Breakfast - Pancakes with Maple Syrup and Bacon

Breakfast, apparently, is the most important meal of the day. What you eat when you get up sets the tone for the coming hours.

My usual breakfast is a bowl of Tesco Value Cornflakes, drowned in about a pint of milk. I think the flakes are made by collecting the dust which falls from the overalls of the factory workers and squishing it together with a bit of glue. But at 31p for a big box that lasts me a week, I can't really complain about their relative lack of quality.

This morning I thought it'd be nice to have something a little less dull.

Pancakes.

Pancakes are ace. Everyone KNOWS this to be true, and yet most people in this country still insist on eating them just once a year. This is one area where Americans are better than us. They understand that pancakes are not just for using up the flour, sugar and eggs before lent. Pancakes can, and should, be eaten whenever the mood takes us.

Quick. Cheap. Tasty. What's not to love?

Here's a recipe which my mum gave me, for Scotch pancakes. I don't know where she got it from originally, I just remember it being scrawled on a Post-It note in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. It's probably the exact same recipe as everyone else already uses, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway.

Ingredients

9oz self raising flour
2oz caster sugar
Pinch of salt
2 eggs
Some milk

How?

Put all the ingredients, apart from the milk, in a big bowl, like this:

Now, add a bit of milk. Not too much. You want the batter to be quite thick, so take it easy. A little splash, then do some whisking. Like this:

You're aiming for a batter which is thick enough to drop off the end of the whisk slowly, but which does drop off. Like this:

The bottle of wine in the background is for when you add too much milk and need to drown your sorrows.

Once the batter is the right consistency (or it's the wrong consistency, but you're drunk enough that you don't care) you're ready to make the pancakes.

I use our Cuisinart sandwich press/contact grill/cook everything thing, heated to 180 degrees centigrade. If you haven't got something like that, just heat up a big non-stick frying pan with a good flat area. Don't use a wok. That would be silly.

Pour the batter onto whatever hot thing you're using. A blob about 6cm across will spread out to make a good size pancake:

Leave them on the hot thing until bubbles start appearing and popping on the surface of the pancakes:

Once those bubbles are there it's time to flip them over. They ought to look something like this:

You should have enough batter to make about 12-14 pancakes. Depending on how gluttonous you are this will serve anywhere between one and four people.

Once all the pancakes are cooked pile them on a plate while you cook some bacon.

Stack the pancakes on top of one another, with the bacon sandwiched between them. Pour some (lots of) maple syrup over the top. If you're feeling particularly healthy, as I was this morning, maybe pop a little bit of butter on the top of the stack too.

Here's what mine looked like this morning, just before I devoured it:

Hot damn. That's a good breakfast.

In the unlikely event that you don't want bacon with them, these also go really well with some fresh berries, or you can throw a handful of dried fruit into the batter before you cook them. Whatever really, the pancakes themselves are just the start. They're definitely a better start than a bowl of nasty cornflakes.

Pulled Pork

I do love a bit of barbecue. For me, the weather doesn't need to be doing what it's doing right now (blazing, eyeball melting sunshine) to make me want to tear open a bag of charcoal, light it up, and introduce some meat to the resulting heat.

It's not just about sausages and burgers for me; anything you can cook in a normal oven you can cook on a barbecue, it's just about knowing how.

Some food tastes better from a barbecue than it can ever taste done in an oven, and I want to share one of those things here: pulled pork.

It's a long time favourite in the US barbecue belt, and it's becoming very popular in the UK too. I've been doing it for the last couple of years now, it's simple, easy and delicious.

My recipe is adapted from the Weber Complete Barbecue Book, which you should buy if you want to progress from incinerating sausages.

Here we go then.

Ingredients:

The Meat:

1 Pork shoulder joint - a 2.5-3kg one will serve about eight people, generously.

The Rub:

2 tbsp mild chilli powder
2 tbsp paprika
2 tbsp sea salt
4 teaspoons garlic granules
2 teaspoons fresh ground black pepper
2 teaspoons fresh ground celery seeds
1 teaspoon mustard powder

The Sauce:

275ml tomato ketchup
175ml cider vinegar
100ml lemonade (not diet)
50g light brown sugar
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon of your favourite hot sauce
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
1/2 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper

Other:

8 big soft white rolls
A big tub of coleslaw, or make your own (I can't usually be bothered...)

How You Do It:

First off, if you don't have a smoker, you can do this in an oven. It won't have the benefit of being smoked, but it will still be tender and lovely. It just won't be quite as lovely, and you can't pretend to be a Good Ol' Boy in North Carolina while you're cooking. Sorry, that's just how it is.

Mix all the ingredients for the rub together in a small resealable tub, like this:

All ready to rub your meat. Fnarr.

You may use all of it, but if you don't, it'll keep until next time (and there will be a next time, this stuff's addictive).

Take your pork shoulder and use a good sharp knife to trim the skin off. You should leave a layer of fat, around a centimetre thick if possible. This will help keep the meat moist while it cooks. I haven't left a layer of fat in a couple of spots on mine, because my knife skills are WEAK.

A big lump of pig. Skinned.

Place the meat in a nice big bowl, with room to move it around. Pour some rub over the top of the meat, like in this amazing action shot:

Then, rub (obviously) the rub into the meat. Don't be shy. You want the rub to coat the meat, but also to penetrate it as much as possible. Really work it in there. Get it into all the nooks and crannies, like this:

Once it's all nicely coated in the rub, cover the bowl in cling film. If you're going to be cooking it in the next few hours, leave it out to come up to room temperature. If not, pop it back in the fridge.

If you have a smoker, the next thing to do is set it up for a twelve hour cook. For my smoker, this means filling the coal basket with Weber briquettes, and filling the chimney starter with them too. I find that 7kg of briquettes will reliably give me twelve hours of heat. Light the coals in the chimney, and when they're ready (a coating of white ash) pour them over the top of the unlit coals in the basket. This is known as the "Minion Method", where the coals light over a long period of time, maintaining an even temperature. Throw a handful of soaked hickory wood onto the coals, to generate the smoke.

Fill the water bowl almost to the top with hot water. Don't use cold, as this means the coals have to heat the water up before the smoker reaches cooking temperature.

You want the smoker to be at a temperature between 200 and 250 fahrenheit for the duration of the cook. If you do it right you can pretty much leave it to do its thing for the whole cook. If it goes a bit wrong you'll need to fiddle with the vents to adjust the temperature and maybe add more coal too. This is a ball ache, especially if you're doing an overnight cook, because you won't know it's gone wrong until the morning, by which point it's too late.

Once the smoker's at temperature, pop the meat in, and go and relax for ten hours (I tend to start the cook at about midnight, and go to bed)

If you're using an oven, set the temperature using your fancy thermostat and wait for it to be ready. Pull a smug face at the people using a barbecue. Pop the meat in the oven, in a roasting tin.

After ten hours, the internal temperature of the meat should be around 190 fahrenheit. Check it with an instant read thermometer, which you can buy for about a tenner. 

It'll look a bit like this:

Take the meat out and wrap it in foil for the last two hours of cooking. 

Combine all the ingredients for the sauce in a saucepan and heat it gently, stirring it to mix it all together. It's supposed to be thin, tart and a bit spicy.

Once the meat's been cooking for twelve hours, leave it to rest in the foil for half an hour, then unwrap it.

You should be able to pull the meat apart easily using your fingers, or use two forks. Remove the layer of fat from the top and pick out any large lumps of fat or sinew.

If you're writing a blog post about the recipe, completely forget to take any pictures of the meat as you tear it apart, ready for serving.

Once you've finished pulling it apart, it will look something like this:

Slice the rolls and chuck a big pile of the pork on them. Add as much or as little sauce as you want. Top it off with some coleslaw. 

Eat it. Then eat some more.

Pulled pork on a roll. Oh yes.

Extract

I bloody love a good extract, me.

Specifically, Marmite. God damn. That shit (figuratively) is good. I mean, okay, “yeast extract” makes it sound a little like the byproduct of a medical condition, but it’s just so packed full of umami goodness that I can happily overlook that.

Mmmmarmite.

It wasn’t until my university days that I got on board the Marmite bandwagon. Previously I had fallen firmly into the “hate” camp. Then, one day I got really drunk. The post booze hunger hit hard and I needed savoury snackage. As it was toward the end of term, money was tight. So tight, in fact, that my own cupboard contained no food whatsoever. Not even biscuits. Not even cheese. Not even a lonely, mouldy crust of Tesco Value bread.

My flatmate, in a similarly foodless situation, sat in the corner watching as I scrimmaged for sustenance. Casually, cruelly, he suggested that perhaps I’d like some Marmite. Just a spoonful of that thick brown gloop would satiate my savoury hankerings for a week.

For the record, eating a spoonful of Marmite is not the most pleasant thing I’ve ever done. It burns a bit. But it was an epiphany. I LOVE Marmite!

Nearly a decade has passed since that watershed moment, and my relationship with Marmite has remained solid. Unwaveringly monogamous. Until six months ago.

A stay with a good friend in London saw temptation rear its head; she had no Marmite for our post-booze toast session. I queried how this could be so, and the answer shocked me:

“I prefer Bovril”

I was in no mood for experimentation, so I stuck with just butter.

All was well, I returned home and thought no more of this alternative extract. But my friend visited recently, bringing with her a small gift: a jar of Marmite’s beefy brother, Bovril.

Now the usurper was in my house it was only a matter of time until I would try it. I pre-empted the inevitable and cracked the seal on the jar later that day.

Bovril is a revelation. It is easier to spread. It has a slightly mellower taste, still able to scratch the umami itch, but less likely to strip a layer of flesh from the roof of your mouth. I am officially a two extract man now.

Phwoar.

But, I wonder, where next? My appetite for toasted bread products is voracious. How long before I find myself Vegemite curious? What other, more obscure extracts are out there, just waiting to tantalise my taste buds?

*drools on keyboard*

Losing

I am rubbish at losing.

Really bad.

When I was a little boy, my parents threw a birthday party in my honour. There were games. Oh the games. You know the ones: Pass the Parcel, Sleeping Lions, Musical Chairs. That sort of thing.

Pass the Parcel at this birthday party went like this: parcel is passed, wrapping is unwrapped, the eventual prize grows tantalisingly closer with each child, the parcel goes to one of my friends, the parcel looks TOO SMALL, there are surely NO MORE LAYERS to be removed, the prize is REVEALED, is grasped in the sticky hands of my (soon to be former) friend, is NOT IN MY HANDS ON MY BIRTHDAY.

I forget what happened next. It's difficult to remember anything bar the unbridled fury of my childhood self. The misplaced feeling of entitlement that my birthday had given me. Surely it was my RIGHT to win on this day?

No doubt mortified, my mum carried me away to explain the intricacies of pass the parcel (the game's not rigged, you grumpy little git, etc...) while my friends continued with the party.

I'm better at that sort of losing now. Several years of playing for an exquisitely mediocre basketball team has given me a fantastic familiarity with losing. Also, I'm English so, in terms of sport, losing is pretty much hard wired in.

The losing I'd like to be a bit better at just now is losing weight.

Me and food have a great relationship. I love it. It loves me. We are as near to symbiotic as it's possible to be without actually relying upon one another to continue existing.

Before we had The Creature in our lives, I mitigated my food intake with enough exercise to ensure I did not pile on too many pounds. I ate what I wanted, and enjoyed it. Hours of (mediocre) basketball and plenty of cycling were the antidote to my obsession with carbohydrates.

Since The Creature, I've cycled probably ten miles in total and played just a few hours of basketball.

I've been in denial about my growing mass. But this weekend I decided to weigh myself.

Purveyors of the ugly truth

Error.

Not the scales. I didn't break them. But they did confirm I'd certainly been worshipping at the calorie altar a little too frequently in the last few months. I then added to my feelings of weight based woe by placing my details in this delightful "How much of a fat bastard are you?" calculator, courtesy of the BBC. The answer, somewhat depressingly, is that I'm a fatter bastard than 84% of the world's population.

Fuckeroo.

That's pretty grim. The bitter icing on that particular cake was the little bit of extra information: "You are most similar to an American in your age group". Oh good. In terms of BMI I'm most similar to the nation which is the poster child for gluttony.

The Enemy

As you may have seen already, I'm on holiday this week, and EVERYBODY knows there's no point trying to diet/ration myself while that's the case.

Therefore, as of next week, I'll be making some changes to the food intake and the effort output. Because, apparently, it's not just the ladies who need to shed so-called "baby weight", it's me too.

Top tips welcome, leave them in my comments box, along with any spare cake you've got lying around.