Irish Oatmeal-Banana Pancakes with Sweet Apple Topping

To download a copy of the recipe for Irish Oatmeal-Banana Pancakes with Apple Topping in cookbook-style format, click HERE.

With St. Patrick’s Day rapidly approaching, it’s once again a good time to look to our Irish friends for a wee bit of inspiration. As we’ve done here in the past, it’s again a great pleasure to present something in time for St. Patrick’s Day that doesn’t involve regrettable stereotypes or green food coloring.

This week’s recipe is for oatmeal-banana pancakes served with a sweet apple topping. From a culinary standpoint, one of the things I find so interesting about this traditional Irish approach to pancakes is that the oatmeal is not used as is, but rather is ground to a flour-like texture and combined with whole wheat flour. Once the other ingredients are added and the batter ladled onto a hot griddle, the result is a delicious pancake with a very pleasing texture.

Some Cook’s Notes before we begin.

• Although the recipe you can download from the link above is done in a traditional cookbook format (ingredients list first, then cooking method), I’ve heard from a number of readers that they prefer to cook directly from the recipe as it’s posted on this site. To make it easier for anyone who would like to do that, beginning today each new recipe post will include an ingredients list.

• Regarding the oatmeal itself, in this recipe I’ve used rolled oats, the general use oatmeal found in most households, including mine. For true Irish authenticity, you might instead want to use steel cut Irish oats, a fuller grain also known by the funny-sounding (at least to my infantile sense of humor) name of Pinhead Oats.

• If the buttermilk called for in the recipe is not available, acidulated milk can be substituted. (Add 2 Tbsp of white vinegar to 2-1/4 cups plus 2 Tbsp room temperature low-fat milk, and let rest for a few minutes.)

• These pancakes are well accompanied by a side of eggs and/or bacon. (In the photo above, I’ve added simple scrambled eggs with the decidedly American topping of ketchup.)

This recipe makes 5-6 servings.

Here are the ingredients you’ll need.

Topping: ¼ cup firm-textured butter substitute; ¼ cup packed brown sugar; 4 large apples, peeled and sliced; ¼ tsp ground cinnamon; ¼ tsp ground nutmeg; ¼ tsp salt; and 2 tsp fresh lemon juice.

Pancake Batter: ¼ cup uncooked oatmeal; 2 fresh egg whites (not the kind in a carton); pinch cream of tartar; 2 cups whole wheat flour; ¼ tsp salt; 3 egg substitute eggs; 2-1/2 cups low-fat buttermilk

Other Ingredients: firm-textured butter substitute (for coating the griddle); 2 bananas, sliced into thin circles; and pancake syrup (optional).

To prepare the topping:

Melt the butter substitute over moderate heat in a medium saucepan.

Add the sugar and stir until melted.

Add the remaining topping ingredients, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook until the apples are soft but not mushy. Set aside until ready to put on the pancakes.

To make the pancake batter:

Place the oatmeal in a mini-processor and process into a flour-like powder.

Place the egg whites and cream of tartar in a bowl, and whisk until soft peaks form.

In a bowl, combine the flour, oatmeal and salt.

Add the egg substitute and buttermilk to the bowl, and stir until combined and smooth.

Fold in the beaten egg whites to form the batter.

To prepare and serve the pancakes:

Working in batches, ladle pancake-size portions of batter onto a hot griddle that has been coated with melted butter substitute. Cook until the tops are bubbly and the bottoms are browned, about two minutes.

Place some banana slices on each pancake.

Turn each pancake over, banana-side down, and cook until the bottoms are browned, about another minute. Place on a plate and repeat, cooking in batches until all the batter is finished.

To serve, place a serving of pancakes on a plate and top with some of the apple topping. Add syrup if desired. Serve with eggs and/or bacon.

To download a copy of the recipe for Irish Oatmeal-Banana Pancakes with Apple Topping in cookbook-style format, click HERE.

There’s an Irish proverb which says, “A cabin with plenty of food is better than a hungry castle.” Here’s hoping your cabin is always filled with the comforting aroma of good food, including Oatmeal-Banana Pancakes with Sweet Apple Topping.

Please visit again next week for another tasty recipe! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Salt-and-Vinegar Glazed Carrots with Herbed Buttermilk-Honey Biscuits

New this week:

(This is kind of like the beginning part of the church service where they make all the announcements about who had a baby and when the Women’s Group is scheduled to meet.)

• New subscriber: Welcome, Gloria…it’s great to have you here! 
• Special thanks: To Rachael Monaco, who this week featured a number of Kissing the Cook recipes on her Facebook page and who, herself, publishes some great-looking recipes for the Buffalo, NY edition of the Examiner on-line publication (http://www.examiner.com/buffalo). Check out Rachael’s articles: there are some summer recipes there right now that you might even find useful this weekend! 
• Other notes: Followers of Tawnya’s food blog will be interested in knowing it has moved. Click here for her new location.

Now let's eat!

This week, we continue with our Country Oven-Fried Steak recipe. In last week’s post, we made the star of the show, the steak itself, along with the all-important gravy that must be applied generously to both the steak and the traditional mashed potato side. In part 2 this week, we continue with the other two side dishes: Salt-and-Vinegar Glazed Carrots with Herbed Buttermilk-Honey Biscuits.

A couple of notes before we begin:

• As was the case with the buttermilk-dipped steaks used for last week’s Country Oven Fried Steaks, if you don’t have other things to do with the rest of the quart of buttermilk you get at the supermarket, you can use acidulated milk to make your buttermilk biscuits. You can make it by adding 1 tablespoon of white vinegar to every 1 cup of room-temperature low-fat milk and letting it rest for five minutes to create a controlled curdle. (Just don't call them Acidulated Milk Biscuits or you'll spend too much time explaining and too little time eating.) 
• In general, the process of glazing carrots consists of mixing the carrots in a pan with your glazing ingredients, and cooking until the mixture is reduced so much there’s little or no liquid left in the pan. This makes for a delicious glaze as long as you end the cooking at the right time, but you can imagine how keeping the heat on the carrots even a little too long can leave them burned and unworthy of the rest of this delicious meal. Be careful out there.

Let’s start with the biscuits. (The recipe below makes about eight 3” biscuits.)

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

While the oven is preheating, in a large bowl combine 1-1/2 cups of all purpose flour and ½ cup pastry flour (or 2 cups all-purpose flour); 1 tablespoon of dried parsley, rosemary or any other herb that matches well to the rest of the meal; 1 teaspoon of kosher salt; 2 teaspoons of baking powder; and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. After the dry ingredients are mixed, cut in ¾ cup of very cold butter substitute (keep it in the freezer till you’re ready, making sure it doesn’t freeze) until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

Make a well in the center of the mixture and add 1 tablespoon of honey and ¾ cup low-fat buttermilk or acidulated low-fat milk. Quickly mix with your hands until a sticky dough forms.

Put baking sheet in oven. While the baking sheet is pre-heating, turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and fold it onto itself at least 3 or 4 times to form layers.

Roll or pat the dough to ¾” thick and cut with a 3” biscuit cutter. Transfer cut-out biscuits to the baking pan. Gather the scraps and repeat.

Use your thumb to make an indentation in the top center of each biscuit to help the top rise evenly. Brush with melted butter substitute and bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.

While the biscuits are baking, let’s make the carrots. The recipe below makes four servings.

Cut 1-1/2 pounds of carrots into 1” pieces on a bias.

Place the carrots, 2 tablespoons of butter substitute, 1 tablespoon of kosher salt, ¼ cup white wine vinegar, and 2 tablespoons of honey into a skillet large enough for the carrots to be in a single layer. Add enough water to come half-way up the carrots.

Bring the liquid to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Simmer with the cover ajar until the carrots are tender, about 8 minutes.

Remove the cover and raise the heat to high. Toss the carrots frequently while the liquid evaporates and the carrots get a shiny glaze. (Remember not to overcook. It’s ok to brown the carrots a little – it’s even good to do so - but not to burn them.)

Once the liquid has cooked off and the carrots are glazed. garnish with parsley and serve!

And there you have it! If narrative recipes aren’t your style and you prefer a cookbook style, notebook-ready version of this or any other Kissing the Cook recipe, send me your e-mail address and it will be sent.

See you all next week! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and, as we enjoy some great food this Memorial Day weekend, remember to kiss a veteran.  And, after that, kiss the cook. :-;

Country Oven-Fried Steak

For readers outside of the U.S. (and probably some American readers too), Country Fried Steak is one of the truly great comfort foods of the south. It’s a delicious, stick-to-your-ribs meal built around a steak that has been "tenderized" (a genteel culinary term for having the living daylights beaten out of it by a stressed cook wielding a spiked hammer that looks like something out of a horror movie or fetish shop) then dredged, breaded and fried in the style of fried chicken, and finally smothered in gravy. It differs from Chicken Fried Steak in ways that no one can agree on: some say it’s in the gravy (brown vs. white); others claim it’s in the breading (buttermilk vs. egg); and still others insist there’s no difference at all. The one thing almost everyone agrees on is that, in either form, it’s a meal that can start off by warming your heart, and end up stopping it.

This brings us to Country Oven-Fried Steak, the version presented below. Rather than being pan-fried, it’s baked in a manner sometimes called “oven-frying.” Another difference is in the gravy, which either version must be smothered in to have any chance at authenticity.  In the fried version, the gravy is generally made from pan drippings by adding flour, etc., in the usual way. In the baked version there are, of course, no pan drippings, so you’ll see that the gravy is prepared separately using beef broth.

This recipe, as with many Country Fried Steak recipes, calls for the steaks to be placed in about a cup of buttermilk before the breading is applied. Since buttermilk is usually available only in containers of a quart or more, unless you plan on using it for other things too you’ll end up throwing out most of the container. To avoid this, it’s possible to make acidulated milk and use it as a substitute for the buttermilk. Just take a cup of room temperature milk – I use skim and it works just fine – add a tablespoon of white vinegar and let it rest for about five minutes. (The process is a kind of controlled curdling.)

As for side dishes, many are possible, but mashed potatoes (smothered in gravy, just like the steak) are pretty traditional. In the photo, I’ve also plated my steak with glazed salt-and-vinegar carrots and buttermilk biscuits. I don’t have a recipe for the mashed potatoes – improvising them is way too much fun for that – but I’ll be posting recipes for the carrots and biscuits next week.

This recipe makes four servings.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Put your baking sheet in the oven to heat it.

Using a tenderizing mallet, tenderize 1-1/2 pounds of beef round steaks until they’re about ¼” thick. Cut them into four servings.

Combine ½ cup Panko and ½ cup plain bread crumbs with ¼ teaspoon of ground black pepper in a 1 gallon zip-lock bag. Put 1 cup of buttermilk (or acidulated milk) in a shallow pan.

Combine ½ teaspoon of kosher salt, ¼  teaspoon of ground black pepper, and ¼ teaspoon of garlic powder, and season both sides of the tenderized steaks. Dredge each steak in the buttermilk, shake off excess, and coat with the breadcrumb mixture, pressing the breadcrumbs in. If they don’t seem sufficiently coated, give them a second buttermilk-breadcrumb treatment. Let the coated steaks rest in refrigerator for at least 20 minutes.

When the steaks have finished resting, spray your preheated baking sheet with cooking spray. Place steaks on the baking sheet and spray the tops lightly. Bake until the coating is golden brown and crispy, about 20 minutes, turning half-way.

While steaks are baking, prepare gravy in a skillet as per the recipe below, but don’t let it completely thicken. When the gravy is ready, add the steaks and bring it to just boiling over medium-high heat.

When the gravy has started boiling, reduce the heat to low, put ½ a bunch of chopped green onions on top of the steaks, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Serve the steaks hot, remembering to add gravy to them and to your mashed potatoes.

To make the gravy:

In a medium saucepan, combine a 15 ounce can of beef broth, 1 tablespoon of fresh chopped rosemary, and 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce. Bring the mixture just to a boil, then reduce to a simmer.

Make a slurry of 2 tablespoons of corn starch dissolved in ¼ cup of water and add to the broth mixture. Add ½ teaspoon of garlic powder, and cook until thickened to consistency of cream.

Whisk in 2 tablespoons of butter substitute, a little at a time, and cook a few minutes more to the desired thickness. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Hope you enjoy this comforting delight!

As always, if you’d like a cookbook style, notebook-ready copy of this recipe, send me a note or a comment with your e-mail address and I’ll send it right along.

And also as always, till next week, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)