Pancakes were always a big deal in my family. Every weekend, my dad would cook up heaps of homemade pancakes from his own recipe stored deep in his brain. My dad is an early riser, whereas my mom has always worked the evening shift at the hospital, so on Saturday mornings she slept in while Daddy took care of breakfast. Some of my best memories are of sitting around the kitchen table with my siblings, fighting over who got the next pancake.
Pancake!
Eventually though, all good things must come to an end. My dad took a new job driving a truck cross-country and wasn’t home on the weekends anymore. One of the first Saturdays without him, my little brother, who must have been about eight at the time, decided that cold cereal wasn’t gonna cut it. So we pulled our mom’s Fanny Farmer Cookbook off the shelf and looked up a recipe for pancakes. He did most of the work, although I guess I supervised the use of the stove and stuff. My most important job though, was to eat the pancakes however they turned out. Flipping pancakes is not necessarily easy if you don’t know what you’re doing, and it’s even harder when you are a little kid who has trouble reaching the back of the stove. Some of them were bad. Really bad. Burnt and raw all at once, somehow both over-mixed and with baking powder lumps, but I ate them!
We worked on pancake making for months, trying different recipes, convincing our dad to write his down as best he could, and after much experimentation (and many awful pancakes for me to eat) my brother came up with his own perfect formula. I went off to college with his recipe in hand and made pancakes for my friends more times than I can remember. As the years have gone by, I’ve done my own experimentation, adding different ingredients, making them healthier, veganizing, improving, playing, and always eating the (occasionally awful) results.
Today’s experiment went well, so try these fluffy and flavorful, healthy and hearty pumpkin pancakes, perfect for fall. This recipe makes a ton of pancakes, by the way. If you are just one or two people and don’t want to eat leftovers all week, halve it. If you are feeding four growing children, get two pans going so that they cook faster and minimize arguing.
Pumpkin Oatmeal Pancakes
Ingredients:
1 cup quick oats
2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon*
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups milk of choice**
2 tsp vinegar or lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup pumpkin puree***
1. Stir vinegar and vanilla into the milk, either in a bowl or right in the measuring cup. Then add the oats and let them soak in the milk mixture for about ten minutes while you prepare the other ingredients. This is a great time to make coffee!
2. Sift together the remaining dry ingredients.
3. Add the oat-milk mixture and the pumpkin to the flour mixture and stir until just blended. Let it rest for a few minutes while your pan warms up. This is a good time to pour a cup of that coffee you made in step one.
4. Heat a skillet or griddle over medium-low heat for about five minutes. I like non-stick, but sometimes I use cast iron lightly sprayed with cooking oil. Ladle some batter into the pan, tilt it a little to spread the batter out, and cook until bubbles appear on the surface and the edges start to dry. The flip and cook a few more minutes until brown and puffy.
Bubbles! Almost ready to flip.
5. Eat drizzled with maple syrup or honey, maybe some toasted walnuts if you feel ambitious, and a nice hot cup of coffee.
*Feel free to add other spices like nutmeg, allspice, ginger, and clove. Today I happened to only have cinnamon
**I used almond, soy should work too.
***I used a can from Aldi – only 79 cents! Make sure it’s just pumpkin, not pie filling.
The Penny Parsnip 