Pancakes pancakes pancakes pancakes and pancakes

The perfect time to post this is Shrove Tuesday I am sure everyone is going to be making pancakes!

I have been on a pancake kick lately, and trying different recipes, these are a few that I have been making, and honestly my sometimes picky kids have eaten them, and it makes a great school day lunch!

The beauty of most pancakes are that you can freeze them and then pop them in the toaster to defrost.  The quinoa ones excluded, since they are puffy and sort of like a chicken nugget.  The thing with pancakes are that they use white flour, so I have been trying to add more whole wheat to them, but then you compromise some texture.  That’s why the oat ones appeal to me.

Most times when I make pancakes I use my waffle maker to bake them, I know they are not waffles and it sort of changes how they turn out, but it makes it soooo easy.  The waffle maker has a chime to alert you when the pancakes are cooked, and it has this shallow heart shaped plate, making them fun and I can split one heart into five smaller hearts that each kid and adult can have one to start with, and it does cook them pretty fast.  No need to mind a frying pan!

So the first pancake on this list are quinoa ones.  This is an interesting one, the batter is quite thick, so I use the standard frying pan method to cook these ones, and they sort of turn out like chicken nuggets if you make them small.  It’s  a great way to throw in an wholesome grain, and use up leftovers.

Quinoa Pancakes from Martha’s Everyday Food

The ricotta pancakes I made because apparently Ricotta is a power food.  I haven’t made this one since, because I don’t usually have ricotta sitting in the fridge, but it was good.  The raspberry dressing was good, my daughter liked it, but my sons wouldn’t touch it!

Ricotta oat bran pancakes from Chatelaine’s January issues

and finally my go to pancake recipe that has some hidden goodness is the oatmeal.  I really like this one, the cinnamon is great too.  The way I make it is that I run the oatmeal in the food processor till it has the consistency of flour.  That way the kids don’t see the flakes and find something to object too.  I do think the recipe as written is great for most people, having some texture would be nice, it’s just seems to be an issue at my house.

Cinnamon Oat pancakes again from Martha’s EDF

and my new personal favorite cottage cheese pancakes from Martha.  What I liked about this recipe was that it used up some leftover cottage cheese that I had in the fridge, and when they were fresh off the grill, the cheese was sort of melty and it stretched while you ate it, but it really didn’t taste cheesy at all.  The kids really thought the cheese was fun and liked these ones.   I also noticed that in the original recipe the photo isn’t that good, and I thought why would Martha allow a bad picture to go up, but when I started griddling, I realized that these are hard to look prefect, the first batch, as is common with pancakes were ugly, but  even subsequent batches were not too pretty.  The second time that I made these they were much better looking though, you just have to make sure the pan is nice and medium hot, and has enough Pam sprayed on it.