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 tempting invitation in my inbox.  An evening of multicultural music, poetry and food at the next Swietlica Open Day on Monday 3 October.  It’s the winning combination that draws crowds to the friendly gathering at Fort Community Wing and so I’m very sorry to miss this event but other members of Leith Open Space will be able to join in.

Joining-in is what the evening is about. This time the programme links the work of Polish artists and musicians with Scotland and other European countries.  Swietlica will be marking the centenary of Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz with  a performance of his work by Scottish poet Ken Cockburn who will also explain his recent project in partnership with the Polish Consulate in Edinburgh.

There will be a photographic exhibition on the theme of migration including work by Radek Slomnicki. Traditional folk music of Eastern Europe offers another chance for the audience to join in with the singing duo TOCZKA introducing music from Ukraine, Russia and Georgia. (The picture, by the way, shows the Ukrainian choir Chrząszcz at the Welcome Home Refugee Night in June). And as always food is a central part of the evening. Once again World Kitchen cooks are invited to contribute dishes to the spread.

If I hadn’t already got my tickets booked to Spain I would certainly be there too but I will raise a glass at 6.00pm (7pm Madrid time) over some tapas maybe when the doors open at Fort Community Wing.  Cheers.

For more information email Dominika.Kasolik@swietlica.org.uk and take a look at Swietlica Facebook page

The aim, inspired by the World Kitchen in Leith, is to celebrate  good home cooking from many cultures.

Here is fresh and spicy food to revive your appetite after Christmas and New Year.  In our first World Kitchen film, Mridu Thanki welcomes us into her kitchen to show us how to cook mushrooms in cream with red peppers and fresh green coriander.  It’s delicious, doesn’t cost much, takes only a few minutes to prepare and cook – and you can probably get all or most of the ingredients at the corner shop. (See below for the recipe).

Mridu generously gave up her lunch hour to let us film the dish adapted from her cookery book, Feasts of India, just a few days before the launch in McDonald Road library (complete with poetry by her partner Gordon Peters).

Even better, we got to eat it.  Mridu demonstrated how traditional Indian vegetarian cookery provides a balanced meal,  serving the vegetable dish along with lentils for proteins, rice or bread (traditional Scottish potato bread works well too) for  carbohydrates and fresh salad for vitamins. The spices bring their own nutritional values as well as delicious aromas and flavours. “Just smell that coriander,” she says finally stirring the chopped green herb into the creamy mushrooms.  And although it is just a film, we think you can!

Thanks to Dougal Perman at Inner Ear for editing the film. And thanks to Mridu for a delicious lunch.  We hope cookery films may become an occasional series on the blog. The aim, inspired by the World Kitchen in Leith, is to celebrate  good home cooking from many cultures. Right, now we are off to try a few more Feasts of India. Meanwhile here is that recipe (serves four):

Creamy mushrooms with pepper and coriander

250 grams mushroom, 100 ml single cream, 1 red pepper, 1/4 cup fresh coriander, large chopped onion, 2 cloves garlic, 3/4 teaspoon salt, tablespoon oil.

Spices: teaspoon (ish) each of cumin seeds, coriander, garam masala, and pinch crushed dried chillies.

For more information about Feasts of India contact:
jaggnath.recipes@googlemail.com

Now click here to enjoy the film

We are in the kitchen with Mridu Thanki to taste a meal from her first cookery book, Feasts of India.  On a cold Edinburgh day there are tantalising warm spicy smells coming from the pan and we are getting hungry.  But it isn’t time to eat yet.  While Mridu lines up red peppers, green coriander and creamy button mushrooms we are trying to capture the moment on film  – hoping tummies do not rumble above the sound of sizzling onions, cumin and chillies.

Mridu seems undaunted by the cameras. (You have to remember that as a founder member of the World Kitchen in Leith she served delicious courgettes in tandoori masala during torrential rain at Leith Festival in June this year.)  Her infectious enthusiasm for food overcomes most obstacles. “I love  food, I love cooking food and I love feeding family and friends,” she explains in her introduction.

Friends and family love her cooking too. “Why don’t you write the recipes down for us?” they ask and that is how she comes to write a book which she says has been 40 years in the making. After all, cookery books were not part of her family tradition. As a child growing up in North India Mridu  learned by watching and copying her mother and grandmother, absorbing the feel, colours and aromas of recipes which had been handed down for generations. As a mother bringing up two children in Britain she enjoyed experimenting with new flavours and ideas gained from her travels.

Now, adding a pinch of salt to the pan ( “to draw liquid from the mushrooms”) she describes how the idea for the book finally took shape in 1997 when she was running cookery classes for women in Latvia and sending recipes home to her daughter Priya and son Rahul.

The result is Feasts of India which is being launched at McDonald Road Library on Saturday 12th December at 12 pm.  Beautifully illustrated by Sandra de Matos and designed by Calum Ross, it has the look and feel of a handcrafted book and the friendly conversational tone of a natural cook who simply wants to share the vegetarian recipes that she enjoys cooking. Like the delicious creamy mushroom dish we tucked into – along with the rest of the meal Mridu prepared earlier to demonstrate the nutritional balance of an Indian meal: black eyed beans with okra,  white rice fragrant with whole spice, beetroot salad and minty raita of yoghurt and cucumber.

And the film?  Well, that is on its way and will be nicely cooked by the beginning of January when fresh, healthy vegetarian food will be exactly what the doctor ordered. We will make sure you are the first to join us ‘in Mridu’s kitchen’. Pardon any rumbles!

illustrations by Sandra de Matos

FEASTS OF INDIA is published by Jaggnath
£17.99 + £2.00 PP

For more information contact:
jaggnath.recipes@googlemail.com

It didn’t just rain, it absolutely poured. Recipes and posters got washed away as the deluge battered our poor gazebos.  But cooks just kept on cooking which was just as well because as soon as the rain stopped people came looking for food.  Crowds of them. We might have hoped for better weather but we couldn’t have asked for a better beginning for the World Kitchen than the Gala Day in Leith Links on Saturday (13 June).

The aim was to bring people together to enjoy eating food from different cultural traditions of the world.  To break down some of the barriers daily life seems to set up. And it worked better than we ever dared to imagine.

“This is good,” said Luis with a broad smile on his face as the rain leaked in all around us. He had been just about to start his cookery demonstration when the sky opened. “We can improvise,” he said, setting out a dish of Portuguese food: prawn and coriander ‘pancakes’ made with chickpea flour and served on crisp lettuce topped with a delicate tomato salsa flavoured with lemon grass.

Loving Leith: Gurmit and Luis (on the right) enthuse about food

Cookery demonstrations were abandoned but there was still plenty to see. On the stall there was Maryjannas delicious sour apple cake from Poland (donated by the Kleofas Cafe), a basket of perfect Pakistani mangoes (thanks to Planet Asia), loaves of wonderful Irish soda bread (baked by Celia to Granny Barron’s recipe), and Fran’s tray of American choc chip cookies which stayed miraculously crisp despite the rain.

Then there was the hot stuff. A big pot of chilli pepper soup (a Nigerian recipe made by Patricia) began to draw hungry folk around noon.  Agnes (from the Africa Centre) arrived with trays of African maize porridge, chicken, beans and spinach cooked with peanuts. Mridu served up courgettes stunningly crimson in tandoori masala sauce and a chutney made with pineapples and almonds which went amazingly well with my Scottish potato scones (just as Mridu had promised).

Not dreaming: these are definitely real life pakoras!

And all the time Pip was conjuring up home-made pakoras at the other end of the stall along with her daughter-in-law Balvinder (pictured above),  “I was dreaming about pakoras in the night,” she says laughing at the end of a very long but successful day over a hot stove. I wasn’t sure if it would work.”  In fact it worked so well Pip was kept busy right until the last drop of onion, potato and batter.  (Fortunately we had brought an extra bottle of gas to fire the heroic old burners kindly provided by the Scouts).

Serving the last few spoonfuls: from the right Agnes, Alice and Jo

And still people kept coming back for more.  Just when we thought we had run out Alice arrived with a new pot of beans and coconut and reinforcements of maize meal.  Meanwhile, we began to invent combinations of food we had never thought of before. Not just Scots potato scones with Indian chutney, but Irish soda bread with African beans, and Portuguese prawn and coriander with Indian pakoras. And…”just give me a taste of everything you have got,” said one happy customer loading his plate.

Nick enjoys a multicultural meal

That’s it for now. But we will be back.  The World Kitchen has loads more stories to tell about our sponsors, the people who made the food and the places it came from.  And more events to plan. Thank you, thank you to all our friends and supporters. And special congratulations to Gurmit and Mridu who had the brilliant idea of creating a World Kitchen just a few months ago!

Flashback to April: Gurmit and Mridu making plans at Out of the Blue.