Thursday, July 25, 2013

My Favorite Breakfast Food

When I was growing up, my mom would make a special breakfast on weekends.  Instead of cold cereal, she'd fry up some eggs and bacon, have a pan full of home fries, and there would always, always be pancakes.  She'd make big stacks of them, and we'd pile them high with butter and syrup.

That was a tradition I continued having when I moved away and married Chad.  Not every weekend, but many weekends, we'd fry up the eggs, cook the vegetarian sausage, and make stacks of pancakes covered in butter and syrup.  Well, until we went low carb, anyway.  Then pancakes were strictly off limits.

I tried a few different substitute recipes.  Nothing really pleased me, though.  They were usually really grainy, bland, and fell apart easily.  When I did make some half decent pancakes, Chad didn't enjoy eating them because they didn't have syrup on them.

So you can imagine my trepidation when I saw a recipe for coconut pancakes in Dr. Fife's Cooking with Coconut Flour book.  I wanted to try it, but I knew they probably wouldn't turn out very well.  And even if they were good, Chad wouldn't like them because there was no syrup. 

Enter low sugar jam.


As soon as I made my first batch of low sugar jam (it has only 1/2 cup sugar in a batch of 6 jars), I knew this would be the perfect topping for pancakes.  That's when I decided to try the coconut flour pancakes.

Yes, hamburger and pancakes. 

And OMG, they're so good!  They taste almost exactly like real pancakes.  The only difference that I can tell that they actually fill us up instead of leaving us hungry in an hour or two the way traditional pancakes do.

They're easy to make, too, and use ingredients I always have on hand.  The cool thing about coconut flour is that, even though it's kind of pricy, you only use a little bit of it in recipes.  That's why I like using coconut flour instead of almond flour, which is not only more expensive, but you use the same quantities as you would regular flour and you can go through a $10 bag after two recipes.

Pancakes make an easy bread substitute, too.  You don't have to make a whole loaf of bread if all you want is two sandwiches.  Just make a batch of pancakes and there you go.


Chad had to show off his manly appetite by slathering butter on top of his sandwich.



And this weekend, we decided to try blueberry coconut pancakes since we still have 5 pounds of blueberries sitting in the freezer.


These were so heavenly.  No need for syrup or jam if you're using good sweet berries.  Just a little butter and they're soooo awesome.  Next time, we plan on trying raspberry pancakes since I have lots of raspberries too!

I really highly recommend the book Cooking with Coconut Flour.  I plan on writing a nice review of the book in a couple of days, but go ahead and check it out on Amazon if you can't wait.

I did contact Dr. Fife and asked if I could reproduce a couple of the recipes form his book.  He very graciously gave me permission!  I hope you'll try this pancake recipe out, and go check out Dr. Fife's Cooking with Coconut Flour.

Coconut Flour Pancakes

2 eggs
2 tbsp coconut oil or butter, melted
2 tbsp coconut milk or whole milk
1 tsp sugar*
1/8 tsp salt
2 tbsp sifted coconut flour
1/8 tsp baking powder

Blend together eggs, oil, coconut milk, sugar, and salt.  Combine coconut flour and baking powder and thoroughly mix into batter.  Heat 1 tbsp of coconut oil in a skillet.  Spoon batter onto hot skillet making pancakes about 2-1/2 to 3 inches in diameter.  Batter will be thick but will flatten out when cooking.  Makes about 8 pancakes.

*I have successfully made these pancakes by substituting stevia, substituting xylitol, and leaving out the sweetener all together.

Recipe reprinted from the book "Cooking with Coconut Flour" used with permission from the author. Published by Piccadilly Books, Ltd. www.piccadillybooks.com. All rights reserved.

6 comments:

  1. Oh thanks for that - I will give these a try!! I'm the same though, I like them better with syrup so will have to think on what to make instead. I think perhaps some berries cooked up with some sweetener might be nice :)

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  2. @Lynda: I think a berry syrup would be a wonderful topping!

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  3. This is one of my favorite cookbooks! The chapter on muffins has lots of yummy variations and has me loving my breakfast again. As to the syrup problem, I use Vermont brand sugar free syrup and it's pretty good.

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  4. Love this recipe- halved it and had for lunch, half with blueberries and half plain, yum! Last time I tried to make coconut flour pancakes they were dry and crumbly but these were great, thanks, Sue

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    1. I'm so glad you liked them! They're definitely the best I've ever tried :)

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  5. Thank you for posting this recipe and book!

    I had a coconut bread recipe, and while it was ok, it wasn't great.

    This recipe is MUCH better. I now have made bread for tomato sandwiches and even dipped the bread/pancakes in egg and fried it to french toast. I plan to make toasted cheese sandwiches using this as a base recipe as well. I added the book to my Amazon wish list...

    Thanks again!

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