Holiday Food

Perhaps my most favorite Sunday morning and holiday breakfast is pancakes / hotcakes / piklets (closely followed by french toast; or baked beans and hashbrowns). All other days I have the same thing for breakfast - porridge with organic honey, sicilian red orange juice and black organic english breakfast tea. But I like to splurge!

Today I made a new recipe - Banana Hotcakes with Maple Syrup and Raspberries. It came from the December issue of 'Delicious' magazine and was seriously yum!

I am lying on the sofa writing this, drinking tea and trying to recover - that's the test of a really good holiday breakfast - amount of recovery time required!

My other favorite pancake recipes are:

• Bill Granger's Buttermilk Pancakes from 'Bills Food' ;
• Lemon Pancakes from Julee Rosso's 'Great Good Food'; and
• the one I grew up with - from one of my mother's cookbooks - the piklet recipe from the 'Australian Women's Weekly Cookbook' - a great standard. And like everything from the Australian Women's Weekly Test Kitchen - almost fool proof!

The other food I am doing at the moment is "Left Over Cuisine"!

Yesterday I made two things:

Roast Vegetable Tart with the left overs from the Christmas Day roast. Along with the roast veges I also included some cherry roma tomatoes, fresh basil, goats cheese and parmesan. The pastry is just bought frozen prerolled puff. I know that is cheating - but I am on holidays!

White Bean, Tomato and Ham Soup - I used up half the left over ham from Christmas day! And also flavoured it with heaps of herbs and a little bit of chilli. Another scrumy dish, that I ate last night for dinner with fresh crusty bread.

Today - if I can manage it I plan to use up the final bits of roast meat by making a quiche lorraine with the remaining ham; and by adapting the chicken and almond pie recipe from Claudia Roden's 'Picnic' cookbook I will use the remaining turkey! I have every intention of making real pastry for both these things but time will tell whether my resolve holds on this point.