Bannocks with roasted veg hoummous

Jan 22, 2015 | 6 comments

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Made these at tea time. I’ve been working out the recipes for the new meal plan. I need to use up all the groceries on the shopping list, or the people following it wouldn’t have enough calories for the week. I found that I had some oats, oil, onions and carrots left and was wondering what on earth I could do with those.

Then I remembered that Jack had made Bannocks with oats, so swapped out the butter for oil, as there isn’t any butter on the meal plan and tried them. Very nice!

Bannocks with roasted veg hummus

For meal plan 8, use
950g onions, Asda 2kg/£1.08, 51p
900g carrots, Asda 2kg/£1.14,  51p
oil
Total cost £1.02

Peel the onion and chop. Peel the carrots if you like, you don’t need to, and chop into thumbnail sized pieces. Drizzle with a little oil, salt and pepper. Roast at 180C for about 40 minutes.

While that is happening, make the bannocks.

240g oats, value brand, 1kg/75p, 18p
60g oil, Asda 1 litre/£1.25, 7p
Total cost 25p

Put the oats into a blender and pulverise them for a while. It helps the bannocks to stick together.

In a bowl, thoroughly mix the oats, oil and enough water to form a dough. Tip out onto a lightly floured worktop and press and pat out flat to the thickness of a £1 coin.

Cut into whatever shapes you want, squares, fingers, rounds, whatever, and place on a lightly oiled baking sheet.

Bake in with the roasting vegetables for 20 minutes. They just want to be a gentle golden colour.

Leave on the tin until they have cooled, they will be quite fragile until then.

home made bannocks

These bannocks were made with un-blitzed oats and are very fragile

Vegetables made into hummus

Once the vegetables are soft, tip them into a food processor and whizz until they are as smooth as you can get them. You may need to scrape them down a couple of times, and you may need to add a little water. Season to taste.

vegetable hummus

This is a small test batch made with 200g each of carrots and onion. The full batch would give you lots to use through the week, and maybe on into the next week

Meal Plan 8

On meal plan 8, use the bannocks and hummus whenever you want them. As an extra with any of the meals, as a fill up at supper or tea, or any other way you want them.

The picture shows a small batch of bannocks made without blitzing the oats first and although delicious, they are pretty fragile. I shall be making another batch and blitzing the oats this time. I wanted to see what they would be like if you didn’t have access to any means to blitz them. Un-blitzed bannocks would need to be treated carefully, with hummus dolloped on rather than spread, and a mouthful at a time, as they don’t hold together when lifting when loaded.

If you have no processor, you could mash the hummus with a fork, chopping any tougher bits with a knife. Or try pushing it through a sieve. It will be a different texture, and just as delicious.

I tried it as it was, then added a bit of sweet chilli and peanut butter. Tasted it in between each addition and each one was lovely. You could add this to chickpea hummus, I have just tried a morsel on a bannock with value soft cheese swirled in, that was yum too. It would be delicious in a sandwich or pitta, with/out any salady bits you may have, or you could swirl it through pasta, with or without the soft cheese

Blitzed oats

Edit: I have now made a batch using blitzed oats. They do indeed hold together very well. Don’t add too much water, like I did with this batch, or they won’t crisp up properly.

home made bannocks, still not quite right

Finally made bannocks how I wanted them

Edit 2: I have made these again, and these were exceptionally delicious. I used butter for these. I blitzed the oats in a food processor, then added the soft butter and blitzed that in, then added a splash of water and blitzed. After that I took them out of the processor and squashed everything together. I happened to have added enough water, otherwise I would have added more to make the mixture into a dough.
Then I rolled them out on a chopping board and used a cookie cutter to cut out the rounds. Squishing the remaining mixture together and re-rolling until all the mixture was used. I got about 20 bannocks from this amount. About, because I forgot to count them when they were freshly done, and by the time I remembered, we had both eaten some.

home made bannocks - got it right at last!

Do try them if you can.
I got about 20 of these from 250g oats and 60g butter, so about 40p. Asda’s own brand is 89p for 250g and Nairn’s are £1.35 for 200g. Both also about 20 oat cakes I think. So at 40p, these are a minimum of half the price. Plus of course you can flavour them with all kinds of things, and you know what’s in them. I was in Sainsbugs earlier and both their own brand and Nairn’s have the dreaded palm oil in them.

Flavour variations for home made bannocks

I didn’t go through the flavour variations on the original post, so I’ll do it here. You could add tomato purée, or crushed garlic and fine chopped rosemary, or crushed lemongrass and fine chopped chilli. Marmite if you like it. A little very finely chopped fresh ginger and garlic.

You could use any fat saved from meat, so beef dripping, the fat drained from a lamb breast, chicken fat from a roast chicken. They would all add lovely flavour. Or you could use coconut oil for a mild coconut flavour.

Oatcakes in the supermarket have a few standard variations, all of which could be reproduced. You could add a little grated cheese, or lots of black pepper, a handful of any seeds in any combination, so flax and linseed, or sunflower and sesame, or pumpkin.

You can sprinkle a little spice on the top of the bannocks before they are baked. So a pinch of paprika, sea salt, ground pepper, tandoori spice, curry powder, celery salt whatever you have in the cupboard. Maybe that five spice that never seems to get used for anything?

You can add a few chopped herbs, fresh or dried. So a few fine chopped sage leaves, or fine chopped rosemary, or a sprinkle of mixed dried herbs. Or how about thyme leaves, and thyme itself has many different flavoured leaves available.

Any combination of the above , so maybe fresh ginger and garlic with paprika on top. Or sunflower and sesame seeds with five spice on top.

Sweet flavour variations for home made bannocks

As far as sweet variations go, you could add a handful of the usual suspects, raisins, sultanas, chopped dates, chopped apricots, or value mixed fruit. Chopped nuts would be good too. So some fine chopped walnuts, with maybe some dates too for the classic combination in an unusual setting. Or any of the other nuts, chopped small.

Fruit and nuts would go together well in any combination you fancy, so maybe Brazil nut and sultana, hazelnut and dried cranberry, peanut and raisin. Some little pieces of preserved ginger, maybe with some ground ginger as well.

You could drizzle melted value chocolate, dark, milk or white over the top of any of the sweet versions, or of course, chip it up small and mix it into the dough.

Well I think that’s enough variations to keep you going for a good long while, and I’m sure you will come up with your own unique ones too. Let me know what you try 🙂

bannocks with roasted veg hummus

 

 

6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. Thrifty Lesley

    Hi Lesley – that sounds interesting, I’ll give that method a go. Would be good in these fuel expensive times to have a stove top method to use

  2. lesley marrion-cole

    I make bannocks too, and I don’t blitz the oats. My recipe is 2 portions oats, 1 portion flour, tiny bit of salt. If I’m making them for a gluten-free person, the flour is gram (chickpea) otherwise all-purpose white wheat flour (Lidl). It’s important to have JUST enough water and not too much. I aim for a sticky paste. I’ve tried leaving the oats to soak in water overnight; it didn’t make any difference. I cook it gently in a heavy iron pan and turn it over when it is half-cooked. Very nice and filling. Sometimes I put caraway seeds on the outside of the bannock when I’m turning it over. This is a quick easy recipe. It comes out of the pan as a fat disc (1 cm deep) and can be cut into wedges. It does not crumble. I tried cooking it in the microwave and it was unsuccessful, it didn’t go nice and crisp and brown on the outside. It’s nice spread with butter/jam etc or dipped into soup/stew. It is best eaten hot but can be toasted and eaten later. I don’t know how well it lasts as I eat it the same day.

  3. Lesley

    Thank you! So glad you like them. Coincidentally, I’m going to make some bannocks this afternoon with rosemary from the garden, and I may use some dripping I have stashed in the freezer as the fat

  4. Jayne Gordon

    Just made these both for the first time, using the butter version, and I’m really impressed with how they’ve turned out. Both really tasty. Waiting for my husband to come home from so I can surprise him – he’s always hungry when he gets in and these seem like a nice healthier option to snacking. Thanks for another fabulous recipe. X

  5. Lesley

    OMG! This made me laugh so much! I have such funny mental pictures of you and your bannock mixture

    If you make a mixture that’s too wet in future, add a little flour, just a tsp at a time. Mix it in, and see what the mix is like. Add some more if you need to.

    Good luck!

  6. LOLA DAVIS

    The saga of the Battle of the Bannocks. This weekend I had two Scots from Fife come to stay. I thought I’d show off by making them some bannocks for breakfast.The recipe looked so simple and straightforward. They said they had never heard of bannocks,nor of the Battle of Bannockburn,in 1314, when the Scots under Robert the Bruce defeated the English,but conceded that they might be Scottish if they were made of oats.
    DAY 1.I was so inspired by this simple,economical Bannock recipe that I decided to go ahead. First problem : I had no normal oatmeal. Lesley is always recommending that you use alternatives from what you have,so decided to substitute some elderly sachets of porridge oats. They were quite fine,so no need to grind. Oil and sugar were mixed in. So far so good. Almost done. Just some water to add. This is when disaster struck.I added too much and now had a wet mix which would be difficult to roll.No oats left so searched around for another alternative to dry the mix: added the end of a packet of granola.This had a few raisins,so looked for more to add but could not find them.Had to leave the mix to do some other chore. On return I found the dough incredibly dry and stiff.I had been thinking about adding chopped dates – a bargain 3 boxes for £1,languishing in my fridge – but found the mix so stiff I could hard turn it over and knew it would be difficult to add anything.I decided to refrigerate it and tackle the next stage the next day,when I felt stronger.
    DAY 2: Lying in bed overnight,I had been thinking of the bannocks and decided I had to attempt to find the raisins and add them with some more oil and sugar.I had no idea what would get the proportions right. Day 2,found the raisins. Took the dough from the fridge – now a really stiff mass,impossible to “stir” raisins through.Cut it into smaller lumps with a knife.Added the extra oil and sugar (guessed the amounts to add). Still too thick so,in trepidation, added some extra water. Oh no! THE MIX IS TOO WET AGAIN! By now I could hardly turn the mix, being too convulsed by laughter.Decided to leave it once more to gather enough strength for another assault on the bannocks.Today is the evening of Day 2. The “dough” – I am not sure that it is a” bannock dough” anymore – is sitting waiting for me in the kitchen to decide its fate. Shall I concede defeat and chuck it – and frugality – out of the window,so to speak,or attempt to roll and cook it? In the end,I have decided to attempt to cook it.If the result is disastrous, I imagine that the birds and foxes I regularly feed will appreciate them and I might just find them edible,though I am not sure I’ll have the nerve to offer bannocks to guests. Who would believe that I,a supposedly experienced cook,would be defeated by a batch (though by now with all the additions it’s a little army)of bannocks? I feel thoroughly stupid.Lesley has my admiration for making them so easily.

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