Cecina - chickpea flour pancake.

There are lots of great food blogs out there, and last week I discovered a brilliant one - MadandDelicacy.com, a blog by two italian women sharing traditional and delicious looking italian recipes. If you like italian food, its definitely worth a look!

One particular recipe caught my eye - Cecina, a chickpea flour pancake, which looked so ridiculously easy, it had to be worth a try. It's apparently a tradional street food in Tuscany and Liguria.

Basically, you mix chickpea flour (or gram flour) with water and a pinch of salt to make a batter, and leave it to soak for a few hours. Then you pour it into a well -oiled roasting pan, add some rosemary and roast in a hot oven, a bit like a Yorkshire pudding.

I let my batter stand overnight, and cooked it the following morning.

The texture isnt like Yorkshire pudding, or like a pancake, more like polenta. we had some freshly cooked as part of a sunday morning fried breakfast, where it went very well with bacon, egg, sausage and tomatoes etc.

I diced some of the cold pancake the following day, and had it in a salad of tomatoes, onion, lettuce, and olives, where it also worked well, in the same way as cubed cheese pieces would.

It's definitely something I would cook again, and I might experiment with adding other flavourings and seasonings to the batter, like cracked black pepper, garlic, herbs, or maybe even some chopped sundried tomatoes or grated cheese. It's always good to try something new!