Pancakes piled up til they reach the sky

The title of this post is from one of my favorite childhood memories, Mickey and the Beanstalk, and you can see the whole thing on YouTube.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

The song with the line about pancakes is in Part 1 at minute 5:45 (This is all for Sista G & Nana. They will appreciate it).

Oooh, and look what else I found whilst perusing Mickey, Peter & the Wolf, in 2 parts.

Tell me, really, what ISN'T on YouTube?

Anyway, back to the topic of pancakes. I told you I am easily distracted.

One of my favorite 4-letter 'f' words is food, and BS & I have the challenge of figuring out how to create really good-tasting food that accomplishes the main task of food - that is, to nourish us.

So, this morning, it was pancakes & syrup! Yay!!!!!!!

I hear a stunned silence from your end. You're thinking, "uh, yeah, right. Pancakes are diet food? Suuuuure." Au contraire, mes amis, my pancakes are packed with good things. Here's how it played out.

I didn't get around to having breakfast this morning, so noon rolls by and I start realizing that the vague hollow feeling inside is actually hunger. And waddaya know, BS is in the same boat. What I want to know is, if someone told me they forgot to eat, I would look at them in scorn. I would scoff at them. SCOFF, I tell you! But it happened, not only to me, but to both of us today. What are the odds?

So I go into the kitchen and see some reeeeeeally ripe bananas on the counter. What can I do with those bananas that will put bites of something in our maws as quickly as possible? 'Cause we're haungry! Muffins? Nope, they'll take too long. Wait, it's coming to me . . . . . . pancakes!

Beautiful, tender, tasty pancakes. Diet food? Totally, if eaten in moderation, and made with care. Moderation is the key to any lifestyle change that has any hope of lasting the rest of your life.

I start pulling things out and filling the counter, making it up as I went along. Pancakes really are stupidly easy to make. As long as you know roughly what proportion of dry stuff to mix with your wet stuff, you can have any kind of pancakes you want.

Aside - I have always made my own pancakes, and always with whole grains. The end product has a lovely brownish tint that you don't find in your usual Aunt Jemimas. But BS was used to them as he never got any other kind from me. When his little friends would come & spend the night, they would invariably want pancakes in the morning. No doubt the little friend was expecting fluffy white piles of starch that were a nutritional wasteland. When I would put the plate of brown pancakes in front of the eager little face, I would stand back and wait for the invariable look of horror. I was rarely disappointed.

Anyway, what ended up going into my blender were eggs, peanut oil, low-fat vanilla yogurt, more vanilla (vanilla is straight from heaven), a little wild honey, low-fat milk, a reeeeeally ripe banana, whole wheat flour, whole oat flour, the necessary leavenings, and . . . . .uh, I can't think of anything else.

No refined sugar, no white flour.

A quick spritz of spray on the non-stick griddle, and the drooling started.

Oops, I flipped that first one a bit too soon. BS decided to put a schmear of this on his, topped by a small drizzle of pure maple syrup:

"It contains no cholesterol, no trans-fats, no hydrogenated oils, and no high-fructose corn syrup. It is also gluten-free, vegan, and certified kosher pareve by the Orthodox Union"

And dark chocolate is health food, right? And just think of it - chocolate, peanut butter & banana pancakes. Be still, my heart. And don't they look good. (BTW, I only had 2, with no chocolate peanut butter. But I did have a bite of his. OMG!).

As I scraped the last bit of batter, some dripped from the spatula,

and when I flipped it, LOOK! It has a wee willie winkie. :-)

But now I have a big bag full of pancakes in the fridge, just ready for the toaster. Oh, and one more thing. Usually I mix up the pancakes in a bowl and use the blender for something else. We rarely have syrup on our pancakes. We have peach sauce - can of peaches (in juice), vanilla, and a bit of honey. Blitz it in the blender and it's better than syrup! But for some reason I used the blender for the batter, so it was not available for peach sauce. That made me sad.

And speaking of syrup, I don't care what kind of a diet you are on, I don't ever want to see this in your cupboard. If I do, there will be an awkward silence while I try to figure out a polite way to leave. Better to have a small amount of the real stuff than any amount of this bottle of chemicals. Who thought this would be a good thing? It is just wrong on so many levels. . .

So anyway, after breakfas . . . er . . . lunch, I went outside and had a happy 2 1/2 hours of mowing, sweeping, raking, edging, bagging, dragging, fixing the weed whacker, and mowing some more. And no, I did NOT use the lovely self-propelled feature on my mower. I pushed that bastard myself. And I have a hill.

Okay? I'm pooped.

Oh, one more thing ( I promise). For those of you who thought I was kidding about Paula Deen in my last post, I was totally serious. I give you her recipe for deep fried butter balls! Told ya. Makes me want one of these.