Made these at tea time. I’ve been working out the recipes for the new meal plan. I need to use up all the groceries on the shopping list, or the people following it wouldn’t have enough calories for the week. I found that I had some oats, oil, onions and carrots left and was wondering what on earth I could do with those.

Then I remembered that Jack had made Bannocks with oats, so swapped out the butter for oil, as there isn’t any butter on the meal plan and tried them. Very nice!

Bannocks with roasted veg hummus

For meal plan 8, use
950g onions, Asda 2kg/£1.08, 51p
900g carrots, Asda 2kg/£1.14,  51p
oil
Total cost £1.02

Peel the onion and chop. Peel the carrots if you like, you don’t need to, and chop into thumbnail sized pieces. Drizzle with a little oil, salt and pepper. Roast at 180C for about 40 minutes.

While that is happening, make the bannocks.

240g oats, value brand, 1kg/75p, 18p
60g oil, Asda 1 litre/£1.25, 7p
Total cost 25p

Put the oats into a blender and pulverise them for a while. It helps the bannocks to stick together.

In a bowl, thoroughly mix the oats, oil and enough water to form a dough. Tip out onto a lightly floured worktop and press and pat out flat to the thickness of a £1 coin.

Cut into whatever shapes you want, squares, fingers, rounds, whatever, and place on a lightly oiled baking sheet.

Bake in with the roasting vegetables for 20 minutes. They just want to be a gentle golden colour.

Leave on the tin until they have cooled, they will be quite fragile until then.

Vegetables made into hummus

Once the vegetables are soft, tip them into a food processor and whizz until they are as smooth as you can get them. You may need to scrape them down a couple of times, and you may need to add a little water. Season to taste.

This is a small test batch made with 200g each of carrots and onion. The full batch would give you lots to use through the week, and maybe on into the next week

Meal Plan 8

On meal plan 8, use the bannocks and hummus whenever you want them. As an extra with any of the meals, as a fill up at supper or tea, or any other way you want them.

The picture shows a small batch of bannocks made without blitzing the oats first and although delicious, they are pretty fragile. I shall be making another batch and blitzing the oats this time. I wanted to see what they would be like if you didn’t have access to any means to blitz them. Un-blitzed bannocks would need to be treated carefully, with hummus dolloped on rather than spread, and a mouthful at a time, as they don’t hold together when lifting when loaded.

If you have no processor, you could mash the hummus with a fork, chopping any tougher bits with a knife. Or try pushing it through a sieve. It will be a different texture, and just as delicious.

I tried it as it was, then added a bit of sweet chilli and peanut butter. Tasted it in between each addition and each one was lovely. You could add this to chickpea hummus, I have just tried a morsel on a bannock with value soft cheese swirled in, that was yum too. It would be delicious in a sandwich or pitta, with/out any salady bits you may have, or you could swirl it through pasta, with or without the soft cheese

Blitzed oats

Edit: I have now made a batch using blitzed oats. They do indeed hold together very well. Don’t add too much water, like I did with this batch, or they won’t crisp up properly.

Finally made bannocks how I wanted them

Edit 2: I have made these again, and these were exceptionally delicious. I used butter for these. I blitzed the oats in a food processor, then added the soft butter and blitzed that in, then added a splash of water and blitzed. After that I took them out of the processor and squashed everything together. I happened to have added enough water, otherwise I would have added more to make the mixture into a dough.
Then I rolled them out on a chopping board and used a cookie cutter to cut out the rounds. Squishing the remaining mixture together and re-rolling until all the mixture was used. I got about 20 bannocks from this amount. About, because I forgot to count them when they were freshly done, and by the time I remembered, we had both eaten some.

Do try them if you can.
I got about 20 of these from 250g oats and 60g butter, so about 40p. Asda’s own brand is 89p for 250g and Nairn’s are £1.35 for 200g. Both also about 20 oat cakes I think. So at 40p, these are a minimum of half the price. Plus of course you can flavour them with all kinds of things, and you know what’s in them. I was in Sainsbugs earlier and both their own brand and Nairn’s have the dreaded palm oil in them.

Flavour variations for home made bannocks

I didn’t go through the flavour variations on the original post, so I’ll do it here. You could add tomato purée, or crushed garlic and fine chopped rosemary, or crushed lemongrass and fine chopped chilli. Marmite if you like it. A little very finely chopped fresh ginger and garlic.

You could use any fat saved from meat, so beef dripping, the fat drained from a lamb breast, chicken fat from a roast chicken. They would all add lovely flavour. Or you could use coconut oil for a mild coconut flavour.

Oatcakes in the supermarket have a few standard variations, all of which could be reproduced. You could add a little grated cheese, or lots of black pepper, a handful of any seeds in any combination, so flax and linseed, or sunflower and sesame, or pumpkin.

You can sprinkle a little spice on the top of the bannocks before they are baked. So a pinch of paprika, sea salt, ground pepper, tandoori spice, curry powder, celery salt whatever you have in the cupboard. Maybe that five spice that never seems to get used for anything?

You can add a few chopped herbs, fresh or dried. So a few fine chopped sage leaves, or fine chopped rosemary, or a sprinkle of mixed dried herbs. Or how about thyme leaves, and thyme itself has many different flavoured leaves available.

Any combination of the above , so maybe fresh ginger and garlic with paprika on top. Or sunflower and sesame seeds with five spice on top.

Sweet flavour variations for home made bannocks

As far as sweet variations go, you could add a handful of the usual suspects, raisins, sultanas, chopped dates, chopped apricots, or value mixed fruit. Chopped nuts would be good too. So some fine chopped walnuts, with maybe some dates too for the classic combination in an unusual setting. Or any of the other nuts, chopped small.

Fruit and nuts would go together well in any combination you fancy, so maybe Brazil nut and sultana, hazelnut and dried cranberry, peanut and raisin. Some little pieces of preserved ginger, maybe with some ground ginger as well.

You could drizzle melted value chocolate, dark, milk or white over the top of any of the sweet versions, or of course, chip it up small and mix it into the dough.

Well I think that’s enough variations to keep you going for a good long while, and I’m sure you will come up with your own unique ones too. Let me know what you try 🙂