Meatless Monday: Why Mess with a Good Thing?

If at first you don’t succeed, try again. 

That sums up my efforts to tweak a perfectly good pancake recipe I shared with you some months back—my friend Cher’s favorite vegan recipe for Banana Flapjacks from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan Brunch.

I had been having great success substituting almond meal for half the flour in my baked goods — imparting more protein, significant calcium and iron, and a nice flavor, all with fewer carbs. Why not try this in my pancake batter?

So, I did—using 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 almond meal. I wish I had not. The batter stuck to the griddle, and the cakes didn’t hold together. The pancakes smelled wonderful; I could almost taste them! I was so disappointed [to put it mildly]. I was out of overly ripe bananas. How could I salvage the Saturday breakfast I had promised to make?

Quick thinking and the decisions to add 1/4 cup of flour to the mix and to fry the pancakes in my well-seasoned crepe pan, with a generous bit of butter, saved the day. These flapjacks may not look like much, but they tasted great. Next time I will try adding 1/4 cup of almond flour to the original recipe, thinning the batter if necessary.

After this near miss, I decided to Google “almond flour pancakes.” I found a few highly-rated recipes, none of which were vegan. They all had eggs. Here is a link to a 5-star recipe. 

The lesson in this? When you are trying out a new ingredient, and you are counting on success, start with a 5-star recipe before tweaking a familiar recipe you love. After all, you want to cut down on, not add to, food waste.

Happy Monday. Have a great week!

On Mondays I often blog on food, food issues, or gardening in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”