Pemmican (Part 1) and a tray of Boggy Brae Flapjack

Tuesday 28 October 2014

Apparently proper Native American style pemmican is a total food.

Toad is making pemmican. He may decide to try an experiment of eating nothing but pemmican for a month or some other period of time. Part of the idea, as I understand it, is that he can take some pemmican to work and eat it during the day instead of drinking coffee throughout the day to stave off hunger. This eating, or rather, non-eating plan tends to fall through when work colleagues bring in cake to share and leave it on a table near Toad's desk. He's looking for a way to eat something more nourishing than cake. He doesn't take a packed lunch. I like coffee and cake but I have them as well as breakfast, lunch and dinner because my coffee experiments have not yet discovered this hunger-staving property that caffeine is supposed to have. It is true that I don't drink my coffee or tea very strong.

When I say "nothing but pemmican" there are provisos. In the first place, according to Toad who has presumably gleaned this information from somewhere, the beef of grain-fed cattle is not as nutrient (vitamin) rich as that of pastured cattle, and as he thinks the beef he bought is probably from grain-fed cattle, he says he would need to take a vitamin supplement as well during the pemmican experiment. Proviso the second is that I presume he would still be drinking coffee and tea, not to mention his winter evening tots of rum or whisky. But that is a presumption at the moment. Observation will bear it out or otherwise.

So, to get onto the pemmican-making method. I am an observer of this process so just describing here what I see. A couple of days ago Toad bought a lump of beef. Last night he thinly sliced some of the raw meat and hung the pieces from cocktail sticks suspended from an oven grid overnight in the bottom oven of the Rayburn on a very low heat setting. This morning I needed to turn up the heat of the Rayburn to cook some flapjack and then a slow-cooking chicken casserole so I had to take the partly dried beef out.

<< Here it is on the baking tray that was underneath it to catch any drips. It occurred to me that, since we have a pan rack above the Rayburn, I could hang the meat there to carry on drying during the day using the rising heat from my cooking, so I did that. See below:

<<Boggy Brae Flapjack. My son-out-law says I should set up a production line, it's that good.







250g salted butter
175g sugar
a dollop (heaped dessertspoon) of honey
a larger dollop (as much as will stick to a tablespoon) of golden syrup

Melt all of the above in a large pan.

While it is melting chuck handfuls of almonds, hazelnuts, brazil nuts, walnuts (or pecans), sunflower kernels, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, poppy seeds (whatever! I usually use all of those) into a blender and grind them up.

Weigh out 350g rolled oats
Add to the oats 2 teaspoons ground ginger (more if you like)
a teaspoon of ground cinnamon
a shake of ground nutmeg or allspice
2 teaspoons of ground coriander seeds.

When the butter and sugars have melted, remove the pan from the heat and mix in the oats, spices, nuts and seeds. Tip into a large baking pan lined with baking parchment. Bake at 325ºC/160ºF for about 20 minutes. My Rayburn oven doesn't cook evenly so I turn the tray round after 12 minutes.

Cut the flapjack into rectangles or triangles while it is still hot and leave to cool in the tin.

Fab with coffee.

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Toadlet will not eat any of the above. She has eaten flapjack in the past. She favourite meat is Parma ham. Whether it is more favourite than Greggs' sausage rolls (which, according to her, are the best sausage rolls in the world) I have not yet established with any certainty.