Kitchen epiphany

It’s two in the afternoon, it’s wet and miserable outside and I’ve hardly ventured out of the house all day. You’d have thought that living in the UK would have made me used to this sort of November day by now. The sort of day when dusk is the perfect description for all of the daylight hours.

All is not lost though. I’ve put the morning to good use and just maybe had a bit of a kitchen epiphany. I set myself two tasks, one was to tidy up the fridge and pantry, the other to do some baking. The tidy up came first and pretty quickly it made me realise just how many half used bags of ingredients there were in the pantry. The list covered virtually every component that can go into a bake and in some cases I was finding items with more than one bag on the go. Onto the fridge and that wasn’t much better, shelves full of half used jars, many of which hadn’t seen the light of day for a long time. Thankfully nothing had gone passed it’s used by date but there were many that will need using up sooner rather than later.

What the tidy up has shown me is the potential flaw in how I plan a lot of what I cook or bake. I spend an inordinate amount of time reading cookbooks or food magazines and am often jotting down or tearing out recipes that I want to try. This means that the recipe is always coming first in the process. I then check what ingredients I have to hand before making a list of what will need buying before I cook. What I think I need to do more often is spin that process around. Check the full range of ingredients that I have in the house and then do the recipe search to fit them. This will not only make better use of the fairly limited storage space that we have but should also cut down on the risk of things getting wasted as they sit at the back of a shelf.

There’s no time like the present to put a plan into place so I’ve made bacon, cheese & red onion scones for this weeks #twitterbakealong challenge, based solely on ingredients I had to hand. The recipe below makes six scones.

Ingredients

1 red onion

25g butter

Salt & pepper

100g cheese

225g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

50g cold butter cut into cubes.

250g yoghurt

100g bacon – approximately 4 rashers

1 beaten egg

Method

• Thinly slice the red onion and sauté it in 25g of butter for 15 minutes. Add salt and pepper during this process. Remove onion from the pan and leave to cool
• Chop the bacon and fry in the pan that you’ve used for the bacon.
• In a bowl mix the flour, cheese and baking powder together. Add the cubed butter and work with your fingers until the mixture is crumbly.
• Add the yogurt, bacon and onions. Use your hands to bring the mixture together as a dough.
• Pat the dough into a rectangle and cut out whatever shape you want your scones to be. I find triangles works best.
• Put the scones on a lined baking tray and then put the tray in the fridge for an hour to chill the scones. About 10 minutes before you take the scones out of the fridge heat the oven to gas mark 4.
• When you take the scones out of the fridge brush them with beaten egg and bake for 30 minutes. The scones should be a golden brown when taken out of the oven.

The beauty of this sort of recipe is that you can use any cheese that you have to hand and the onion and bacon can easily be switched for whatever you have in your fridge on the day.