Pancakes, the Rule of Tum way

Supper club chef Dorian Kirk shares his favourite pancake recipes from both sides of the border.

I loved Pancake Day as a kid. Mum used to make mounds of them, served just simple with lemon and sugar. But there are so many versatile recipes you can use with a pancake as the base. Below are just two different styles of pancake you can make tonight, one classic Scottish recipe with smoked salmon and horseradish and a hearty English dish with goat's cheese and butternut squash.

Scottish pancakes with smoked salmon, horseradish Crème fraîche, watercress and pickled beets.

Scottish pancakes with smoked salmon, horseradish crème fraiche, watercress, pickled beets

Pancakes

125g self raising flour
100g wholemeal self raising flour
2 large free range eggs
300ml milk
2 tbsp horseradish sauce
Pinch of salt

Garnish

4 small whole beets
600ml water
200ml red wine vinegar
75g caster sugar
5g salt
Horseradish crème fraiche
200ml crème fraiche
2 tbsp horseradish cream
1⁄2 a lemon squeezed
Salt & pepper

Serve with smoked salmon and watercress

Place beetroots into a pan and cover with water, bring to the boil and simmer until a knife goes through with ease. Drain and keep the beet water. Whisk the sugar, salt and vinegar into the hot Beet water. Peel the beetroots once cooled and slice into wedges and submerse in the pickle mix.

Whisk the flours, eggs, milk, salt and horseradish sauce into until smooth. Place a large heavy-base frying pan over a medium heat and lightly butter the pan. When the pan is hot, drop dessertspoons of batter into the pan to make four small pancakes.

After 1 1⁄2 minutes, you will see bubbles forming on the surface of each pancake, flip them over and cook for a further 1 minute, so that no batter oozes out when lightly pressed.

Remove the pancakes to a wire rack and cover loosely with a clean tea towel. Continue making the Pancakes until all the batter is used up.

For the topping, mix the crème fraiche with the horseradish and lemon juice in a bowl and season to taste, with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.

To finish, place the pancakes onto plates, top with a spoonful of the horseradish cream, slices of salmon, the watercress and pickled beets.

English pancakes with butternut squash, walnuts and chill, soused leeks, tarragon goat's cheese and rocket.

English pancakes with butternut squash, walnuts and chilli, soused leeks, tarragon goat’s cheese and rocket

Pancakes

140g plain flour
Pinch of salt
200ml whole milk
2 large free range eggs
25g melted unsalted butter
1⁄2 red chilli, finely chopped

Squash

600g butternut squash, diced
3 sprigs of thyme
50g butter
50g walnut pieces
1⁄2 red chilli, finely chopped
Salt and pepper
Dash of oil

Soused leeks

3 small leeks, diced
75g butter
20g parmesan, grated
2 tbsp crème fraiche
1 1⁄2 lemons, juiced
1 tbsp chopped parsley

Tarragon goat’s cheese

125g fresh goats cheese
3 sprigs of tarragon, chopped
100ml double cream
200g rocket

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and making a well in the middle. In a jug mix the chilli, milk and water together. Break the eggs into the well and whisk slowly. Add the chilli, milk and water, whisking constantly and gradually incorporating the flour until the batter is smooth. Set aside to rest for 30 mins, and then whisk in the melted butter.

Place the butternut squash into a hot pan with the thyme, butter, oil, seasoning and chilli. Keep moving it ensuring it cooks through, before adding the walnut pieces and placing to one side.

Next place the diced leeks into a pan with the butter and seasoning, cook down on medium heat until the Leeks are cooked but keep their colour, add the rest of the ingredients, and set aside.

For the goat’s cheese, blitz all of the ingredients until smooth, thinning with milk if needed.

Heat a lightly greased frying pan over a medium heat. Using a ladle, pour roughly 2 tbsp of batter into the pan and swirl it around so the bottom of the pan is evenly coated. Cook the for about 45 seconds on one side until golden and then flip the pancake over and cook the other side for about 30 secs until it freckles. Stack and repeat until all of the batter is used.

To finish stack the pancakes on to plates and serve with the leeks, squash, goat’s cheese and rocket. 

Dorian Kirk is head chef of A Rule of Tum, a supper club based in Herefordshire. A Rule of Tum is about creating honest, seasonal dishes crafted from the ingredients they find right on their doorstep.

Spiced winter gin cocktails

The G&T is, of course, very much associated with summertime, but what's to stop you indulging in some mid-winter spiced gin cocktails? 

Ed and Joe at The Travelling Gin Co spend most of the cooler months experimenting with winter variations of the classic gin and tonic, using spiced tonic and flavoursome nutmeg and cranberry. So why wait 'til summer? Grate yourself some nutmeg, slice up a kumquat and kick back with one these warming cocktails.

Spiced Tonic Fizz

In an iced stacked cocktail shaker take:

• 50ml gin
• 25ml fresh lemon juice
• 15ml spiced tonic syrup (by Liber & Co).

Then, shake and pour onto more ice.

Top with Colonial Tonic water. 

Garnish with thinly sliced and whole kumquats. A slice of orange works brilliantly too, but give kumquats a go… they provide a heighten sharpness (from the flesh) and sweetness (from the skin) to your drink.

Winter Tonic

Mix together:

• 35ml gin
• 20ml cranberry juice
• 15ml nutmeg syrup*
• Colonial Tonic Water

Stir all ingredients gently together.

Garnish with a lime slice and fresh cranberries.

* There's a great recipe for nutmeg syrup plus details of the Colonial Tonic on the Travelling Gin Co website.

Ed and Joe head up the Travelling Gin Co, a pop-up drinks project serving classic G&Ts and cocktails straight from the baskets of their bicycles at festivals and private events.

The Mushroom Picker

Follow the fateful progress of a mushroom picker as he “creeps along with quiet purpose” through a dark and ancient English woodland in this utterly unique storybook.

“In a dark and ancient English wood
beneath two oaks that proudly stood,
a patch of leafy forest floor
trembled near a woodshed door.
It was that dreaded night each year
The Mushroom Picker would appear.”

I stumbled upon this charming and eccentric storybook last week. Although mushrooms and I don’t get along in the kitchen (it’s a texture thing, I’m working on it), I definitely appreciate their comely forms and earthy scent when ambling along forest tracks. The Mushroom Picker lures you into their furtive world with all the ghostly charm of will-o’-the-wisp leading you off the beaten track into a hushed overgrowth populated by woodlarks, jostling ferns and bursting puffballs.

The tale follows the fateful progress of a mushroom picker as he “creeps along with quiet purpose” through a dark and ancient English wood, while a host of charismatic mushroom characters – Slippery Jack, Rosy Earthstar, Scarlet Cup and our heroine, Penny Bun (a rare and coveted porcini) – evade his annual harvest.

The book is lovingly crafted by mushroom obsessive David Robinson, a co-founder of Sporeboys street kitchen who, along with Andrew Gellatly, has been serving up wild mushrooms to fungi-hungry Hackney folk since 2005.

The story is brought to life through enchanting luminograms, created in a darkroom using a cameraless process. Robinson artfully arranged hand-picked mushrooms on the plate glass of his enlarger then built a scene by exposing them to different intensities of light, after which the fungi characters are quickly dispatched with (eaten), the scene never to be remade. Utterly unique and enchanting, buy it immediately.

The Mushroom Picker, David Robinson, £14.99; (Violette Editions, Nov 2012)

Jo Keeling is the editor & founder of Ernest Journal. She is learning to love mushrooms, one chanterelle at a time.

How to use a firesteel

A must-have on any camping adventure, a firesteel can have your fire roaring in seconds. Andrew Groves of Miscellaneous Adventures show you how. 

Firesteels are a great way of lighting a fire in the great outdoors. Striking the ferrocerium rod with the back of a knife creates a shower of hot sparks that will ignite many natural or manmade tinders. They can also be used to light gas or alcohol stoves. Here are a few tips on how to get the best from your firesteel.

First you need to locate or make some suitable tinder. Dry, fibrous or fluffy materials work best. Below are a few of my favourites that can be found readily in the UK. Others include, cotton wool, cedar bark, seed heads of various plants or even the fluffy stuff inside jackets and sleeping bags in an emergency. The best of all though is birch bark, and that's what I'm using here in my demonstration.

In order to use your firesteel you need a suitable striker; high carbon steel works best. Many outdoor knives and axes are made of high carbon steel. In this example I'm using the back edge of a carbon folding Opinel. The idea is to scrape off a layer of the rod creating sparks that land onto your bundle of tinder. Use the thumb of the hand holding the firesteel to push the striker from the handle towards the tip of the rod firmly.

You should see a flash of hot sparks land onto your bundle of tinder; if one of these sparks lands in just the right spot fire should swiftly follow.

Once your tinder ignites, build your fire in the normal way and get the coffee boiling. Experiment with different tinders in different environments and see what works best for you. Happy camping!

Andrew Groves lives in a barn in a small Sussex woodland, where he runs Miscellaneous Adventures. He makes wooden tools by hand and teaches workshops in wood carving and other skills. miscellaneousadventures.co.uk

Top five field guides

Woodlore, wild food and mushroom foraging: bushcraft expert Andrew Price chooses his favourite guides for outdoor living. 

Photo: Jo Keeling

Camping and Woodcraft, Horace Kephart

First published in 1906, this ranks sixth among the 10 best selling sporting books of all time. Kephart was a librarian and woodsman who lived in the Great Smoky mountains of the USA, and spent most of his time living in the wild. Consequently, he became an expert on all aspects of life in the great outdoors. These 480 dog-eared pages have inspired and fuelled my interest in camping and wilderness living since I first discovered a copy in a village jumble sale at the age of 12. A must-have book for the library or backpack of every nostalgically-minded outdoorsman.

The Survival Handbook: A Practical Guide to Woodcraft and Woodlore, Ray Mears

This was Ray Mears' first book, written when the author was only 26 years old and published in 1990. In the pre-internet world, this book was groundbreaking, packed with thought-provoking ideas, ancient skills, and pictures of skinned rabbits. With it came a realisation that I was not alone, and there was at least one other person in the world whose idea of heaven was sleeping in a debris shelter in the woods. It was full of photographs, line drawings and excellent descriptions of the type of “Duffel” or equipment necessary to become a true wilderness adventurer. By comparison with his more recent publications it was rough and ready, experimental and lacking the sure-footedness of his more recent books. All factors that make it some of Ray’s best work in my opinion.

Wild Food, Roger Phillips

If I was asked to recommend one book for the first time (or experienced) forager it would be Wild Food by Roger Phillips. It's packed with full colour photographs and recipes featuring many of the UK’s wild edible plants and fungi. Unlike many field guides, he avoids over complication, and sticks with species that are easily identified. He also includes a selection of traditional recipes and folklore, as well as a few tried and tested concoctions of his own. Most of the plants featured in the book are actually good to eat, and turn a trip to the coast or local hedgerow into a gastronomic adventure.

River Cottage Handbook: Mushrooms, John Wright

There are a lot of excellent fungi identification guides out there, but most of them are more concerned more with scientific identification than culinary delights, and while I find Mycology a fascinating subject, my real passion is for finding things that are good to eat. John Wright’s book has an introduction by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, so it should come as no surprise to find that as well as providing a well-illustrated and comprehensive guide to edible (and not so edible) fungi, it also has a selection of recipes and advice for preparing them. It’s a well written and entertaining read, so definitely has a place in my foraging basket.

Mountaincraft and Leadership, Eric Langmuir

This book was first published in 1969, and has since undergone several amendments and reprints in order to keep the content up to date with the latest developments in equipment, techniques, and access legislation. It's a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in spending time in the hills and mountains, and particularly those who intend to lead other people into those environments. It's a comprehensive read, with chapters on navigation, hillwalking technique, camp craft and expeditions, food and nutrition, river crossings, mountain weather and meteorology, first aid, incident management and mountain rescue and so much more. I currently own a copy of the fourth edition, and would certainly consider it to be recommended reading for every outdoor instructor.

Andrew Price founded Dryad Bushcraft in the hope of inspiring others to learn to be comfortable with the outdoors through knowledge, rather than expensive equipment.

dryadbushcraft.co.uk