Friday 27 December 2013

Breakfast . . . Or Rather My Difficult Relationship with Eggs

Eggs and I, have, um, a mutual disrespect for one another.

I remember my mother feeding me scrambled eggs when I was really young. I don’t really remember what age I was when I started turning my nose up at them, but I do remember that I was never very fond of the taste, and they kind of hurt my tummy, so I really didn’t like eating them. They don’t like me and I don’t like them. Nowadays we call it having a food intolerance.

I often refer to the egg intolerance as being a “threshold” intolerance. You will see recipes on here that involve eggs (like the gingerbread cake posted a few days ago), which may seem a bit odd when I talk about having an intolerance to eggs. 3 eggs in a cake? I don’t eat the whole cake (or at least, not in one sitting!). 6 eggs in a cake (I make a wicked gluten-free/leaven-free chocolate cake suitable for Passover), I start paying a price. My boyfriend’s aunt’s Yorkshire puddings where she substitutes more eggs to use less milk for his lactose intolerance? I suffer “Yorkie regret”. You get the picture.

Either way, at the moment, I need to minimise things that upset my system. As much as I’m not really fond of the taste of eggs anyway, it’s a bit of a pain that they are generally something I can’t eat, because they are down-right encouraged on a low-residue/low-fibre diet because they are easy to digest (for most people, just not me) and high in protein.

My foodie friend, who was ever so kind to me about my pre-Christmas meltdown, bought me some maple syrup for Christmas. I LOVE maple syrup. The real stuff. In large quantities. I could drink it straight from the bottle (and will admit that I have done that more than once!). One of the only things I miss about living in Canada is going out to tree farms in March when the sap starts to run and eating very freshly made maple toffee which is rolled out on the snow. Heaven!


So, I’ve been on the search for dairy and egg free options to pour this lovely gift on. One of yesterday’s experiments was vegan French toast. I don’t remember the last time I had proper French toast, I find it just too eggy for my tummy and haven’t had it in years.

I tried out this recipe, which uses banana. http://vegetarian.about.com/od/morerecipes/r/FrenchToast.htm I made some adjustments though. As I was only cooking for me, I cut the quantities in half. I used -

1 ripe banana
Just under ½ cup of rice milk
½ tsp of cinnamon
1/4 tsp of nutmeg
Dash of cloves
½ tsp of vanilla

I used a hand blender to puree the whole thing and poured into a shallow dish. I used some chunky slices of  white bread, and soaked them for a bit, turning halfway through. I heated a frying pan and a small amount of sunflower oil and cooked them until they browned. It made about four slices, which meant two for lunch and two for the freezer.



It was actually quite good! And nice to be reminded how tasty French toast actually is (and to actually eat a fruit! It was pulverised puree, but it was fruit!!) But I will say that the combination of banana puree and maple syrup was a bit sweetness overkill. 

Tonight’s experiment was applesauce pancakes, using this recipe http://www.food.com/recipe/cinnamon-applesauce-pancakes-129670.

Again, I made a couple of adjustments. As it was just me, I cut the quantities in half. I make my own applesauce, and had just enough leftover from the gingerbread cake earlier this week for this. I hadn’t put much cinnamon in the applesauce when I made it, so I added more to the recipe. The quantities I used were-

1 cup of flour (I ended up adding about another 2 tbsp of flour as I found the batter runny)
2 tsp of baking powder
1/4 tsp of salt
1 tbsp of sugar
1 cup of water
1/4 cup of applesauce
1/8 tsp of vanilla extract

I cooked them on a hot frying pan with a little bit of sunflower oil.


I found the batter very runny and it made very thin pancakes (I should add that I was making these as “North American pancakes”, not “English pancakes”, which tend to be much thinner and more like crepes). When I got to the bottom of the batter, I then discovered a big pile of flour that I had clearly missed mixing in. Doh! So the last two pancakes pictured came out nice and fluffy!! I ended up with about 12 pancakes from this recipe, but I suspect it would have been about 8 had I mixed it properly. Either way, more for the freezer for meals that I can just reheat. And more excuses to eat maple syrup!!




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