Recipe

From a friend. Don't need to be too careful with the amounts as long as the proportions stay roughly the same, so doubles and tripples really well :-)

Farinata – Chickpea flour pancake

150g chickpea flour (gram flour)
400ml lukewarm water
½ tsp salt
Needles of a fresh rosemary spring about 25cm long.
4 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Pepper

Beat water into flour bit by bit. Season and beat 1 minute more. Stand for 4-6 hours.

Skim any froth from the surface of the mixture. Whisk again briefly and add rosemary. Pour the oil into a 30cm shallow tin or a 22/32cm oven sheet. Stir mixture and pour into the tin.

Heat oven to 240C. Place the tin in the oven, and turn heat down to 220C. Bake for 20mins until the mixture has all set. Grind a *lot* (or not as things go :-) ) of pepper over the top and stand/rest for 10mins before serving. Also good at room temperature.

Reading

Not Buying it - My year without shopping by Judith Levine

Well worth a read, she makes some interesting points about how companies use us to justify being crap to people :-(

Oh - and I borrowed it from the Libary, so I didn't buy it either!

Recipe

Made this for DD1s birthday cake. Currently I am, apparently, the best parent in the world. But then she has just become a teen, and is starting to realise that chocolate may well become a big part of her world....

Cherry Brownie


Doesn’t *have* to be cherries – especially as they aren’t that obvious in the finished brownie….. Although if you want a stiffer brownie you can put them in whole with the chocolate chips at the end of the recipe (warning – they *will* sink  )

½ cup soy yogurt
1 cup soya mylk (again, plamil preferred)
1 cup cherries, from a jar of ‘cherries in syrup or juice’ (we used some from Lidl)
1 ½ cup granulated sugar
1 cup sunflower oil
2 Tbsp bourbon (or any whiskey, but bourbon works best)
2 ¼ cup self raising flour
½ cup cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 1/3 cup chocolate chips (plamil are the preferred choice, but M&S dark chips work well too)

Mix yogurt, cherries, soya mylk, sugar, oil and bourbon in a large bowl. Beat well.
Gradually add in (pref. sifted to get rid of any lumps) flour, cocoa, baking powder and bicarb. Mix a lot so that you end up with a smooth batter.
Mix through chocolate chips.

Pour into a bottom lined 8x8 or 9x9 tin. Set oven to 180 degrees Celcius and bake for 25 mins, reduce temp to 150 degrees Celcius and bake for a further 20 mins, or until a skewer comes out clean (you may need to check in a couple of places to be sure that it isn’t just melted chocolate….). If you can turn off the oven and leave brownies to cool in there (but will still cool just fine in its tin on a rack as well)


Serve - well, we just ate it... there were plans to 'black forest' it, but they didn't happen....