Stick it in a bun... why the hot dog is perfectly acceptable at breakfast time
This month we introduce the brekkie dog, whip up flourless pancakes, meet some clever beekeepers, and say no to wasted bacon grease...
Our breakfast sausages are specially crafted for maximum morning enjoyment. The compact size and the casing is designed to offer up the perfect ‘snap’ with each bite you take. This makes them excellent hot dog sausies! If you’re worried they might be a little mini for the job, make a note of this important life hack… two can become one! Our breakfast sausages are links, sausages joined with a twist of their casing. You can join two breakfast sausages together to make one longer sausie by untwisting the casing in between and then gently massaging/rolling the filling to fill the gap! Heat a pan with a little olive oil and fry breakfast sausages for just 5 minutes or so, turning, till golden all over and cooked through.
Hot ideas for brekkie dogs
Duvet dogs! Cook a thin blanket of omelette, roll up cooked breakfast sausages inside, and pop your pigs-in-duvets in a bun with chosen condiments. Cute or what?!
Sprinkle grated Swiss cheese over the split-open bun before popping your cooked sausage in, and let the residual heat of the sausie gently melt the cheese. Top with chutney or relish.
Accompany brekkie sausage with Japanese-style omelette, sliced into thin strips, pickled daikon, thinly sliced nori, and a good squeeze of Kewpie mayo (or Kewpie wasabi mayo if you’re wanting a wee kick).
Breakfast sausages alongside eggs scrambled with chipotle, topped with pickled jalapeños and a dollop of sour cream.
A Full English dog: breakfast sausages joined by grilled streaky bacon rashers, silky folded eggs, cubed fried potatoes. You could try to fit grilled tomato in there... but you’d be pushing it!
Top your sausage-in-bun with a sunny side-up crisp fried egg, a dollop of Thai chilli jam or other chilli sauce of your liking, and a scattering of coriander leaves.
Flourless banana pancakes
For this simple breakfast treat, you won’t even need a measuring cup. So long as you have eggs in the fridge and a couple of bananas in the fruit bowl (the closer to over-ripe, the better) you’re good to go – the small amount of baking powder does make for a fluffier texture, but it’s not strictly necessary. Mashing and mixing the batter using a fork is the best method.
In a bowl, mash 2 ripe bananas using a fork. Crack in 3 Freedom Farms Free Range size L eggs and whisk into the mashed bananas using the fork. Add ¼ tsp baking powder and a pinch of fine salt and combine well. Heat your favourite frying pan and add a generous wodge of either butter or virgin coconut oil depending on your preference. Cook spoonfuls of batter, spreading out gently with the back of a spoon or a crepe spreader. You want these small, about 8cm across, or they’ll be too tricky to flip. Let cook on low heat until sealed and golden brown on the first side, and almost cooked through, before attempting to turn them over – if you try to turn them too early they will fall apart! To turn them, gently ease a metal turner under and flip carefully. Cook on the other side for another half a minute or so until sealed and golden. Keep the pan well greased, and keep your stack of cooked pancakes warm as you go. Once all the batter is cooked, serve up – these banana pancakes are flavoursome all on their own, but additions that marry well include a drizzle of maple syrup, honey, or coconut nectar, a dollop of coconut yoghurt, fresh sliced fruit, and lightly crumbled Fresh-as freeze-dried fruit pieces.
Get with the Buzz
Beekeepers Jessie Baker and Luke Whitfield are staunch proponents of nurturing urban bee populations. Their business Bees Up Top walks the talk by rescuing and rehabilitating bees, and rehoming them in hives installed all over the place including on the rooftops of Auckland businesses and restaurants. They also educate on the importance of bees (put simply: no bees, no food for us humans!) and how we can all do our bit to help bees thrive.
We had a quick chat to Jessie to get the buzz on what her bees are up to...
Can you tell us a bit about your Buzz honey and how people can buy it or taste it?
“Uber Buzz honey can be purchased from the UberEats App. Each jar gets a free packet of bee friendly seeds so that people can help the bees by growing more food for them.”
Any top tips for people wanting to make their gardens and/or workplaces bee-friendly?
“Bees love blue flowers best! Plant things like rosemary, lavender, thyme and borage. Borage is exceptionally good because the flowers fill with nectar every two minutes, where other flowers can take up to 2 days. Sunflowers are also good because they provide lots of pollen that the bees feed to the baby bees.
“Create a water drinking station for the bees to drink from in the summer. Bees need a lot of water to make honey, and they take water back to their hive to spread on the eggs and cool the hive down. They fan their wings which acts like an air conditioner. A shallow dish full of rocks or marbles submerged in water gives the bees a safe place to drink because they have something to stand on and won't drown.”
Local Spread
Kaipara might be famous as kūmara country but there’s a new underground crop causing a stir in the region… peanuts. MPI teamed up with pioneering peanut butter maker Pic’s of Nelson to plant a trial crop near Dargaville. The growing conditions, including warm soil temperatures, have proven successful with the first harvest of hi-oleic peanuts being gently pulled from the ground earlier this month. It’s early days, indeed, but we are greatly excited by the idea that we could be spreading Aotearoa made and grown peanut butter on our morning toast one day.
Save your bacon….
Your bacon grease, that is! Don’t biff the leftover fat once you’ve plucked your crisp rashers from either the pan, if cooking stovetop, or baking tray, if cooking in the oven. Tilt the pan or tray and pour remaining fat into a glass jar, or alternatively let it cool somewhat till pliable and scoop it up into the jar with a spoon or spatula. Store in the fridge for up to a few weeks. As anyone raised in the southern states of America and they’ll tell you bacon grease is a precious ingredient, just as important as bacon itself.
In southern states cooking, bacon grease adds a smoky, sweet, umami dimension to dishes like cornbread and that Thanksgiving mainstay, succotash. There’s plenty of other ways we love to use it, too:
Toast croutons in it
Fry eggs in it
Roast root veggies in it
Stir it through cooked greens – beans, peas, Brussels sprouts, broccoli
Use in wok-fried noodle and rice dishes. Pork lard is traditionally used to cook pad Thai noodles, bacon grease works well too, just adjust the level of any salty seasonings down
Use bacon grease in place of some or all the butter in savoury baking such as cheese scones, pastry, muffins, and loaves
Cook potato rösti in it
If you’ve got quite a bit of it, make baconnaise
Thanks for diving into The Breakfast Club with us this week. We reckon that breakfast is arguably the best meal of the day… so it’s heaps of fun sharing our thoughts and ideas with you!
If you’re not familiar with Freedom Farms… we’re a 100% NZ-owned company that set out over a decade ago to bring you bacon farmed the Freedom way… from NZ farmers who care about the same things we do… farming that is kinder for farm animals and takes it easy on the environment. When you buy our bacon, eggs, pork, sausages and ham you are supporting a wonderful little group of NZ farmers… and we’re really really grateful!
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