until you have used all of your mixture

Leftovers?

  • Store in a lidded container in the fridge. Use as soon as possible for the best taste, but they keep okay for up to 3 days
  • Reheating: in the microwave for a few seconds, or in a dry frying pan

Got a question? Ingredient you need help with? Get in touch:

ann@storrcupboard.com

(Learning to love) not keen on ricotta

(Learning to love) not keen on ricotta

by | Jan 10, 2019 | Dodgy Dairy, Quick Quick, Recipes, Skill

Three weeks ago I had a leftover milk glut.  I made lots of things, including paneer and ricotta.  The paneer went into a pea and paneer curry (which I’ll post another time … so many recipes from one milk mistake!).  So, leftover milk lead to me having a dish of home-made ricotta. But, as I confessed last week, I don’t really like ricotta.  Ha!

I know that we can learn to tolerate, like or love many different foods.  What we like is informed by where we’re from, the rules we grow up with, what our friends and family do and don’t like.  And, it’s also a way of explaining who we are to the world – if you eat meat, you don’t eat sugar, you’re plant based or a foodie or a McDonalds lover.

(Interested in learning more?  Read Bee Wilson’s First Bite, it’s fascinating.  Or just this essay – in 1989, a lawyer called Jeffrey Steingarten was approached by Anna Wintour to be American Vogue’s food writer.  He said yes, obvs.  Quite the career change.  Having agreed to take the job, he realised there were many foods and flavours he loathed – clams!  dill (yep, foul stuff TBH)! lard!  He taught himself to like these foods.  Yes he’s unnecessarily rude about Greek food – skip that nonsense and work onwards to how he overturned his tastes and found it much more exciting to eat, especially in restaurants, because he now liked everything on a menu and everything was up for grabs. Hoorah!).

So I took my own, small, ricotta based challenge, sought the help of my lovely Insta helpers and got on it. I did have spinach and ricotta cannelloni, courtesy of Dad Storr.  I can report that I’m Still Not Keen on cooked ricotta, sorry dad (though thank you for lunch).  So I made some more ricotta to further experiment.

Molly Wizenburg’s second book, ‘Delancey’, is where I first learned about making ricotta (though I used Victoria Glass’s recipe).  So, I returned and took some breakfast inspo from Molly.  She writes about smearing fresh ricotta onto hearty toast and adding fruit compote or freshly roasted fruit.  I have no fruit compote and it’s a terrible time of year for fruit, so I went for some heaped teaspoons of my dad’s raspberry jam.  MUCH BETTER, and my dad makes fucking amazing jam.  The sharp jam with the sweetish cheese was just lovely and would be an ace breakfast.

Verdict: good!  I learnt that ricotta is just basically cream cheese, and I like creamy things.  Kinda simple, very quick, and very nice indeed.

Got a question? Ingredient you need help with? Get in touch:

ann@storrcupboard.com

(Forgot to cancel) freezing milk

(Forgot to cancel) freezing milk

by | Jan 3, 2019 | Dodgy Dairy, Quick Quick, Recipes, Skill

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know that I had a few problems with milk over the Christmas period.

Over autumn, I moved to glass milk bottle milk deliveries, in a bid to cut  down on my single-use plastic.  I love having the glass bottles and teaching my kids how to just push the foil lid just so.  As much as I enjoy the chink of the glass bottles, the online system for reminders is hopeless; by that I mean it doesn’t exist.  So, Christmas comes, the hot chocolate loving milk guzzling kids left and I had 12 pints of milk to get through.  And they were starting to go off.

First off I grabbed a sharpie and labelled which day the bottles had come on; this way I knew which bottles to prioritise.  And then I hit insta.

Freezing milk used to be a weekly activity for me, as I’d get it delivered with my veg box.  But, thanks to insta user Sarah Leigh Mitchell, I learnt that you *can* freeze in glass – you just need to shake up the milk beforehand, empty a little to leave room for expansion and bob’s your uncle.

I was a little unsure of freezing a bottle that might (hopefully) have been washed and used hundreds of times, but you can always pour into a plastic bottle.

If, like me, you buy whole milk, then KUDOS BECAUSE IT’S DELICIOUS and gives you more leeway in terms of using it up (you cannot use semi skimmed or skimmed milk to make cheese etc).  Also, be warned that it can go a strange shade of yellow when you freeze it.  This is because the fat slightly separates.  There’s nothing wrong with the milk at all, don’t panic!

To defrost your milk, simply take it out of the fridge a day or so before you think you’ll want to use it.  If the plastic milk bottle is still sealed, then you can float it in a bowl/sink of cold water to speed up the defrosting.  Then use as normal.

Got a question? Ingredient you need help with? Get in touch:

ann@storrcupboard.com

Leftover egg-white granola bites

Leftover egg-white granola bites

by | Jul 22, 2018 | Leftover Baking, Midweek Recipes, Recipes, Skill

Have you tried the souffle omelette guys? I really enjoyed mine. Nothing to do with the hunks for buttered bread I had it with. No.

 

Egg-whites are a binder; it’s why, when I made a cake and forgot to add egg, it was a tray of cake crumble. Ergh argh! Leftover egg whites then give us the opportunity to play with foods that benefit from, you know, sticking together.

 

I was introduced to the idea of granola having clumps by the amazing SmittenKitchen. Oh I heart her. I haven’t used another granola recipe since hers/my taste adaptations to her recipe. I skip the coconut and wheatgerm in her recipe because I don’t like them. One day I had some sesami seeds knocking around my cupboard and added them and instantly we all here loved the recipe totally. The nuttiness just works.

 

My eldest tends to use granola as a little snack, digging her hands into my fancy big glass storage jar. The whisked egg whites are used to hold the oats and nuts together, so it’s an easy dive for her.

 

If you’re making these for lunch boxes, omit the nuts. You could use more oats, use something like millet and sunflower seeds, too. Any granola/flapjack recipe is diamond for random oat/seed/nut decluttering, so just keep the total weight of dry to around 225g and you’re onto a winner snack, and you’ve used up *loads* of leftovers, whoop!

Granola bites

Based on Crunchy Granola, ‘The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook’, Deb Perelman

Ingredients

120g rolled oats
25g walnuts
25 almonds
45 sesami seeds
1/4 teaspoon salt
60ml golden syrup
1 tablespoon olive oil (or any oil if you don’t have olive, don’t buy it specially)
1/8 teaspoon mixed spice/cinammon
1 egg white

Tools
Electric whisk/balloon whisk
2 mixing bowls
Sharp knife
Chopping board
Baking trays
Greaseproof paper
Flipper

Optional tools
Garlic crusher

Time
15m prep
Apx 1 hr 25 m mixing and baking

Level
Medium

Prep
Roughly chop nuts
Turn oven to 150C
Line trays with greaseproof paper

Method
Place oats, chopped nuts, seeds, salt and spice a large bowl and mix with your hands
Add syrup and oil, and mix into to oat nut mixture thoroughly
Beat egg whites until frothy
Fold through oat nut mixture
Transfer to baking trays
Place in the oven and put timer on for 15 minutes
GENTLY turn the bites over, to keep the clusters together
Repeat twice
When golden and cooked through, remove from the oven
Leave to cool

Storage

When cool, store in an airtight container for up to a couple of weeks

 

Got a question? Ingredient you need help with? Get in touch:

ann@storrcupboard.com

Leftover egg-white omelette

Leftover egg-white omelette

by | Jul 21, 2018 | Quick Quick, Recipes

In my second year of uni, I watched my friend Becky’s flatmate, Meryl, make an omelette for her tea.  I watched her, and thought – why the fuck haven’t I ever thought of making an omelette?  I cooked my dinner most nights –  Ragu jar sauce with tuna/’pie’ (campbells cream of mushroom soup + tuna + sweetcorn+ mash) or Bird’s Eye potato waffles, egg & beans.  But I started to branch out into Marcella Hazan tomato sauce, a verrrry basic stir fry.  But hey hey, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a simple step and all that.
So, omelettes.  A definite part of my Catholic meat-free-Friday tradition, my mum getting us to stand by the cooker, plate in hand, as she’d turn out 6 in a row.  Cheese omelette (slightly undercooked) oven chips and peas.  (Seriously.  Mum said the oven only needed to be at 220 degrees not 230.  So the chips were always soggy.)  Why this cheap, simple, vegetarian meal didn’t pop into my mind, I dunno, but I thank Meryl for being more couragous in the kitchen.
So, these egg whites.  Unless you’re a protein-junky, egg whites are the boring part of the egg.  Tasteless.  But so good at holding-air-in-things! So, whisk up your leftover egg-whites until they are nice and frothy and fold into  some beaten egg and you have a lovely, light omelette, all eggy and mild.  You can, if you are as greedy as me, break off chunks of omelette and lay them on a wedge of heavily buttered baguette.  Ahem.
Note: no more than 1 large egg-white per omelette otherwise things get a little crazy.

 

Souffle Omelette

Makes 1

Ingredients

1 large egg white
2 large eggs
Unsalted butter, for cooking
Salt & pepper
Fillings; snipped herbs, some cooked mushrooms, 30 odd grams of finely sliced ham…

Tools
Electric whisk/balloon whisk
Mixing bowl
Frying pan
Flipper

Time
5m prep
5+ mins cooking

Level
Medium

Method
Beat egg whites until frothy
Turn the heat on under the frying pan; quite hot
Add the butter – keep an eye on it, it should be hot and bubbling but do not allow it to burn; if you do, chuck it, wipe the pan clean and start again
In a seperate bowl, beat the 2 eggs until combined
Season
Take your large spoon and fold the egg whites in
Pour the mixture into the pan; they should sizzle
Push the sides of the egg mixture into the middle of the pan
You might want to flip the omelette, as it takes a little longer to cook than a regular, French omelette
Add the filling so it can heat through
Keep pushing the sides into the middle so that you are cooking the egg through as quickly as possible
Serve immediately

Got a question? Ingredient you need help with? Get in touch:

ann@storrcupboard.com

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