Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Boot basic breakfast foods
Mix things up with bannock, Welsh cakes
Sick of cereal? Over oatmeal? Extremely sick of eggs? Basic breakfast foods can lose their appeal when they become too familiar. To alleviate that tedium, we have a couple of tantalizing griddlecakes, plus tangy buckwheat waffles, to freshen up your mornings.
Welsh cakes have a long tradition in Wales, where frugal housewives made them from ingredients on hand for their miner husbands to take into the coal pits. More substantial than a mere cookie, less fragile than a piece of cake, a Welsh cake or two tucked into a coat pocket made a welcome addition to the miner’s midmorning tea — or to your Saturday morning errands. This is an eminently adaptable recipe — add grated lemon peel, use different fruit or spices, but keep the flour, butter and baking powder the same.
Bannock, another kind of griddlecake, is a type of flatbread. Traditionally made with oat or barley flour in Scotland, these humble unleavened breads traveled with Scottish emigrants to Canada. There, the First Nations people adopted bannock as their own, although many sources say they had been making flatbreads from corn long before the Scots arrived.
Today, bannock is still much-loved in Canada, but it takes many forms: baked on a griddle, dough shaped around a stick to bake over an open fire, or fried. It is made with oat flour, wheat flour or any other ingredient that can be formed into a simple dough, and today’s bannock is usually leavened with baking powder. Since “bannock” just means “bread” — and, like bread, is the same in both singular and plural — they’re all legitimate versions. Our bannock is lightly leavened and seasoned with sage and cheddar, which makes it equally good at breakfast with the porky goodness of bacon or sausage, and at supper, with an earthy bean soup rich with kielbasa.