Tag Archives: Breakfast

Pancake Breakfast

I love Saturday breakfasts, and I guard this morning jealously. Little Man is getting of an age when dance or sport classes might make an inroad to our Saturday breakfasts, but not quite yet. It’s the one morning of the week when we don’t have to rush to be anywhere else. No one has changed out of their sleep clothes before breakfast. We haven’t washed our faces or brushed our hair, we just relax and enjoy being with each other.

Two of Little Man’s most requested breakfast foods are pancakes and waffles, which I don’t mind since I can still try to chock them full of as much nutrients as I can, then sit back and enjoy my own buttery, mapley goodness. I love pancakes too.

My favorite pancake recipe is adapted from one that we learned in upstate New York, from a family cookbook of dear friends that’s kept up at their camp. When made with all purpose flour, these are the fluffiest pancakes I’ve ever had. The only problem with them was that I always ate too much, and that left me feeling all sorts of blah. So sometime after we moved away from New York I started experimenting with shifting the recipe around and incorporating whole wheat flour. They were still fluffy and awesome, but I could feel good about incorporating some whole grains into them and they didn’t leave me collapsed on the couch. I tweaked the recipe a bit more, thinning it out a bit when I wanted to make fun pancakes for little man, like his initials or a reindeer face, but for the most part I was very pleased with my Perfect Whole Wheat Pancakes.

Then came the shift in our diets and wheat was no longer welcome in our household. It has been a tough break up. Though I find that some of the gluten free flour blends are fine in some baked goods, I wasn’t happy with them in pancakes. Then I tried replacing the whole wheat flour with spelt flour, and the results were fantastic.
The spelt flour pancakes are not quite as fluffy as the whole wheat version, but they are incredibly tender and have great flavor. They aren’t just vehicles for butter and syrup, but have a great nutty taste of their own. I do still need to thin the batter a bit to make the decorative pancakes, but a little loss of fluff is worth the gain in Little Man smiles when I made planet pancakes for his birthday.

For this post I’ve included recipe links for both my Perfect Whole Wheat Pancakes and my Perfect Spelt Pancakes. The only difference between the two is in the flour used, but for the ease of people searching for recipes I’ve included them both. The pictures here are from making a batch of the spelt flour pancakes. If you are gluten intolerant, this recipe does work well with gluten free flour blends. I’ve also dosed both versions of the pancakes with a good amount of chia seed meal with the goal of sneaking in whatever extra nutrients I can to Little Man’s diet. You can, of course, purchase chia seed meal in the store, but it’s just as easy to buy a bag of chia seed and pulverize a bit every now and then in a coffee grinder. That way you have the whole seeds around if you want them, and you can grind up the meal whenever you want. I tend to make about 1/2 cup of chia seed meal at a time, and keep the rest in a baggy in the freezer.

Another plus is that if you have extra pancakes (or want to make an extra batch) these store really well in the freezer. Little Man often eats pancakes or waffles for breakfast during the week when there is no way that we have time to make them from scratch. So I tend to make larger batches on the weekend and freeze the leftovers. A couple of seconds in the microwave or in a warm skillet and they are ready to go.

Oh, and one last thing before we get down to the recipe. As one batch of pancakes are done, I put them in the warm oven on a baking tray and then start another batch. The main joy of Saturday breakfast is that we all get to sit down together to eat, not to have one family member constantly cooking pancakes to only see them devoured before the short order cook ever gets a chance to sit down. So use your warm oven well. Get the food cooked that can hang out for a bit, like the pancakes and bacon, make the coffee or tea, doing the eggs last. Then make sure that you get to sit down with your family and loved ones for a well deserved meal. You want memories with your family, not ones where they only remember you standing by the stove.

Little Man and I adding frozen blackberries to a batch of pancakes in our “Saturday best.”

Perfect Spelt Pancakes
Ingredients:
2 cups spelt flour
2 tbsp. chia meal (aka ground chia seeds)
1 ½ tbsp. baking powder
¾ tsp. salt
2 cups almond milk (or any kind)
2 eggs
3 tbsp. oil
1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen (optional)

Directions:

Heat a cast iron griddle or other large, flat skillet over medium heat. If necessary, brush your griddle with a little canola oil. Turn your oven on to low (200°) and place a baking sheet inside.
You don’t have to use a griddle to make pancakes, but the nice large flat surface makes it easier to form and flip the pancakes. A pan with higher edges can make things a bit… awkward.
In a large bowl whisk the dry ingredients together. Make a well in the center and set the bowl aside.
The chia meal looks like a nice heap of black pepper right now, but it will completely disappear into the batter soon.

The mixed dry ingredients with the chia incognito.
In a large measuring cup or medium bowl, measure out the almond (or cow or coconut or soy, etc.) milk then break in the eggs and add the oil. Stir with a fork until the yolks are broken and the ingredients are more or less combined. This doesn’t need to be perfect.
I like to in my milk into a large measuring cup, then add the eggs and oil. They all get mixed together in this cup without dirtying another bowl in the process.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir to blend well.
The batter is ready to go. If I am making fancy or decorative pancakes, then I like to remove a bit to a small bowl and thin it out with some extra milk. Then I put it into the pancake pen, or just free hand initials or planets or bunny bums, etc.
Make sure your griddle (or pan) is heated and oiled. Pour the batter onto the griddle in the amounts you desire. I use about ½ cup for a really big pancake with a tablespoon or slightly more for silver dollar sized ones.
When I called these “perfect” pancakes, I was talking about taste not presentation. I’m not interested in making Yoda faces or artistic pieces too pretty to eat. These are pancakes. They should be fun. Don’t sweat it if your child’s initial is barely legible. As long as they know what you’re trying to do, you’ve succeeded.
Wait until the edges of the pancakes start to look a bit dry and the bubbles stop forming. This is a relative waiting game, and will differ based on the heat of your griddle/pan, etc. Flip your pancakes and adjust the heat. If they are too brown turn down your heat and wait a moment to let the griddle/pan cool. If they are too pale, raise the heat slightly.
Look for the edges of the pancakes to start to be a bit dry and for the bubbles to slow in forming on the tops. This means that the pancake is set enough to flip without splattering all over the pan.

The first batch of pancakes is always the sketchiest. The griddle may be too hot or too cold. Just adjust your settings or batter and keep on going. You can always serve the “special” pancakes last.
Once cooked, remove the pancakes from the griddle and put on the warmed baking tray in the oven. Repeat with all of the remaining batter until all the pancakes are cooked. Prep/cook any sides you want, and warm the maple syrup (the real stuff, please). Enjoy an awesome breakfast!
Pancakes staying nice and warm in the oven until the rest of breakfast is ready to be served.

Any leftover pancakes can be frozen and then reheated during the week for a fast and awesome breakfast. I often make extra just so Little Man has some good pancakes to eat on a rushed week day morning.

Click here for a printable version of the Perfect Spelt Pancakes recipe.

Click here for a printable version of the Perfect Whole Wheat Pancakes recipe.

Making Breakfast with No Electricity

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There are many pluses for living outside the city. We don’t suffer through the water bans since we are on well-water, not city. We don’t get (as much) of the odoriferous down draft from the water treatment plant. We get to be surrounded by forest, and wake up to the sounds of chicken and sheep, with a view of the horses in the pasture through our kitchen window. We can tromp through our neighbors Enchanted Forest whenever we want, and rarely need to worry about Little Man walking/playing in the road since there are nearly no cars that come our way. Plus, plus, plus…

However, every now and then, particularly in the winter, we can lose power for a couple of hours at a time. When that happens it’s means more than simply the inconvenience of blinking clocks and a lack of television. For us it means no running water since the pump that brings our water from the well is electric. No showers, no washing, no water for tea or coffee unless we’ve been wise (and sometimes we are) and kept our emergency supplies of water filled along with the large jugs in the refrigerator… which shouldn’t be opened much during these times so it doesn’t “lose its cool.”

Then one morning right at the beginning of winter we woke up to the sound of disconcerting silence (no hum of the old refrigerator) punctuated by the panic inducing beeps of Little Man’s bedroom monitor losing power. Dave and I stumbled around for a bit, trying to wrap our sleep addled brains around the fact that we had no electricity and what that actually meant for our morning. I tried to turn on a sink tap to brush my teeth… and nothing happened. I stood there, staring at the tap, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Apparently Dave was dong something similar in the kitchen since I heard him utter a low moan as realization settled in as to the extent of our dilemma. No showers… argh! How to brush our teeth? My water bottle was still mostly full from yoga the night before. What about cooking breakfast with our electric stove (or microwave) without electricity? Doh!

At that point Little Man woke up and I went downstairs to light the wood burning stove (aka our house heater) while Dave went into our son’s room with a flashlight. I tried to get my brain to function and to think about the breakfast predicament as I knelt by the stove balancing my flashlight beam on the things I needed, but I couldn’t quite get out of autopilot mode. I arranged the wood, kindling and wadded up burnables in the stove and then lit the whole thing. Closing the stove door, I waited to make sure that the fire had caught and listened to the comforting clicking of the warming stove. Then it finally hit me. I didn’t need electricity to cook our breakfast, I had a wood burning stove right in front of me. My city-girl mind had only thought of the stove as a heat source for our home. A smile stretched across my cheeks as I quickly planned our breakfast adventure.

Upstairs Dave was hurriedly getting ready since he had to teach, while also explaining to an unimpressed Little Man why there was no TV for morning cartoons. For sanity’s sake I whipped out the ipad hoping that it had a charge, and turned on a quick Little Einsteins episode, buying Dave and I a little respite while he got out of the house and I collected my breakfast supplies.

On a large tray I piled a shallow cast iron skillet, a full tea kettle, a hot pad, plates, cutlery, a bowl with two eggs, a couple slices of bread, a mug and tea bag, a filled sippy cup, honey, jam and a few other tools. I waved Dave out the door, put slippers on Little Man’s feet and was just leading him downstairs while balancing my tray of awesomeness… when with a pop the electricity came back on. The TV was blaring in the front room since apparently Little Man had pushed in the power button during his desperation to show Dave that the TV worked without electricity.

With the jubilant sounds of a little boy who has found treasure, Little Man dashed back into the living room with Pooh Bear flapping behind him for his morning cartoons. I looked at my tray, placed it down on the dining room table, snapped a picture for future sleep addled reference, and went back to our now working electric stove to make breakfast. Next time I’ll be ready when the power is out and we get to have a picnic breakfast downstairs with our wood burning stove. And I’ll make sure the TV stays off and doesn’t wreck our adventure.

I like the “rustic” look of the black and white photo here. I felt all “pioneery” as I balanced by tray of modernity to cook on a hot stove.

Ladies and Gentle-Chickens!

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OK, I’ll admit it… I’m totally turning into a farm-geek. Harvesting and gathering your own food is just plain fun (particularly since we were not involved in the hard work of prepping the garden or planting anything… just reaping the benefits). It’s like Easter egg hunting. Digging through the potato hill, not sure if there is anything left until your hands start raking in the ruby red tubers. Little Man loves pulling up root vegetables, especially beets. He grabs the leafy greens and then leans back with all of his might until either the root gives way or the greens do. I have had to start restraining myself at the farm garden, always reason to come back tomorrow. We have free reign in the garden, but it is not our’s and I don’t want to abuse our privileges there. Even so I often find myself making excuses to go back to the garden or asking Little Man if he wants to go say “hi” to the chickens just so that I can say “hi” too.

After “shopping” in the garden

My favorite thing to do is gather eggs. There is something about walking into the chicken coup, the scent of sweet hay and a little bit of chicken funk, but it just makes me smile. Novella Carpenter in her hilarious discussion of urban farming in an Oakland ghetto (Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer) describes chickens as the gateway animal to urban farming. After a couple of weeks living on the farm I can totally see her point. We plan on staying here for quite some time, but when we do eventually leave… don’t tell Dave, but I would really like to be somewhere that we could have chickens.

Speaking of Dave, a couple of days ago he came home from working at the university to be greeted by a happy toddler who invited him to go say “hi” to the chickens. We went to take the short cut to the chicken coup through the back yard, which Little Man calls the “hair cut.” He heard us call the short path to the garden behind our house as the “short cut,” but didn’t know the word so now it is “hair cut.” Usually when Little Man greets the chickens he says “Helloooo Laadiessss.” Today was different. He walked up to the coup, threw his arms wide and yelled “hello ladies and gentle-gnomes!” Dave and I smiled at each other and in unison said “good evening ladies and gentle-chickens!”

We went into the coup and were greeted by Little Man’s “ladies.” Our plan for the eggs was built on yesterday’s botched brunch. Little Man, while trying to hold it together in a marathon grocery shopping expedition said that he would like pancakes for brunch. I made a rookie mistake and promised my beautiful, curly-haired boy that he would have pancakes… and then we got to the restaurant 30 minutes after they stopped doing breakfast. Oh bother! So to atone for my error, dinner that night was a pancake breakfast. Specifically we had pancakes made from a Bauder Camp recipe (I miss those cocktail cruises!), homemade turkey sausage patties and oven-roasted home potatoes. I’ll share those recipes at another time. For our purposes in this post I am going to share the recipe that came the day after our pancake breakfast for dinner. We ended up having a good amount of sausage and potatoes left over, and in our house that can only mean one thing… frittata.

A frittata is like a large omelet, but it’s even better since you don’t have to flip or fold it. That means it can be easily turned into a fast, delicious dinner. I have included a link to the frittata recipe below, and it is based off of the left overs that we had in our house that evening. You don’t have to make a pancake breakfast for dinner in order to prep for this meal the next night… but it’s a great excuse to do so.

One “trick” I use for frittatas is something that I learned from the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites: Flavorful Recipes for Healthful Meals cookbook. To make a frittata that provides four servings (the leftovers are great the next day!), I start with eight eggs. If the eggs are small I might add another to round it out. The trick is to only use four whole eggs and four egg whites, ditching four of the yolks. My brother is moaning right now, but by getting rid of those yolks I can decrease the amount of fat and bad cholesterol in the dish. Dave and I are both a bit rounder than we would like, and lowering overall bad cholesterol in our diets is another goal. So there you go. You can keep or ditch those four yolks as you see fit. I haven’t found any loss of flavor, richness or overall awesomeness in my frittatas since I started doing this.

One last frittata trick… Many of the recipes that I’ve read and seen demonstrated on TV require that you get out an extra plate, flip the darn thing when it’s mostly cooked onto the plate, and then invert it again into the skillet to finish cooking. It looks simple on TV. I’m sure my issues with this have been a result of a lack of patience or my overall clumsiness, but I have burned my hands and splattered my stove (and countertops… and cupboards…) enough that I gave that technique up. Instead, I cover the frittata pan with a lid immediately after I add the eggs. This lets the top set up through the steam released from its cooking. Once the eggs are set up nicely I remove the lid, sprinkle on a bit of grated cheese and pop the thing under the broiler for a minute or too to brown it up. That way you get the crispy browning of the top that you would otherwise miss from not flipping it. No more burned fingers (or at least less), no more messy stove and surrounding area (or at least less), and the resulting frittata is stunning in its caramelized cheesy glory.

Sausage and Potato Frittata

Left over roasted potatoes and sausage patties for the frittata

The frittata flavor base of onions, roasted potatoes and sausage

The flavor base after adding the smoked paprika, my favorite spice

After adding the egg mixture put a lid on the pan to help cook the top

Once the top is almost set, you can add the cheese

The top is almost set and I had run out of cheese to grate. Luckily I did have slices of Colby.

The finished product. Be careful with broiling your frittata. I have been known to walk away from the oven and “caramelize” my frittatas more than intended.

Best kitchen helper ever!

Two Independence Days

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Did I mention that we made the move to Vancouver Island the day after Canada Day and two days before American Independence Day? So even though I had warned our American bank that we’d be moving to Canada, an automated system caught our Canadian purchases and “temporarily” froze our account… the day before the Fourth of July… so no live person would be in the office to fix this problem until July 5. Argh! Our dilemma was discovered when we tried to buy sushi from a take-out joint for dinner. Thank goodness we had not decided to go to a sit down restaurant, had eaten our food and then found out we had no funds at all. I don’t know what we would have done. Would they accept our toddler helping us wash dishes as payment?

So we went home, frustrated and concerned about what we were going to eat that evening and the next day until the American bank opened again and freed our cash supply. Luckily the day that we unloaded our moving van I had visited the grocery store for a few staples. We had oatmeal, bananas and milk for toddler cereal in the morning, and I had also bought a bag of potatoes on the off chance that we just needed something comfort foodish… I don’t know about you, but basically any type of comfort food for me includes potato in some form. It would be another day or so before I realized our farmer friends were growing potatoes in the garden, and oh what a splendid discovery that was.

On the drive back to our sushi-less home, we remembered that we were living on a farm (yes, we were slow on the uptake that day…). Most importantly in this case, we were living on a farm that had chickens, glorious chickens. So we all put on grubby shoes and I grabbed a basket that usually held students’ papers and dropped in an unused (and unwanted) curtain as padding. As our landlords were on vacation, their friends were stopping by to take care of the animals. We had been told that we could collect eggs and eat from the garden while they were away. As we trudged up to the chicken coup, we were praying that the farm help had not completely collected all the eggs. They had not, but we will later find out that they had planned to do just that, which is a different story for a different day.

In the meantime, we needed to collect dinner. The three of us walked into the coup; or at least two of us did. The previous day our son had decided that the sheep were “too loud,” but the chickens won his heart instantly. While his love was unwavering, he was not sure about walking amongst them and instead felt safer in Dave’s arms. I can’t blame him, I’ve often felt the same way. We collected nearly 3 ½ dozen eggs that day (remember the part about other people’s plans to collect eggs? Oops!).

The ladies who saved the day

Collecting eggs for dinner

The best eggs you will ever taste

Later Dave and his mom would comment on how confident I looked in the hen house gathering eggs, and they asked about where I had learned to do that. My first thought was that it was egg collecting, not rocket science… or even archaeological science. Then I remembered that this actually was not my first time collecting eggs. Visiting my Grammie’s small farm as a child I had also collected eggs. I don’t think I did it often, and my main memory of this is being pecked by the chickens (not fondly). Flash forward to the in-between time of Canadian and American independence holidays and I suddenly found myself living on a farm, with a hungry husband and child waiting for my efforts. I think my long-missed grandmother was proud at that moment.

With our egg bounty we headed down to the garden for some herbs and lettuce. I found a little curly parsley, some fresh oregano and an abundance of chives. Basket overflowing and toddler in arms, we headed back to the house.

The potatoes were shredded, drained, seasoned and pan-fried into latkas like my Mom’s college roommate had taught her (this recipe will be shared in a later post). Another 8 of our eggs were transformed into what I on the spur of the moment named Chinese Eggs. I had never cooked with eggs that I had literally just collected minutes before. Just like restaurants use descriptive names to entice our appetites, I use the same tactic with our son whose favorite food in the world is Chicken Fried Rice. The only way I got him to try (and love) an amazing roasted sweet potato risotto was to call it Italian Fried Rice. I have no shame when it comes to food shenanigans that get him to eat. So our Independence Day meal (for both countries) was made up of my Mom’s Latkas, Chinese Eggs, a salad of freshly harvested lettuces and fresh herbs, tossed simply with a little olive oil, salt and white pepper.

As we ate and laughed about our farm fresh feast, washed down with a lovely, cheap Californian wine I brought in my luggage, we sent all grateful thoughts to those chickens and their absent caretakers. When Dave and I married in upstate New York, promising for better or for worse, much of what I was thinking about was the difficulties of life as an academic, especially for two academics in the same field. I certainly did not imagine (in dream or nightmare) living on a farm, feeding my amazing family with the bounty that we had literally just collected from the ground 30 minutes prior. All in all, this was a pretty good way to celebrate independence.

On my way to the chives

Chinese Eggs

I named these “Chinese” Eggs in honor of my profuse amount of chives, which reminded me of an amazing sautéed flowering chive dish I’d had at a much missed restaurant in upstate New York. Using the catch word “Chinese” was also a ploy to entice my son to try them. He usually does not like scrambled eggs, but he LOVES Chinese food. In this case the ruse worked and he gobbled them up! If you are curious as to why I only used half of the yolks in this recipe, I did that in an effort to lower our overall cholesterol intake for this meal. Between the Chinese Eggs and the Latkas I used an entire dozen! We didn’t finish it all, but that was still quite a few eggs on our table at once. I also used white pepper as opposed to black because I had not yet found where I had packed the black pepper. It was a fortuitous difficulty since the flavor of the white pepper was perfect for this dish.

8 eggs divided (4 whole and 4 whites)

1 cup finely chopped fresh herbs (such as parsley, chives and tarragon)

½ teaspoon white pepper

Salt to taste

Olive oil for the pan

In a medium bowl whisk the four whole eggs and four egg whites together. Mix in the chopped herbs, pepper and salt.

Heat a non-stick pan over medium heat and add a splash of olive oil. Pour in the egg mixture and stir, stir, stir. Cook the eggs until the whites are set and then remove them from the pan to a serving bowl.

*If cooking for children, pregnant women or anyone who is immune compromised be sure to cook the eggs thoroughly.

Click the following link for a pdf version of the recipe that can be printed.

Chinese Eggs Recipe

The Sheep Are Out…

I'm a mom, an anthropologist, and a food lover finding her way on a small farm on Vancouver Island

Tag Archives: Breakfast

Pancake Breakfast

Making Breakfast with No Electricity

Ladies and Gentle-Chickens!

Two Independence Days

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