Crêpes!
The first Friday of the month is reserved for recipes. You can see additional First Friday Food posts here.
The Reason:
I’m still trying to burn through some of my stored-up food posts, and that means pancakes! So you’re getting another First Friday Food that is not on a First Friday.
As far as the reason to make crepes, one day it just occurred to me that I could make crepes. With whole wheat flour no less! We’re always looking for good pancake recipes, and crepes are a significantly different form of pancake.
The Journey:
First off, I’d like to specify that I originally learned how to make crepes from an actual frenchman. I don’t have his fancy pan or fancy crepe-scraping tool, but make no mistake, I know how to get the job done.
All that being said, flipping crepes is no joke, even if you don’t flip them in the air. There is certainly a skill to it. Be prepared to have ripped up and shredded crepes, even after making hundreds and hundreds of the things. Making crepes is somewhat stressful, and requires your full attention. But afterwards, you get to eat crepes, and the ripped up ones taste the same as the nice ones!
The recipe calls for the ingredients to be mixed in a blender. Do it! I tried everything I could to avoid it, including mixing with a mixer. It doesn’t work. If you get chunks in your batter, they will stick to the pan, and then you’re not going to get nice looking ones.
Also, use a LOT of butter on the pan, in between each and every crepe. You really can’t over-butter it. Just remind yourself you’re cooking like a French person, and throw an extra pat on there. You’ll thank yourself when you try to flip one.
The Verdict:
Making crepes is not that difficult, but it is a LOT of work. You have to make LOTS of them, because people will eat them way faster than you can make them. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
But, might I add, they make you look very fancy pants impressive.
Crepes are so versatile. You can basically put anything on a crepe. Even setting aside savory crepes, you have jellies, jams, curds, marmalades, peanut butter, nutella, and just plain sugar. You could have these every day of the week and not get tired of them.
Well, not get tired of *eating* them. But you will definitely get tired of making them.
The Recipe:
Recipe from 100 Days of Real Food.
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup whole-wheat flour
- 1 cup milk
- ¾ cup water
- 1 tablespoon honey
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon butter, melted + extra for cooking
- Put all ingredients in blender and mix well. Let stand about 15 minutes.
- Melt and swirl around a small pat of butter in an 8 or 10-inch frying pan over medium heat.
- Angle pan and pour enough batter on one side to thinly and evenly cover the pan. Very quickly swirl the batter around to cover the pan in one thin layer.
- Immediately use your cooking spatula to push down the thin edges of the crepe around the perimeter.
- After about 1 minute (and once it is golden brown on the bottom) carefully flip it over without tearing the crepe.
- Fry for 1 more minute on the other side (until it is golden brown as well) and then roll up each crepe.
Russian Yogurt Pancakes
The first Friday of the month is reserved for recipes. You can see additional First Friday Food posts here.
The Reason:
“Wait a minute,” you’re saying. “This is not the first Friday of the month. Is there something wrong with my calendar?” No, you’re right. But I have so many food posts queuing up that I need to clear out a little inventory.
And it’s been far, FAR too long since we’ve had a pancake recipe on here!
The Journey:
These are yogurt pancakes, and as such, they take a lot of yogurt. I highly recommend making your own, which is cheap and simple. In fact, you can even use old yogurt that is starting to go bad!
These are some of the most amazing, moist pancakes that I’ve ever had. The texture is absolutely perfect. Usually my pancakes are a little on the tough side since I use only whole wheat flour, which tends to be a little denser. The downside is that these are a little hard to work with in the pan; they are very tricky to flip. It’s well worth the effort though, and who cares what they look like anyway!
My advice to offset this is to make very small pancakes. They’re easier to flip, and you can pretend like you’re a giant who needs to eat 80 pancakes for breakfast every morning.
The Verdict:
These are so amazing. They’re moist and the yogurt gives them a buttery flavor, so you don’t need to put extra butter on top. The original recipe says you can top them with something savory instead of sweet, which I could totally see. And you can even use up yogurt that’s going bad! No downsides on this one. This is in our regular pancake rotation.
The Recipe:
Recipe from A Girl’s Guide to Butter.
- 4 cups plain yogurt (going bad OK)
- 3 eggs
- 4 tablespoons sugar
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- Enough (whole-wheat) flour to make a medium-thick batter (one that holds its shape but is still a liquid rather than a paste). I use a little less than 2 cups.
- oil, for frying (we use coconut oil)
- Mix all the ingredients together except for oil, and beat until smooth.
- Heat the oil in a cast iron skillet over medium-high heat until almost smoking.
- Using a large tablespoon, spoon the batter into the pan in the form of small oval pancakes.
- Fry on one side until golden-brown, then flip, reducing the heat to medium, and cook until the other side is golden-brown as well. Be sure to add more oil if your skillet becomes dry.
- Remove to a platter and top with any of the desired toppings.
Lonely Eats the Pancake Maker
We take our pancakes seriously in this house. For the past several years, we have made pancakes every Sunday morning, like clockwork. Of course, this tradition goes over *very* well with the kids, which means we need to make at least a double batch, and a triple batch if we want to have leftovers for weekday breakfasts. Picky Evie generally tries to eat her entire week’s allotment of food in that one meal. Last week, she ate 13 pancakes (granted, smallish, but still).
Even with two griddles going, demand far outstrips supply, and the kids are clamoring for more as fast as I can make them. Right about when I’m finishing up cooking the last of the batter, everybody else finally gets their fill, which means by the time I sit down, I eat solo.
Like all of the best traditions, it evolved organically, but is now firmly entrenched in the fiber of our family. I’m not joking when I say that I think all four of us look forward to Pancake Day. As traditions go, it’s not the worst thing in the world.
My favorite part about Pancake Day, is trying different recipes. There’s our famous pumpkin pioneer pancakes, slow rise pancakes, and coconut pancakes with pineapple sauce (wow, been too long since I’ve posted a pancake recipe on here!). We’ve done crepes, Dutch babies, and sour yogurt pancakes. Pancakes with jam, pancakes with marmalade, and pancakes with lots and lots of maple syrup. Blueberry pancakes, walnut pancakes, and peanut butter pancakes. And then there’s French toast. Don’t even get me started on French toast!
I hope that we have Pancake Day for the next 20 years. I hope that when my kids are teenagers, they make sure they’re home (and awake) on Sunday morning (don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath). I hope that when my kids have kids of their own, they make pancakes on Sunday.
Long live Pancake Day!
Coconut Pancakes with Pineapple Sauce
The Reason:
I swear I didn’t intend to do another pancake post. I’m going to have to rename the feature to First Friday Pancakes! I planned to do an item from baconfest, but, sadly, none of the recipes were really phenomenal enough to blog about (plus the pictures didn’t turn out that well).
So here we find ourself with yet another pancake recipe, but I promise you, this is one you don’t want to miss!
The Journey:
Some people are turned off by the fact there is coconut in this recipe.Do not come in expecting super coconut flavor! This isn’t an Almond Joy. The coconut flavor is very mild, although some people don’t like the texture of coconut, so in that case I guess this might not be for you. However, I’ve served these to many self-proclaimed coconut-haters, who ultimately love these pancakes.
The other interesting part is the pineapple sauce, which you use instead of syrup. To me this is the best part. You could really put the sauce on any pancakes, but it does seem to go especially well with the coconut. The whole thing is sort of a tropical, island-y theme.
As to the pancakes themselves, they are very thick, so you have to cook them for a long time. Because of the coconut, they don’t bubble up like regular pancakes. I find it’s best to cook it for a while on one side, flip it and pat it down, cook it on the other side, and then flip it back to the first side again. Otherwise it can be difficult to make sure everything cooks through.
The Verdict:
These are HEAVENLY! I might go so far as to say these are the best pancakes I have ever had. They are also a very nice change of pace, since they are different than any of the other pancake recipes in our stable. They’re also pretty dense, and vegan to boot! What’s not to love?
The Recipe:
The recipe is originally from the “Vegan with a Vengeance” cookbook.
Coconut Pancakes:
1 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 t nutmeg
1/3 cup water
1 1/4 cup soy milk
2 T maple syrup
1 t vanilla extract
2 T canola oil
1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl, followed by the wet ingredients, followed by the coconut.
If you don’t know how to cook pancakes by now, you’re coming to the wrong blog.
Pineapple Sauce:
20-oz can of crushed pineapple
2 T arrowroot powder (we substituted 2 T corn starch)
3 T sugar
1 t vanilla extract
Cook the sauce for ~7 minutes, until it thickens. Make sure you stir this a lot, or it will burn to the bottom of the pan.
Slow-Rise Pancakes
The Reason:
As has been established previously, pancakes are very serious business in our house. Though we have a couple of good solid base recipes, we are always on the lookout to try something different. As always with new recipes, you win some and you lose some.
This one was a winner!
The Journey:
The interesting thing about these pancakes is that you use yeast. I’ve seen a lot of pancake recipes, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen that requires yeast. It doesn’t really rise, per say, but you do end up making something that is more of a dough, not a batter. It’s more like frying bread dough.
You can try to thin the dough with a little bit of milk, but it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, so I don’t know if it is even worth it. Basically, the whole thing is just very different than making regular pancakes, so you can’t really expect the batter to be the same consistency.
The other very appealing thing about these pancakes is apple slices! Sure, you could put apple slices on any pancake, or you could put something besides apples on these pancakes, but they looked so good in the recipe, that I just went with it and it worked.
The yeast makes this like a chemical reaction, changing the consistency of things. I think it actually makes the dough sweeter, but it also makes very thick pancakes. You have to make sure you flatten them a lot when you flip them over. Also, because they’re so thick and chewy, they are hard to cook through, especially where the apples are. So you want to be careful to make sure they aren’t too doughy in the middle.
The Verdict:
These things are rib-stickers! Very filling, in addition to being delicious. The apples are a really good idea, though as I said, you could really do that on any set of pancakes. These won’t replace our baseline pancakes, but they are definitely now a part of our normal pancake rotation. You do have to start them the night before, so they take some pre-planning.
The Recipe:
The original recipie can be found at Vegan Yum Yum (which is pretty awesome by the way).
2 cups white whole wheat flour
1 1/2 T vital wheat gluten
1 1/4 t yeast
1/2 t salt
2 t sugar
1 1/2 cups milk
1 T oil
1 egg
Mix the dry ingredients first, and then mix in the milk, oil and egg. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave it in the fridge overnight.
If you’re going to be doing the apples, try to cut them thin so the pancake underneath will still get some heat.
The rest is just like making regular pancakes.
Repost: Pumpkin Pioneer Pancakes
Note that this post originally appeared on Cheap, Healthy, Good, but I reposting it here for posterity’s sake.
My daughter Evie likes pancakes. A lot. It’s not really Sunday at our house if you’re not in your PJs at noon eating pancakes while batter slowly drips off your daughter (and the stove, and the walls…). I can’t say I blame her, they’re fun to make, they’re delicious, and they’re really not that bad for you.
(This is assuming you don’t put chocolate chips inside and then slather them with whipped cream and who knows what else – I mean, you can do that, I’m not judging. I won’t even call the health police on you. However, if she was going to be eating pancakes that often, I figured we should at least try.)
So why are they “pioneer” pancakes? Well, anyone who has kids knows that the first component to a successful meal, especially one they don’t want to eat, is marketing. (Yes, we had to sell our daughter on the idea of pancakes. Kids are funny that way. I’m sure she wouldn’t believe it now either.) One of the main components of the recipe is substituting molasses for sugar, since molasses is a mineral-dense sweetener, particularly for calcium and iron. My daughter and I were reading the Little House on the Prairie books, and they mentioned eating molasses as a topping for pancakes. Voilà, marketing slogan established!
Evie, helping me make pancakes: “Are we going to put that in now? The other thing?”
Me: “What thing?”
Evie: “The icky sticky goo?”
Well, apparently I can’t add molasses to anything without singing, “Molasses, molasses, icky sticky goo! Molasses, molasses, it’ll always stick to you!” A song that fun was not going to go unnoticed.
As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t a lot of things that can’t be improved with the addition of pumpkin (and there’s not a lot of other ways to sneak vegetables unnoticed into breakfast). And I throw some walnuts in there too for good measure (“Brain Food”…it looks like your brain and it’s good for it too! There should be a requirement that all ad execs have to have prior experience as a parent.) Use whole wheat flour and you’re in business!
We usually make a triple batch and freeze them on cookie sheets, before putting them in big freezer bags. Then we can reheat one or two at a time for a quick breakfast during the week. Because, hey, if you could get away with eating pumpkin pioneer pancakes for breakfast every morning, you would too!
Pioneer Pumpkin Pancakes
Feeds 3 hungry people (12 – 14 medium-sized pancakes)
1 egg
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp black strap molasses
1 tbsp canola oil
1/2 cup pumpkin
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1 1/4 cups white whole wheat flour
1/4 cup walnuts
1) Beat egg in a large mixing bowl.
2) Beat in buttermilk, baking soda, baking powder, molasses, canola oil, pumpkin and pumpkin pie spice.
3) Beat in whole wheat flour. I just hand mix it (but then again Evie doesn’t mind if it is a little lumpy). You might notice that the batter is pretty dark thanks to the whole wheat flour and the molasses.
4) Add water to thin batter if necessary.
5) Heat skillet. You could hypothetically do this at the same time as mixing the batter, unless you also have to manage a 3 year old.
6) Oil the skillet. I usually do this about every other batch of pancakes or so.
7) Use a large spoon to make whatever size pancakes you want.
8 ) Sprinkle a handful of walnuts on each pancake. You could mix it into the batter, but I like to put it into the pancakes manually so the walnuts are evenly spread. I find that if you mix them into the batter, you end up with the last few pancakes being walnut city.
9) Flip the pancakes when bubbles rise to the top and the edges look a little crispy.
NOTE: All of the following calculations come from Kris (the proprietor of CHG), instead of Shane (author of the guest post). Please e-mail her/me if there are any issues. Thanks!
Approximate Calories, Fat, Fiber, Protein, and Price Per Serving
382 calories, 15.4 g fat, 8.1 g fiber, 14.6 g protein, $0.99
Calculations
1 egg: 54 calories, 3.7 g fat, 0 g fiber, 4.7 g protein, $0.33
1 1/4 cups buttermilk: 172 calories, 6.1 g fat, 0 g fiber, 12.6 g protein, $0.62
1/2 tsp baking soda: negligible calories, fat, fiber, and protein, $0.01
1 tsp baking powder: 2 calories, 0 g fat, 0 g fiber, 0 g protein, $0.01
1 tbsp black strap molasses: 47 calories, 0 g fat, 0 g fiber, 0 g protein, $0.13
1 tbsp canola oil: 124 calories, 14 g fat, 0 g fiber, 0 g protein, $0.08
1/2 cup pumpkin: 42 calories, 0.4 g fat, 3.6 g fiber, 1.3 g protein, $0.33
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice: 6 calories, 0.2 g fat, 0.3 g fiber, 0.1 g protein, $0.70
1 1/4 cups white whole wheat flour: 509 calories, 2.8 g fat, 18.3 g fiber, 20.5 g protein, $0.27
1/4 cup walnuts: 191 calories, 19.1 g fat, 2 g fiber, 4.5 g protein, $0.50
TOTAL: 1147 calories, 46.3 g fat, 24.2 g fiber, 43.7 g protein, $2.98
PER SERVING (TOTAL/3): 382 calories, 15.4 g fat, 8.1 g fiber, 14.6 g protein, $0.99
Cheap, Healthy and Oh-So-Good
Today I have a guest post over on Cheap, Healthy, Good about the “Pioneer Pumpkin Pancakes” that Evie and I usually make on Sundays. Well, I should say WE have a guest post, since the post is really made by Sara’s photography.
Welcome anybody who clicked over from Cheap, Healthy, Good! Take a look around, see if you like the place. Try not to rough it up too badly, you hooligans!
For my regular readers, go check out the post, and the blog. Enjoy our pancake recipe and any others you find. Chances are they are cheap, healthy and good!
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