Since moving back home I feel this blog has taken on a theme;
that of cooking meals my dad likes! I don’t have a problem with that; I’ve lost
weight since moving, so clearly the meals I was making for myself in York –or
should I say the endless stream of Pringles and blue cheese- weren’t doing me
any favours. Living in the middle of nowhere means that a 2 mile round-trip
walk, usually in the rain, separates me from indulging too much. Something anti-indulgence to me now is soup- it's the one thing in
our house that never goes amiss and I make a lot of it. I’ve mentioned in a previous post that
my Dad simply doesn’t eat lunch if there’s no soup. But I haven’t mentioned
that he goes crazy for oatcakes- must be a Scottish thing! When I moved
back, we had a hot July of oatcakes with goat’s cheese, made from a great
little Midlothian recipe in The Scottish Cookery Book by Elizabeth Craig. I used coarse oatmeal bought
randomly from the Baxter’s Soup Factory Shop somewhere on the Borders but when
it ran out, any subsequent oatcakes I made had the texture of dust. Glutafin,
who make the gluten-free flour we use, changed their white four mix recipe
around the same time and now I have problems with lots of my baking. As a
result, I’m turning to substitutions to help stabilise things and for this recipe, gram flour,
with its nutty flavour worked as well as I’d hoped. Obviously if you’re on the
oats-count-as-gluten side of the fence these aren’t for you, but non-allergy
sufferers are free to use plain flour instead.
