Chickpea Flat Bread - Oven Fried

This is a recipe you have got to try! 

If you are anything like me, you have things in your cupboards you use seldom - or go through little phases of using them and then forgetting about them for awhile. For me there are several items, some of which I have mentioned on here.

Well, another one is gram flour or chickpea flour. Not so long ago I did use this far more often but it fell out in favour of spelt flour for breads and baking. This week I decided to bring it back and redo some of my favourite recipes with it.

I ended up making a gram flour bread type of pancake - often called Socca - of course my recipe is a little different (what else is new!) but we think it's even better with a few tweaks...

Here it is:

Oven Fried Bread

2 cups of gram flour

400 ml water

finely diced onion

fresh and dried Rosemary

Olive oil or coconut oil

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

salt

cumin

pepper

Mix the gram flour and water together - blend really well to get out any lumps - then allow to sit for at least 2 hours or even over night. 

Once the flour is ready - add your spices and baking soda, except the fresh rosemary, and blend lightly again to make sure everything is evening distributed. 

In the meantime, set your oven at 190C and prepare a round tin or deep pizza pan by covering with parchment paper. Pour about 1 tablespoon of olive oil on the parchment, add the onion to the batter and then gently pour the batter on top of the oil. 

Once the batter is in the pan - carefully mix or draw the oil through the mixture (it will float to the top) and then sprinkle with a little more salt, pepper and the fresh rosemary. 

Place in a hot oven for about 30 to 35 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean. Take out and allow to cool for about 5 to 10 minutes, then serve with a meal.

This is lovely with anything or on it's own.

April

Lovely!!

Bulk Buying, Flour and Cinnamon Cake

Today, in my wish to get a little organized for next week and indeed the coming winter season, I did a large bulk shopping trip to build up our own stores here at home. What I found were some different flours I would not usually use too often.

I now have oat flour, more gram flour, barley flour, white spelt and lentil flours. A few years ago, when I was gluten free, I did use more of these. At the time our digestive tracts were still in recovery phase, so we did not eat bread and certainly not cakes.

Now, we are well past that (a few years in fact) and I have been making lots baked goods for us to enjoy. Mostly I use organic whole grain spelt flour for nearly everything. But it is nice to branch out now and again into some different tastes.

When I came home I wanted to try out my white spelt flour in a cake recipe I have been working on and hope to make a few of these cakes in the coming weeks. Tonight I made a cinnamon cake that was supposed to have an almond crumble.

However, at the last minute I thought the almond crumble might not keep frozen, so I ended up mixing the almonds into the batter. Of course, I always start with my standard - 2 cups of flour,  baking soda and a little salt.

Next I wanted the cake to be sweet but am no longer using commercial apple concentrate, so I made some apple sauce from 2 apples with cinnamon and nutmeg mixed in. To this I added 1 cup of butter and two eggs. 

Steamy apple sauce with lots of cinnamon and nutmeg

Using my blender I ground up 1 cup of almonds fairly fine which went into the flour mixture. Then I folded in the apple sauce-butter-egg into the flour mixture. As I was stirring it, I added 1/4 cup of maple syrup and a little more flour.

Cinnamon cake batter in pan

At this point it smelled very almondy so I added more cinnamon! 

Of course, the entire house now smells like cinnamon cake, it looks divine and we are fasting until Thursday... LOL

Into the freezer it goes until next weekend. I hope to have a couple more made by then, perhaps something very different from what I normally make - with all these nice flours to try. 

Hope you have a lovely day!

April

Cinnamon cake, just out of the oven

So much food!

Today was another day of cooking, eating and enjoying our feast days as much as possible. Even with the weather taking a little turn towards the rain, at least it was later in the day and I was still able to get out into the garden for some fresh herbs and salad leaves.

I have been itching to use my food mixer/grinder more, and have been looking for excuses to try it out. Today I decided to grind up some of the dried herbs from my garden - it did a fantastic job with them. Now I have jars of very fragrant freshly dried herbs which will replace the old ones.

I mention this because I am still astounded by how differently my own finely ground herbs smell and look compared to shop bought ones. What on earth do they do to them? Why is the food so different tasting and looking from homemade? Shocking!

So, on to today. Because I had so much food already on hand, I did not want to make much more, but I am still working away at my list of requests. With our main meal I decided to make onion bhajis - which everyone loves, and I have discovered an easy way to make them.

This type of food would normally have been fried or even deep fried (I bake them), they are delicious in a sweet and spicy way, great with a dip or salted on their own. I had a roasted duck ready for a warm duck salad, and wanted something substantial and complementary to go with it. 

The onion bhajis were perfect! To make the bhajis, I sliced a few onions, sautéd them with spices (ginger, turmeric, cumin, salt, pepper) in a pan until translucent. In the meantime I mixed gram flour and more of the same spices together with water.

Gram flour mixture

Once the onions were done, I mixed these two together until the onions were well coated with the wet flour. Using a wooden spoon I dropped large spoonfuls of this wet mixture onto an oiled pan and then placed it into a hot oven.

Saute onions

The trick with these seem to be baking them long enough - in the past I would think they were overdone and take them out early, however they do need the full 45 minutes or more depending on how thick they are. Halfway through the cooking, I turn the pan and brush the bhajis lightly with olive oil again. 

Once out of the oven, salt with sea salt and serve! These went nicely with warm duck salad, pickles, goat's cheese and other finger foods in our meal. It was all delicious, eating this way after our long fast makes it all worthwhile.

Onion Bhajis out of the oven

Oh and the halva turned out great, everyone loves it even though it did not set hard the way shop bought tahini treats do. Perhaps next time it will be better - however the taste is outstanding.

Let's see what tomorrow brings! LOL

Have a lovely day,

April

Hazelnut honey halva treats