Quote of the day:
“Apparently, gluten-free products are selling like hot cakes; well, hot cakes without wheat.”
-NY Daily News
A reader sent the following question:
“Thank you for the great blog! I’m curious. Do you make real pancakes, or raw pancakes, in the morning? I would love to learn more about how you eat together as a family.”
Since deciding to no longer be a label or a label family (strictly following a particular diet), I make traditional pancakes from scratch, with gluten-free flour, when I can.
I like to add nutritious gems, such as chia seed, flax seed and vanilla, and some not-so-nutritious but super-delicious and fun things such as chocolate chips, too.
I guess you’d call them gluten-free-vanilla-chia-flax-chocolate-chip pancakes. Now that’s a mouthful!
We’re not gluten free by any means, but I’m a big believer in mixing things up and everything in moderation. Knowing what I know about wheat and how it’s processed and how difficult it is to digest, I choose other grains when I can (and when it’s easy and fun and delicious).
Thanks to retailers like Vitacost, you can get a slew of gluten-free stuff these days. This wasn’t so a few years ago.
At first, we tried every gluten-free pancake mix and decided we liked the Namaste brand Waffle and Pancake Mix best. Ain’t that fitting? Then our daughter, Madison came home from a sleepover one Sunday morning and announced that she’d made pancakes from scratch.
“Scratch?!” I said. “Wow! I never thought of scratch!”
So I got a bunch of different gluten-free flours (pea flour, tapioca flour, brown rice flour, all-purpose flour, almond flour, etc.) from Vitacost, put “˜em in jars and labeled “˜em (a fun project for the kids!), and now we make pancakes from scratch.
We’re still experimenting, and it’s fun! Sometimes we use egg whites, and sometimes we use whole eggs. We vary the add-ins from chocolate chips to bananas to apples to dried cherries. Once I made brown rice pancakes with leftover brown rice. They were good! I’m also a big fan of the “use it up” theory.
Have the best day ever!
Namaste!
Taylor plus 5
Taylor Wells, M.A., M.Ed., RYT, owns Prana Power Yoga, Inc., super-mom.com and Prana Super-mom Consulting. She is also a Boston Herald columnist and blogger, United Nations Yoga Peace Ambassador, activist, and happy Super-mom of 5 kids.