Breakfast Bargains: Pancakes

photo by wordridden

This is the first part in the series Breakfast Bargains — ideas on how to feed your family nutritious, frugal breakfasts. You can read the introduction to this series here.

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Pancakes are a great way to feed your family in the morning. They can include a variety of ingredients and can be dressed up in so many ways.

What I particularly love about pancakes is that they freeze well and are easy to reheat on a busy morning. Making them from scratch does take quite a bit of time, but I make a double or triple batch on a slow morning and “flash freeze” the leftovers. The time I put in making them always is made up in the time I save later in the week.

Since I’m not much of a cook, I don’t have a favorite recipe quite yet. I usually just do an ingredient search at Allrecipes with whatever I can find in my refrigerator: milk, buttermilk, eggs, plain yogurt, flavored yogurt, cottage cheese, oats, sour milk, etc. and try it out.

I always have good quality, Grade B organic maple syrup on hand. I’m not against serving sugar-filled junk to my kids, I just don’t want to top their healthy pancakes with refined sugar. Not in the morning, at least. The cheapest Grade B maple syrup is at Trader Joe’s. We just purchased a ton online and were able to beat TJ’s price by quite a bit.

I plan to post a few pancake recipes, each one covering a different set of ingredients to help you clean out your fridge. Today, I will highlight my friend Jodi’s Whole Wheat Pancakes. What I like about this one is that it uses whole wheat flour and includes a number of protein sources: egg, yogurt & milk. I doubled the recipe and was able to make over 16 pancakes.

Jodi’s Whole Wheat Pancakes

Ingredients

1 c. whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 egg
1 c. milk
1/2 c. plain yogurt
1 tsp. vanilla

Whisk dry and wet ingredients in separate bowls and then combine, adding the vanilla at the very end. Fry on a hot griddle until they turn a deep golden brown.

Honestly, I was skeptical because it didn’t include any sugar at all (I don’t like my kids to have sugar in the morning — I need it). But they were good. They were pretty moist and my kids liked them. And the pancakes were filling — I didn’t hear any “I’m hungry” until it was lunchtime.

I encourage you to try this recipe out. You really can’t mess it up. Let me know how it goes!

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