Tag Archives: breakfast

Jae's apple spice pancakes

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I think that everyone has fond pancake memories. When I was a kid I went through a phase when I made pancakes from my family – from a mix – every week. I couldn’t tell you what day it was, as Saturday morning children’s programs on TV (Smurfs! Kids Incorporated! Flintstones! Muppet Babies!) and pancakes meld into each other but might have been separate days.

In my third year of university (I graduated 10 years ago) I had a roommate who liked to make pancakes at 1 or 2am. It became a tradition, a better tradition than him coming home drunk and trying to cook. -Twice he set off the smoke alarm (one time he put on a pot of mushroom soup and decided to take a drunken bath), and still teased me about not being able to “boil water” because I once turned on a stove element with a kettle on it not noticing the flammable trivet beneath.

I recall huge breakfast platters in university, occasionally a method to soak up alcohol from the night before and help cure the hangover. Things like Grand Slams from Denny’s, “Big Breakfasts” from a place called Bigg’s. Restaurants where the pancakes are as big as your head.

Then last weekend I had a pancake craving, a craving that I rarely get. I put out a call for brunch but no one who was interested was also free. Instead I decided to make my own.

Rather making than pancakes from a box or using a standard recipe calling for white flour I consulted Jae Steele’s cookbooks to see if she had any pancake recipes using what I already had. In her most recent cookbook, Ripe from Around Here (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010), I found Apple Spice Pancakes.

In both of her cookbooks non-gluten free recipes that call for flour call for spelt flour. As she writes in her first book Get It Ripe (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008),

Not all flours are created equal.
Wheat flour, while it is commonly used in conventional baking, is not used in these baking recipes. Instead, most call for spelt flour.
Spelt has as much protein as high-protein wheat flour and tends to be less of an allergen than wheat flour.

According to the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs:

People with ‘allergies’ to wheat starch commonly report that spelt is easier to digest. Spelt does however contain gluten, and people with gluten allergies (celiac disease) are likely to be allergic to spelt, similar to wheat and other gluten grains.

Using Jae’s recipes for Apple Spice Pancakes also gave me a chance to use up the last of my “awesomesauce” (working name of the applesauce that I made last month). I find that using vegan recipes is convenient if I’m out of eggs – though I had one left when I made these.

Here, at the request of Paula, aka @DragonsKitchen (blog), is the recipe.

Apple Spice Pancakes

(Page 101, Ripe from Around Here)

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups spelt flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp sea salt

1 medium apple, grated (about 1 cup), + 1 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice.

1 cup non-dairy milk [I used So Delicious Coconut Milk]

1/2 cup applesauce (p. 98 or unsweetened store-bought)

1/4 cup liquid sweetener, 1 tbsp sunflower, coconut or olive oil, plus more for frying

Directions

1. Whisk together the flour, baking powder and soda, nutmeg, and salt in a large bowl. Whisk in the grated apple, coating well with the flour mixture (this helps to keep the grated apple from clumping). Add the milk, applesauce [or awesomesauce], sweetener and oil, and mix with a silicone spatula just until all the flour has been absorbed.

2. Portion the batter out into a hot and lightly oiled skillet and cook on medium to medium-high heat until golden on both sides, about 4 minutes on the first side and 2 minutes on the second. [I find that cooking times vary by stove and pancake thickness so my advice is to ignore the timing instruction and cook until they look done. You'll know.]

3. Serve with your favorite pancake toppings – maple syrup, chopped nuts or seeds, nut butter or non-dairy/non-GM/non-hydrogenated margarine, cinnamon …
[I recommend a light smear of coconut oil, a sprinkle of cinnamon and Forbes Wild Foods' #3 dark maple syrup. They're a local company and the sales guys who work at Toronto farmer's markets are so darn cute.]

Makes about 4 servings or 10-12 pancakes.

Sugar free, nut free.

Eat well, be well.

In brief: Smoothie part 2

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Meyer Lemons Closeup #3
Image by CaDeltaFoto via Flickr

Today’s was the same as yesterday’s but I forgot the EFA Oil, and added another half apple, a second tablespoon of Greens, the last of a Meyer lemon and some fresh mint leaves.

It filled me up more.

When I do a cleanse this should be the basis of it with some other fruit occasionally thrown in. I bet peaches would be good.

I’m thinking of visiting Lettuce Eatery for lunch, although the fact that they rebranded as Freshii leaves a bad taste in my mouth – no pun intended. Well, a little intended.

Breakfast that goes down smooth(ie)

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As mentioned previously, I’ve been reading The Raw Food Detox Diet by Natalia Rose after buying it second hand at ABC Books. I’m at the beginning of part 3 of 5 in the book. I won’t go into details about the book right now (I’d like to do a more dedicated post in the future), but I intend to put it into practice short term as a cleanse and then decide how much of the principles I want to adopt longer term. The book reminded me about starting the day with fruit and the quick digestion time of fruit. Usually my breakfast routine consists of bringing oatmeal ingredients (oats and additives such as nuts, seeds and dried fruit) to work in a container, nuking it around 9:30am and eating it throughout the morning. Today I decided to forgo my usual oatmeal breakfast and begin my day out with fruit.

Problem is, I don’t have much fruit at home right now. It’s on my shopping list. What I do have, are apples that I bought in the fall and stored in Debbie Meyer Green Bags that I bought at Canadian Tire (most of the apples were still good months later), and frozen bananas.

This morning before work I made a fruit smoothie and drank a glass. It gave me lots of energy until hunger set in and I drank the second cup, brought to work in a Magic Bullet cup with lid. Smoothies are great. They’re easy and super-nutritious. Meghan had her Green Smoothie Cleanse last week, and my buddy SDM of In the Weeds has been blogging about his daily concoctions at work. I’m envious of his access to fruit, and the varieties of it.

Here is what I made this morning:

In my Magic Bullet (using the blender) I combined

  • 1 apple, cored and chopped but mostly unpeeled.
  • 1 frozen banana thawed a little bit because frozen bananas are solid (I know, one once attacked my foot and won).
  • Half a lemon peeled but not juiced, as much pith removed as I could.
  • Approx 1 tablespoon of ground flax seeds.
  • Coconut water (bought in a tetra pack).
  • Regular water.

The nuttiness of the agave provided great flavour. It was an awesome smoothie, one I’ll repeat until I buy more fruit. I correctly guessed that the coconut would taste good with apple and banana but I didn’t realize how much flavour the hazelnut would impart or how good it would be. I could use less next time.

I’m a fan of Vega products.  The Barleens Greens are new, bought  on Saturday after scrutinizing product labels. I tried drinking it in water on Monday and didn’t like it, so I’ll keep using it in smoothies. When I run out I might try the Berry version. I had a bottle of Barleens cinnamon-flavoured flax oil last year. While I found the taste too strong on its own, it was good on oatmeal with honey.

I did bring oatmeal to work today but didn’t eat it. I drank the first smoothie around 8:15am, the second in mid-morning (10? 10:30?) by 11:30 I got hungry. I don’t get hungry at noon like other people because I graze on my oatmeal all morning and the slow release carbs get me going. However, it’s almost 12:30 and I’m ready for a salad.

Smoothies are definitely a way to help stay hydrated and keep things easy on the digestive system, which I taxed on Tuesday evening with breaded tofu fingers (like chicken wings) and a grain-based veggie burger that was more dense than expected. By making little changes to what we eat and drink, even if they don’t become habitual, we can change our health. Going back to the Raw Food Diet, and I’ll get more into this another time, I’d like to try eating all raw until dinner time or mostly raw, with salads topped with sprouted grains or eggs and/or cheese (but not grains and one of the others because they’re poor combinations for digestion, while vegetables can combine with anything). I think I could do quinoa on my salads even though it’s technically cooked.

Lunch today is what remained in a box of salad (a box of Earthbound Farms salad appears to yield 4 meals worth of salad), the last of my cucumbes and baby carrots from the fridge at work and the last of the can of sliced beets that I opened yesterday. I figured that if I was using up the salad I may as well use up everything that goes on it and on Fridays I like to eat out so I’ll stock the fridge again on Monday. As per my usual this week, the dressing is a squeeze of lemon (used that up too and there wasn’t much left) and a drizzle of walnut oil.