I'm Eating Pancakes

Lunch is the difficult meal for us in this house. We always seem to have enough food for yummy dinners and decent breakfasts. Most mornings we eat farina or oatmeal because it's more substantial than most cold cereals and because it's pretty quick to make (I struggle to get up when David's alarm wants me to after being up at least once, usually twice, in the night with miss LeiLei). Dinners are usually something with tofu or meat replacements and lots of veggies and flavor.  But lunch, well if we don't have any leftovers (we only ever have any when I make soups), lunch is real chore. Half of the time I can't remember what I finagled for us to eat at lunch time. I've started trying to keep track by taking iPhone pictures. Yesterday we had a delicious concoction of pasta, homemade tomato sriracha sauce (way more delicious than it sounds even if you are a rooster sauce junky like me) and spinach.

Today I wasn't sure how I was going to manage. We don't buy bread, I make all of it from scratch which takes planning (and let's face it, I am way to scatterbrained, not to mention tired, at 9:30 in the morning to remember to make some dough) so sandwiches are usually out of the question. Also we generally only have things for PB&J on the sandwich frontier. Anyways, today I made pancakes. 

I've been experimenting with homestyle vegan pancake recipes and struggling to find one that I'm truly happy with. I just wanted some tasty, traditional pancakes without eggs and butter. After trying enough to know what things I did and didn't like about the recipes, and about how much of a flour to moisture ratio I needed I came up with my own today. It rocked our socks! Perfect, for us, pancakes (pancake preferences are a sensitive matter, David didn't even like pancakes before I made them for him). Not too fluffy or too dense, and very moist. If you've never made pancakes without a mix, you should try some ASAP, whether you use this recipe or not.

Ingredients:

1 cup + 2 tablespoons unbleached all purpose flour

1/2 cup whole wheat bread flour (regular would be okay, just a little more dense and dry)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 tablespoons vegan sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon egg replacement powder* =ERP, plus 3 tablespoons warm water

2 tablespoons vegan shortening (ie: Earth Balance), melted

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/4 cup soymilk

1. Mix the dry ingredients (minus the egg replacement powder) together until well combined. 

2. In a small bowl whisk ERP with water until dissolved.

3. Mix the shortening, vanilla, ERP mixture, and soymilk into the dry ingredients until fairly smooth. Some lumps are okay.

4. Pour desired pancake sizes into a skillet with vegan shortening and cook on low-med heat. Flip the pancake when bubbles uniformly cover the batter-up side.

Serve with any toppings you like. We used organic agave nectar this time around. Blueberries and powdered sugar would be amazing with these!