Oat Cake Crackers served with Dunbarton Blue.

Grant and I both love whole grain, very slightly sweet crackers that are really somewhere in between a cracker and a cookie. When we lived in the Pacific Northwest, we could find these up in Canada or in specialty food stores around Seattle. Often they are labeled “Digestive Aids” and are popular in British food sections. In Scotland, they call them Oat Cakes. They are a perfect companion to really good cheese, especially blue cheese. I’ve been hanging out lots at The Bloomy Rind and she has an excellent selection of U.S. artisan blue cheeses. So many! I’ve been slowly working my way through all of them which made me start to crave the little oat crackers I can’t seem to find anywhere around these parts. So, I came up with my own recipe! It’s really hard to know what to call them since the idea seems to stem from the Scottish Oat Cakes yet, they are more like cookies but since they aren’t very sweet, they are also kind of a cracker. I decided to call them Oatmeal Cake Crackers.

Oatmeal Cake Crackers
1 ½ cups Rolled Oats, coarsely ground in a food processor
1 cup Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
¼ cup Demerara Sugar (or Cane Sugar or Brown Sugar)
¾ tsp Sea Salt
½ tsp Baking Soda
½ cup Unsalted Butter
¼ cup Buttermilk (I used Hatcher whole buttermilk.)

Preheat oven to 350. Mix all ingredients together with your hands or a food processor. Roll out on a floured surface to ¼” thickness. Using a small biscuit cutter, cut into rounds and place on a cookie sheet. Brush the tops with egg white. Bake for 15-16 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool on a wire rack. These are delicious with cheese, especially the blue or cheddar varieties.

Last weekend was a big bluegrass weekend for us as Grant’s bluegrass band, Off The Wagon, had three shows. Saturday they played The Station Inn and our friend Bradford Lee Folk joined them for a few songs. It reminded me of how much I love his voice and that I forgot to mention his new album, Somewhere Far Away, which came out a couple months back.

We first became familiar with Brad, or at least his voice, back when we lived in Seattle and we saw his old band Open Road play one of our favorite venues, the Tractor Tavern. So, when we first met him in Nashville a few years back, we were thrilled he had moved to town and excited to hear his new music. What a voice!

You can find his new cd plus lots of other good merch and his touring dates all on his website here. His songs are so beautiful and his voice is really unique. Definitely check his music out!