Why buy expensive crackers and cardboard tasting oat cakes when making them yourself is so unbelievably easy. Plus you can add in your own spin of flavour to suit your mood. Here I have used pumpkin seeds, which lends a nutty sweet hand to the erstwhile solitary oat.

-Rachel Findlay

Recipe

Ingredients

120g porridge oats

120g spelt flour, wholemeal or white

5ml bicarbonate of soda

2.5ml salt

10g thyme, leaves picked

50g pumpkin seeds or pine nuts

100ml boiling water

30ml rapeseed oil

Preheat oven to 170C and butter a baking tray

Toast the 50g of seeds in a dry pan, allow to cool and chop roughly.

Add the oats, spelt flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt, thyme and toasted seeds to a large bowl.

Add the boiling water and oil and mix to a pliable smooth dough. Add a little cold water if the dough feels too dry.

Roll out to about 5mm on a floured board and cut into 5cm rounds. Place on the buttered tray.

Bake in the middle of the oven for 10 - 15 minutes. They should be golden brown and cooked through.

Our historical inspiration finds a bit of humour:

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary defined oats as ‘A grain, which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland appears to support the people’. The Scotsman’s retort to this was ‘Thats why England has such good horses and Scotland has such fine men’