Did you know that March 1st is National Peanut Butter Lovers Day? In my opinion, I don't need any prompting to eat peanut butter, but when I heard this, the obvious first thing that came to my mind was pancakes. Because everyone eats peanut butter on their pancakes, right?
We eat natural peanut butter in our house. It has no added fats, especially no hydrogenated fats, and often NO SALT. It's simply peanuts and nothing else. Now every other type of non-natural peanut butter just tastes like peanut flavored Crisco. By itself, I find that unappetizing. Although, I must admit, the hydrogenated peanut butters do make better cookies. For a story of a peanut butter company doing great things for others through their sales, read my post about YumButter.
For a little peanut butter and pancake background, I never ate peanut butter on pancakes until I started dating my husband. When I found out this family tradition of smothering their pancakes in peanut butter and then pouring on syrup, I was a bit skeptical. And then I tied it. And I've been eating my pancakes that way ever since.
Ironically, there is a family story about a gentleman over hearing another man in a restaurant asking for peanut butter for his pancakes, to which he replied "The only person I know that puts peanut butter on their pancakes is Tim Clegg." Ironically, the peanut butter requesting customer had been a roommate or close friend of our uncle's when he was a child.
Typically, we make our pancakes out of buckwheat flour. I recently made a large purchase from Birkett Mills. It is the only buckwheat flour on the market that has been certified gluten-free. But alas, on March 1st 2013 (which I originally wrote this post), we were out of buckwheat flour.The last week of February that year was quite a wild one for us, as my husband had a minor mishap that entailed a visit to the E.R. and daily bandage changes..
So, I decided to use the Gluten Free Pantry All Purpose GF Baking Flour that I had sitting in my cupboard. This was one of the many mixes that my grandmother purchased for me at Christmas, a recent tradition that I GREATLY appreciate. But I've never used their flour to make pancakes before, or anything else for that matter, so we looked up a recipe on the internet using their flour.
I don't usually make buttermilk pancakes, so I didn't really know what to expect. They are definitely lighter and fluffier than our traditional buckwheat pancakes. The batter was also much thicker, so I did add 2 more tablespoons of water to the batter. It did call for buttermilk, which I do not keep on hand. My trick is to substitute plain Greek yogurt, mixing half water and half yogurt to equal the amount of buttermilk requested.
All in all, they were good. My husband especially liked them. Personally, I still like our buckwheat pancakes. We took the original recipe off the back of the Hodgson Mills buckwheat flour years ago, and have been using it ever since, with a few modifications. If you're interested, I've put the recipe for the batter below. But take the time to visit Birkett Mills online. They offer many other buckwheat products. You can also follow them on Twitter at @buckwheatisbest.
Buckwheat Pancakes
1 c. buckwheat flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 tbsp. honey
1/4 natural, unsweetened applesauce
1 egg
1 c. milk
vanilla and cinnamon to taste.
What are your favorite ways to use peanut butter? Have you tried powdered peanut butter, like PB2? Do you eat SunButter instead of peanut butter? It tastes great in a Chicken Satay!
Labels: In the kitchen
