Thursday, August 19, 2010

Pimp my Pancakes

I hardly ever post about food on my blog. Its not because I don't cook, or don't like to cook, because I do, and do. Its mostly for the reason that when I prepare food, I'm usually in such a frenzied and distracted hurry, that grabbing my camera and documenting the process seems ludicrous, if the thought even happens to occur to me at all.

However, for some unkown reason, I was feeling remarkably mellow as I began breakfast preparations yesterday morning, so as a result you are treated to the first (and quite likely also the last) edition of "Pimp my Pancakes".

I have a basic pancake recipe, and it should be noted that it is a quite good, decent little pancake recipe in and of itself. But somewhere in the course of things, this recipe ceased to be viewed as a recipe, and came to be viewed as more of a framework for bigger and {arguably} better things.

The most recent flavor of the week is "Banana Peanut-Butter Pancakes". They came about one morning when I had a couple of mushy bananas on my counter which needed to be used poste haste. They were an immediate hit, and since over-ripe bananas are hardly a thing that is in short supply around here, they have been made several times since, with further variations.

My basic no-fail dry ingredients for pancakes are these:

2 cups all purpose flour (or whole grain, or what have you) 2 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp baking soda 1/2 tsp salt

On this occasion I added to the dry ingredients: 2 Tbs brown sugar, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and roughly 3Tbs flaxseed meal just to make us feel good about ourselves (if you do not require flaxseed meal to make you feel good about yourself, than by all means, skip it).

I then mashed up one banana (although I sometimes use two, only one was to be had on this particular morning) and mixed in 1 tsp vanilla and 2 generous spoonfulls of organic peanut butter.

The other staple wet ingredients are 2 cups milk (feel free to substitute almond milk, or whatever) and two lightly beaten eggs. My original recipe calls for 1/4 cup of oil, but I do not use this, since the banana and peanut butter lend plenty of moisture to this version.

Throw the wet ingredients in with the dry and mix them up, and cook them up. Then slather with more peanut butter and drizzle with syrup or honey.
Feed them to your children, and feel good about yourself (after all, there's flaxseed meal and 2 whole servings of fruit in this recipe!)
I don't mean to leave Ingrid out of this post, but she already had a generous amount of syrup in her hair by the time I took pictures of the pancakes being consumed, so she was conveniently skipped over.

What types of food do you find yourself constantly tweaking?

3 comments:

Bobbie - Clumsy Crafter said...

Hey fellow home birther! I hide flaxseed in a lot of our food too. My husband thinks I'm trying to get him. I'll have to try your recipe the next time my husband works late. We always have pancakes for dinner when he's not going to be there to eat with us.

Ginger said...

You are becoming more and more of a southern. Peanut butter on your pancakes next will be fried okra.

Amy said...

cant wait to try this recipe; my 3 year old loves pancakes (in fact, today he needed them SO badly that we had to hop in the car and drive to cracker barrel for lunch.)