Make Your Own: Butterscotch, With Real Scotch

Hey guys! We’ll be starting a new series called Make Your Own which will be posted alongside our usual food posts, as we want to share with you how easy it is to make some of the accompaniments to many dishes. We know that this will be great help for you guys for many of these recipes can be made in bulk to be stored for future use, great for time-strapped people like ourselves!

Butterscotch is great, and goes with so many different sweet treats. But why not take it further and add in some real Scotch for that boozy kick? After all, it is butter… Scotch, right?

Easy Buttermilk Hotcakes

Here in Melbourne, there is a strong brunch culture. With visually attractive and uniquely conceived dishes, it’s easy to guess why this is popular with so many people. Brunch encompasses both sweet and savoury foods, from thick slices of French toast to the classic Eggs Benedict. In particular, our friends have been raving on over the Ricotta Hotcakes from popular brunch café Top Paddock and the healthy, wholesome version crafted by Serotonin, with many going as far as to proclaim them as “the best hotcakes [they’ve] ever had]!

We love brunch too, so we  just had to challenge ourselves to replicate this dish. While not as pretty as the original, we can sure say that it tastes as good, whilst being much more economical!

These hotcakes could be either baked or fried. Baking this recipe gives a slightly more cake-like texture, while the fried version would more closely resemble the classic pancake, while retaining a clean balance of fluffiness and density. We just might make a ricotta version in the future, but this recipe is definitely good enough for now.

Foil-Baked Rainbow Trout

This is an easy one.

Time isn’t a luxury we can afford all the time while studying hard in medical school, so we often turn to dishes that require minimal preparation and time, but with maximum results. Fish baked in a foil envelope is an starling example of dish that is just that. Extremely versatile, you can do this recipe with practically any whole or filleted fish you have, though of course cooking times will vary.

Buying a whole fish is more economical than buying fillets, sometimes saving you up to $15 per kilo. For a long time we had the impression that buying a whole fish meant the burden of having to clean and fillet the fish ourselves, often much more trouble than it is worth, but we recently discovered good fishmongers would be glad to have these whole fish gutted, filleted and even pinboned! We had a whole rainbow trout that we got fresh from our fishmonger that he’d cleaned out for us, and as with all fresh fish its flavour really shines through without much done to it.

This baked fish recipe utilises items that are almost present in decent pantries, and carries through the sweetness of the rainbow trout very nicely. For a more complete meal, simply add vegetables of your choice (e.g. tomatoes, fennel, garlic) to the packet so that everything can bake together, while adding even more flavour to the fish.

Hearty Beef Stew

Life changing. That’s what we said when we had our first forkful of this one-pot wonder, for who knew that we could make a dish with such complex flavours in our little space of a kitchen?! Since then, we’ve made this dish again for potlucks and have had friends asking for the recipe. It is no wonder, for this hearty, robust stew is sure to win anyone over! The list of ingredients may be daunting to some but the execution is really quite simple and hassle-free, plus you only have to wash one pot! This dish is super versatile and can be served with essentially anything lying around the kitchen. Amaaaaaazingggggggg!!!

Paleo Banana Pancakes

Yay! We are finally getting round to posting about food! Today we had Ben and Xin Min over for brunch and we had to think up something quick when we were presented with the challenge of making something without refined sugar! After doing some Googling we came across the 2-ingredient banana pancakes and decided that we could make them with our own twist.

This recipe is quick to prepare and extremely healthy. While our tweaking to the original recipe added many ingredients to the list, the resulting pancakes were light, fluffy and tasted considerably better than the original! We felt that the original recipe had a very odd ratio of bananas to eggs and the batter was rather runny, thus we added almond flour for a denser mixture. We also found that the recipe works better if the batter was ladled into the pan for thicker pancakes rather than thin ones which we found flat (literally) and kinda flimsy.

Kitchen Essentials – Dorm Edition

G’day mate! Welcome and thank you for stopping by our blog! Before we get on to any legit food posts, we have created a list of what we think are essential ingredients in the kitchen for students living in dormitories like ourselves and hopefully it is useful 🙂