Apple pancakes with cinnamon butter, a variation on a traditional Scottish theme, went down well at World Kitchen in Leith events this year, here’s the recipe from Fay Young.

Ok, I know dropped scones are really meant for teatime. But they can be good at breakfast too – perhaps, sinfully, fried with bacon and served with maple syrup as a Scottish variation on the Canadian theme.

So when I was helping to organise a World Kitchen in Leith multicultural brunch earlier this year, dropped scones sprang to mind.  Not quite the simple kind my granny used to make in her tiny flat in Glasgow, where Barr’s Ginger Beer was delivered by horse and cart once a week (I was very young!).

Granny’s recipe was just flour, egg mixed to a thick batter with a little milk then dropped on to a sizzling hot griddle and served with butter

This is a slightly posher version by Lady Claire MacDonald who lives somewhere altogether grander on Skye.  She adds apple, sugar, butter and spice to the recipe and you can eat the pancakes just like that but the real magic touch is the cinnamon butter she spreads on top.

I lost count of how many apple pancakes I made for the brunch (and again for the World Kitchen lunch on World Food Day in October] They went like hot cakes but they do also freeze well.  Here’s the recipe, adding lemon rind and juice is a very slight adjustment of my own.

RECIPE

225g (8oz) plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

60g (2oz) caster sugar

0.5 tsp ground cinnamon

60g (20z) butter, melted

2 eggs, beaten

300ml (0.5 pint) milk

2 tasty apples peeled and cored

grated rind and juice of half lemon

mild oil for frying

Cinnamon butter:

120g (4oz) butter

2 tsp ground cinnamon

120 (4oz) soft brown sugar

METHOD

First make cinnamon butter, beating all ingredients until smooth. Keep covered in fridge, until you want to serve pancakes, will last for at least 2 weeks (longer, I find).

For pancakes, sift flour and baking powder into bowl, add sugar and cinnamon. Beat in melted butter, beaten eggs and milk. Grate apples into mixture and mix well.

Oil a griddle, hot plate or frying pan. Drop spoonfuls of batter on to hot surface, roughly 2-3inches or 5-7.5 cm across (you can make pancakes bigger or smaller depending on spoon).  Cook for about 2 minutes until small bubbles rise to surface then flip over with palette knife and cook on other side.  (I find it can take a bit of trial and error to get the temperature right, the first couple of pancakes might be either too dark or too pale…but still good to eat).

Remove cooked pancakes to keep warm on plate, covered with cloth.  Serve hot with cinnamon butter.  (They freeze and reheat well). Plate soon empty.

At World Kitchen in Leith events, Alice’s beans in coconut  disappear off the plates in record time and everyone wants to know how to make them.  Well, here Alice Musamba shares the secret and a little extra tip:  the coconut sauce can be adapted to suit many other vegetables. In fact at last night’s World Kitchen meeting she brought a pot of delicious mushrooms in coconut.  They soon disappeared off the plate too.

Ingredients:
2 cups dried African sugar beans or cannellini beans
2 big yellow onions, chopped
4 tbsp. Oil
2-3 tomatoes, chopped
1 tbsp tomato puree
2 tsp. turmeric  or mild curry powder
2 cans coconut milk
1 1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper

Method:
It is best to soak the beans overnight.
In a large pot, cover the beans with water and simmer until they are just tender. Sauté onions in oil until golden brown add the remaining ingredients to the pot and simmer several minutes until the beans are very tender and the tomatoes are cooked. Add the coconut milk last and do not cover the pot whilst simmering for about 20mins, season with Maggie veg cubes. Serve over rice or Sadza

Ed: You probably also know Alice from another great cooking enterprise. Until recently she ran the very successful monthly CORE World Cafe at North Edinburgh Arts Centre. See their new Facebook page for details of the next World Cafe on 25 November.

When Agnes Ngulube Holmes goes shopping for World Food Day she finds herself transported from an Edinburgh street to the African continent.  This is what she found.

One autumn afternoon in Edinburgh, I join Meena and Mark at Out of The Blue Drill Hall for a brief meeting about World Kitchen in Leith plans for World Food Day. We agreed we would produce a menu based on seasonal foods from local shops. For African  dishes that could be a challenge!

I decided to take a walk along Junction Street on the lookout for small businesses that source their products locally. I wandered across James Anderson Butcher, where I got engaged in an interesting discussion about where foods were sourced from at some supermarkets.  The friendly staff informed me that their products were sourced from the Highlands, Orkney and places in Scotland.  I left the butchers very satisfied with what I had purchased.

Where to get my other ingredients?  I went to Gorgie Road where I came across Shumba Meats and African Crest two African owned businesses; I can only describe my experience in these two businesses like suddenly being back on the African continent for brief period. Then I walked out of the premises back into Scotland.  It was a great feeling, and made me realise how interconnected we are (I like both).

For World Food Day, my contribution to was nshima (maize meal thick porridge), which meant good team work with Alice as this needed a lot of stirring to get the nshima nicely thick and smooth with no lumps. Then there was cabbage cooked with peanut sauce, tomatoes, onions, mixed peppers and spices; and beef stew cooked with onions, tomatoes, matoki (green bananas), mixed peppers, spices.

Some more good teamwork went into preparing Alice’s contribution: beans with coconut dish.  Also Temeka and Leija helped with the mandzi and serving the food to the customers.

We all enjoyed being part of the World Kitchen in Leith…making the day a brilliant experience for everyone who attended the event. GREAT SUCCESS!!!

Rami Okasha rustled up a taste of Egypt for World Food Day.  Here he gives his recipe for Felafel and makes it sound very simple.  That’s Rami in the picture on the right busy dishing up to the stream of people arriving for lunch at Out of the Blue Drill Hall (Ellie and Maka are on the left).

Felafel

You can use either chickpeas (Turkish, Israeli) or broad beans (Egyptian).

250g dried chickpeas or beans
1 medium onion
3 cloves of garlic
1 large bunch parsley
1tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp each of ground cinnamon, caraway, fennel, black pepper
1 tsp salt
3 tablespoon plan flour

Soak the chickpeas overnight, covered by about 2-3 inches of water. Next day, drain well and put in a food processor and blend the chickpeas with the garlic and salt. Transfer to a bowl.

Finely chop the onion and process with the spices and half the herbs, stalks removed. Add to the chickpeas. Finely chop the remaining herbs. Sprinkle flour and mix. Chill for an hour. Then form into small balls.

Line a baking tray with baking parchment. Space the balls so they don’t touch. Bake at 200C for 20-30 minutes. Halfway through, shake the tins so the felafel roll about.

Serve with hummus, harissa & garlic yoghurt in a pitta bread.

Flashback to 2006: Rami serving lunch at Leith Open Space second multicultural discussion event

Editor’s note: Rami by the way is a founder member of Leith Open Space and we seem to remember he was the one who first had the great idea of inviting people to bring multicultural dishes to our first Open Space event very nearly six years ago.

For World Food Day in Out of the Blue on Sunday 16 October, Ellie Casson set out to overcome her fear of failure – the perfect paella is hard to make and she has tasted the best in Spain where it comes with sun, sand and the Med.

I have always loved paella. How could anyone not love sitting in bright sun on aged wood decking, pale blue paint peeling off the beams, 10 feet from the sand and just 20 feet from the Mediterranean?  It really doesn’t matter what you’re eating, if you’re sitting at the back of Restaurante Kati on a Sunday afternoon surrounded by families enjoying the day, the view, the food and each other’s company.

Restaurante Kati is in a fishing village called Cabo de Palos in Murcia, where there is also a lovely Sunday market.  It is run by a family of fishermen.  The men bring back their catch after an early start, and their wives and sisters cook in the kitchen for locals returning from the market laden with bags of oranges and this week’s fashion must-have.

No not sunny Spain: Ellie went shopping in Edinburgh Farmers Market for World Food Day.

My father was the first brave soul in our family to attempt to replicate the paella that we know to be the best in Spain.  With a St Michael’s cookbook for guidance, the first product was delicious. But not quite a paella.

Dad persisted over a number of years, learning from Spanish friends the secrets to their paellas.  One would add ñoras, dried whole red peppers.  Another would prefer a fish-only paella.  All agreed that the golden yellow comes not from saffron, but colorante – the amount of real saffron you need would cost a small fortune and a herd of camels.

Unfortunately for Dad, he is British.  So even when he replicated the recipe of one Spanish friend to the letter, another would tut and say that it was a very good effort. But not a paella.

This is why I have always been anxious about making paella. However, for the World Food event on the 16^th of October, I set self-doubt and fears aside.

I do not have the benefit of Dad’s Spanish master classes, but I have a good stock of cookbooks, the internet, and I know what the best paella in Spain tastes like.  Research done, I set about my trial run.

It seems the secret to a good paella is first the oil.  In 80ml of olive oil (from my friend’s very own trees) I separately cooked then removed a whole, unpeeled head of garlic, a ñora, a good bunch of thyme, chopped chorizo, chunks of pork belly, squid cut into rings, and chicken thighs.  Had I had the heads of some prawns I would have cooked these too.

The next important stage is a flavoursome sofrito. [see above].  I made mine with garlic, onions, and chopped chargrilled peppers.  Then I added 8 small, peeled tomatoes and cooked the whole mixture until almost all the moisture was gone.

Now the rice: Spanish Calasparran or bomba rice is added and cooked for a couple of minutes before half the stock is added, along with browned chicken, thyme, garlic bulb, ñora and, in this – but not future – cases, saffron.  A good amount of salt is added too.  Then the hard part.  Do not touch!  All I did was add more stock if it was looking a little dry.

15 minutes later, I added chunks of hake plus cooked chorizo, pork belly and squid.  Another 15 minutes later, with a touch more stock along the way, in went prawns [above] to simmer with the rest of the ingredients until just cooked.

Result? Almost spot on.  In future I shall use colorante and I will take a little more care about how much stock to add, but I think I am as close as I can get to the best (British) paella I will ever be able to make.  No sand, no Med but so far there is sun: Scotland’s October weather this year seems to be on my side to complete the experience!

Editor adds: The sun shone and Ellie’s paella certainly passed the test at the World Food lunch. Here she is sharing a few secrets of success.  For more mouthwatering pictures see Ellie’s World Kitchen in Leith collection on Flickr

Things are heating up again at World Kitchen in Leith as members prepare to take part in World Food Day at Out of the Blue Drill Hall.  Please consider this your invitation to join us!

“Eat your way to a better world”, that’s the invitation on the World Food Day flyer and World Kitchen in Leith is really delighted to be asked to take part in this event organised by Take One Action in association with World Development Movement, Oxfam, Transition Edinburgh South and  Out of the Blue.

Not least because it means working with our friends Chris and Isi at OoTB Drill Hall Arts Cafe again. As well teaming up with  Multi-Cultural  Family Base (MCFB) now we have all recovered from our sell-out event, Multicultural Family Brunch, at the Drill Hall in March.

This time the menu is a kind of multicultural tapas with dishes from France, Spain, Africa and India as well as Scotland. As much as possible we will be using locally sourced and seasonal ingredients so you can bet that apples will be on the menu.

With live music, talks, workshops and stalls this special multicultural meal is a chance to celebrate good food – and question our global sysem of growing and distributing food among 7 billion people on our planet.

FREE ENTRY

WORLD FOOD BUFFET – £5

No need to book but first come first served!

World Food Day in Out of the Blue Drill Hall will explore the impacts of politics and economics on food supply and health of people in Scotland and around the world. The aim is to discover how we can all make a difference by the way we shop, sow and grow our own food, and take action alongside a billion people across the world.

For more information contact worldfoodday@takeoneaction.org.uk  call 0131 553 6335 and keep checking World Kitchen Events page on Facebook.  Look forward to seeing you on Sunday 16 October.

Brunch is served: flashback to the multicultural family brunch at Out of the Blue in March when we served around 100 people and helped MCFB raise £100 for their art therapy work with young people.

A beautiful green spinach cake was a hot (literally) favourite at the World Kitchen brunch.  Here Meena Bhana shares her recipe for the spicy savoury cake but first she takes us to the bustling streets of Indian cities with her menu for the World Kitchen brunch.

I put together a menu of Gujerati dishes for the brunch and then I spent hours in the kitchen experimenting.  We decided to offer Falooda –  a spectacular mix of milk, vermicelli and flavourings topped with ice cream –  as a complimentary drink for guests arriving  at Out of the Blue.  With at least 80 bookings, how much milk would that take?

THE MENU

Chickpea and Potato Chaat – chaat is a dish that takes you right back to the streets of India. Chaat tastes hot, sweet, tangy and crunchy. It contains, potatoes, channa, chaat masala, onions, chillie powder, coriander, puffed rice and tamarind chutney.

Spinach cake is a savoury baked cake to get the taste buds tingling whilst sipping a cup of masala tea. It is made with methi (fenugreek leaves), semolina, maize flour and corn.

Dokhra is a savoury steamed cake that can be eaten at any time of the day. It is made with yoghurt, semolina, green chillies and ginger and is topped with mustard seeds, sesame seeds, curry leaves and coriander. Served with green coconut chutney, dokhra is a perfect accompaniment to a cup of masala tea.

Dokhra topped with seeds and spices

Falooda is a culinary spectacle, a rose infused drink that consists of not only an array of beautiful colours but also numerous flavours and textures owing to the variety of ingredients that go into its making. A gastronomic delight thought to be introduced to the lands of India by the Parsi’s.

(And how much milk? In the end we decided on 10 litres, there was quite a lot left over but Out of the Blue Drill Hall Arts Café was able to use it up.)

RECIPE FOR SPINACH CAKE

Note: Methi is another word for fenugreek. You will get it at one of the Asian stores in Leith walk. It has small leaves on a stem but if you are not sure, the store owner will definitely know what it is. It has a slightly bitter taste but works well in this cake.

Liquidise the following ingredients: 2 bunches methi, 1 cup oil, 1 onion, 1  cup milk, 2 tablespoons green chillies finely chopped, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon salt

Sift together: 1 cup semolina, 1  cup gram flour, 1  cup plain flour,  2 teaspoons baking powder

Small tin of corn

Add liquidised mixture to the above dry ingredients. Add drained corn and mix thoroughly. Pour into greased pan and bake at 180 degrees for 30min.

What to eat? Bea and Parvez help guests make the difficult choice.

“Knowing what to make is not to same as knowing how to make it.” In a story full of Spanish colour, Ellie Casson explains why she chose to make Spanish empanadillas for the World Kitchen brunch –  and how.

When my family first moved to Spain, we discovered in a nearby village an outstanding family bakery.  It was situated on the square and had a little terrace outside where you could sit with a coffee from the bar (and a little brandy if you were feeling particularly Spanish that morning) and eat pastries or cakes you had just bought at the counter inside.

The shop was by no means pristine.  The bar was always propped up by one or two grizzled old men, occasionally interrupting grunted conversations for a minute on the slot machine; and, while the square has recently been refurbished, 20 years ago it was a little run down.

Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, we visited the bakery at least once a week for all the years we lived nearby, and still popped in whenever we holidayed at our family home after we moved away.

We would sometimes buy a barra to go with a rotisserie chicken from the market and occasionally treat my Grandma with a sweet, glossy square of cake from the glass cabinet.  However, we usually visited the bakery on a Saturday morning to pick up empanadillas and bechemelas for breakfast (usually before getting stuck into whatever mighty task Dad had planned for us that weekend!)

Dad’s favourite are the bechemelas – layers of puff pastry filled with ham and cheese (or béchamel sauce, hence the name). Empanadillas are made from a more bread-like pastry (pan being the Spanish word for bread) and offered a variety of fillings.  The most typical would be frito, which is tomato, onion and probably some red pepper; and my favourite, though not obvious, combination of boiled egg and tuna.

When the World Kitchen in Leith decided to hold a Brunch to help raise money and awareness for the Multi-Cultural Family Base in Edinburgh, I knew what I would make.  Knowing what to make, however, is not the same as knowing how to make it.

Luckily, my brother had a number of years ago bought me a book called 1080 Recetas de Cocina (1080 recipes) by Simone Ortega.  A Spanish chef friend was very excited when she saw this at Christmas, telling me it is quite an institution in Spain – of the Mrs Beaton variety.  Every young, newly-wed woman in Spain will receive this book as a gift.

I have never used a cook book like it. I finally found the recipe for the masa (pastry) and proceeded to translate the ingredients.  Flour, salt, butter, lard.  Standard quantities.  Then measurements for water and white wine.  Half and half in a glass, not quite full and, in brackets, a water-glass sized glass.  Perhaps they didn’t have liquid measures in Spain at the time.  It also used a method to make the pastry that I have not seen before.  You heat the water, wine and fats in a pan until everything is dissolved and mixed.  Take it off the heat, add the flour and salt, knead on a floured surface (while boiling hot!) and leave to cool for three hours.

As for fillings, the book suggested a number of combinations, including egg and tuna, but gave no advice on how to make these, what consistency they should be, or how much I would need for the amount of pastry I had made.  It stated quite simply at the end of a list of possibilities, “as you can see, you can make whatever filling you want based on your tastes.”  So Dave and I experimented.  I can tell you now that béchamel and ham is best saved for puff pastry.  However, tuna and egg with a good glug of first press, unfiltered olive oil is delicious.

There was no indication from the recipe how thin the pastry had to be rolled or how large the circle cut-outs should be.  It was also noted that the made-up pastries should be fried, but there was no mention of how long for, what temperature the oil should be or what they should look like when they were ready.

Again, Dave and I experimented.  We did try the frying method, and eventually came out with some perfectly acceptable little pastries.  But I was unconvinced.  The empanadillas of my childhood were from the bakery.  A bakery where you bake things.  So, we reverted to the oven.  We tried different thicknesses, diameters, washes (milk and egg), temperatures and cooking times, all the while tasting our finished products along the way.  We had no room for dinner at the end of the evening, but we had achieved success.

Successful chefs Dave and Ellie

When I recently returned to Spain, I discovered that our old bakery had closed down.  The baker had retired and his children had not wanted to carry on the family business.  It will now be knocked down and turned into luxury flats with a beautiful view of the square.

I had a conversation over a beer with the ironmonger who had come over to look at our front gate (in which he described Dave as “exotic” after I mentioned that he was ginger) and learned about a new bakery in one of the back streets of our local village.  It is smaller than our old bakery, and there is no bar or seating area, but I noted on my last visit that they had a larger variety of fillings for their empanadillas, one being morcilla or black pudding.

Now that I have perfected the method for making the empanadilla pastry, and I have such inspiration from the new bakery, I will follow the advice of Simone Ortega and try whatever combination suits my fancy!

thanks to Ellie Casson for the delicious chorizo stew…and for the picture too

Where to start?  That was a problem facing our guests at the World Kitchen multicultural brunch which we organised with Multi-Cultural Family Base in Out of the Blue a week ago. We were spoiled for choice with the range of dishes cooked up by the team plus extra treats provided by our friends at  Punjabn De Rasoi  and Kleofas cafe.  Now we’ve got the task of selecting some recipes for publication so you can try them out at home.  Coming up soon…

… there’s Meena’s beautiful steamed spinach cake from Indian, Bea’s melt-in-the-mouth Scottish tablet, Alice’s wonderful African beans in coconut, Ellie’s delicious empanadillas from a traditional Spanish recipe and (ahem) my Scottish apple pancakes with cinnamon butter.

There will be more stories to tell about the artists and musicians who helped to make the day such a memorable occasion with a really happy and welcoming atmosphere.  We hope to track at least some of them down to find out more about their work – starting perhaps with  Lawrence Howells of Tabla Alba, the sitar band who filled the room with evocative sound.

Meanwhile, of course, the cooks were trying to keep up with a great flow of guests and we owe special thanks to our very willing and hard working volunteers (there was some truly heroic dishwashing going on in the kitchen) as well as Isi and staff at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall Arts Cafe

And at the end of it all it looks as if we have raised a good sum towards the work of MCFB (we’ll let you know exactly how much when the counting is finished).

But first we’re delighted to start the World Kitchen brunch recipe blog with Ellie Casson who explains what happened when she delvesd into a traditional Spanish cookery book to find a recipe for  empanadillas. We’ll be posting that in the next blog.

Yesterday we had one of those isn’t-it-exciting-help-don’t-panic meetings.  We’ve gone from worrying no-one will come to finding we are now fully booked.  So all we have to do now is make sure we cook enough food to feed a big and enthusiastic crowd of all ages coming to the World Kitchen in Leith multicultural family brunch on Sunday.

That’s Sunday 20th March in Out of the Blue Drill Hall Arts Cafe and it’s only three days away (well two and a half but who’s counting).  This time, for the third World Kitchen in Leith event, we are working with Multi-Cultural Family Base to raise funds for their tremendous work with young people and families in Leith.  And it’s not just food – there’s a programme of art, music and storytelling.

That means some very interesting text and email messages flying back and forward. At MCFB Becky is organising a wonderful mix of African and Indian music (sitar and tabla, jazz, Senegalese Afro-beat) and Sarah is putting together an art exhibition along with stalls of art and crafts for sale including African jewellery.

And of course there is food. As always an enthusiastic team of cooks have gathered together to create the kind of multicultural menu you certainly won’t find in a cafe.

There’s Alice’s African beans in coconut and spinach with peanut butter, Bea’s Scottish cheese scones, haggis bites and border tart, Ellie’s Spanish empanadillas and chorizo and lentil stew, Meena’s Indian spinach dhokra and chickpea chaat, and my American-Scottish fusion of New York diner breakfast bagels plus Scottish afternoon-tea apple pancakes.

We’re delighted to be able to offer extra spice with pakoras and sweet meats from Punjabn De Rasoi on Leith Walk, chutneys and jams from Greener Monday, beautiful Polish beetroot soup from Kleofas cafe –  and those hand-made bagels are from the Manna House on Easter Road.

Sorry, got to dash. A facebook message from Meena reminds me she’s working out the best way to steam a bulk supply of dhokra…and I’ve got to work on those apple pancakes.