Let’s get one thing straight.
I love pancakes.
I will eat them for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and just because they’re pancakes if you’ll let me. They’re tasty comfort food either plain and hot off the stove or loaded with butter or maple syrup or just simple sugar and lemon.
Unfortunately they’re not the best for the food conscious and since I don’t really want to put on all of the weight that I’ve lost over the past two years (even though I’ve made a very good attempt at that over the last few weeks – eek!) I have to find alternatives.
So I’ve been seeing this “no carb” so-called pancake popping up all over Pinterest and a couple of other blogs that I read and I thought surely it was worth trying.
So, I did.
And I followed the general directions from Freckleberry Fit. (Which is a pretty awesome blog for interesting foodie things.)
Two ingredients are called for. Just two. Bananas and eggs. Apparently this makes pancakes.
I am already highly doubtful.
So I grab my ‘nanas and slice them up into a bowl.
At this point I am thinking porridge would be really lovely right now over all that banana goodness and I fight the temptation to not just pull out the oats and milk.
I successfully resist but mournfully start mashing at the bananas.
The original recipe says to whisk the eggs and banana together at this point until smoothish… and that it doesn’t matter if your bananas are a little lumpy.
A LITTLE lumpy? The above was the result after a few minutes of fork-mashing the bananas alone.
I am guessing that it would be easier with bananas that are a little more ripe than what I was using but I didn’t want to wait another couple of days for my bananas to be of adequate squishiness. But I was getting kind of annoyed at this point as it was taking way too much effort and time than I was willing to spend on this frivolous idea.
So I broke out the big guns…
The Blorky Machine, as the manbeast calls it (for the noise it makes). I blorkied the bananas into a lovely, mostly smooth puree.
If I had a baby, they’d be happy right now.
The baby, that is. Not the bananas. At this point I don’t think the bananas give any of the fucks about anything.
So then it was time to add the eggs. I beat the eggs separately and threw the lot into the bananas and I whisked away.
I-whisked-away-I-whisked-away…
Don’t know about you, but that still doesn’t look anything like pancake batter to me.
After everything was combined properly, I started spooning small ladle-full portions into my little frying pan. The recipe says it makes fifteen. With my little ladle I got ten. Close enough. I need to rejig the math for the calorie information.
And to my surprise, it sort of looked like pancakes as I was cooking them…
Well, I did say SORT OF.
And the freaky thing was it started to smell a bit like pancakes cooking… though that might have been some serious wishful thinking on my part…
But don’t forget…
…When the recipe says 45 seconds on each side, it really is ONLY 45 seconds on each side. This one got a little tan. I think it had more to do with the fact that the sugars in the banana were caramelising more than the pancake being burnt as it didn’t taste at all burnt.
But that brings me to the next point – and last photograph:
You maybe forgiven that these look very much like pancakes. They even smell a little like pancakes.
Unfortunately they are not pancakes, never will be pancakes and should never be tried as a substitute for pancakes.
I wish they were because I love pancakes.
Whilst they don’t taste horrible, they’re not really to my taste. Having said that, I ate a decent serve of them, just to be sure. The savoury of the eggs doesn’t really mesh with the sweetness of the bananas. I found myself either wanting to put cheese on them or sprinkle them with sugar, and indeed, they remind me a little of the taste of French toast without the sugar.
Try it – you might like it. If nothing else, they’d be an excellent recovery snack for after a workout. A nice little hit of protein and sodium.
The original recipe touts this as being 31 calories for each pancake. I’ll round mine up to 45 each and call them done for now.
And REAL pancakes will remain a very, very, VERY, occasionally-sometimes food.
FML.
UPDATE: Just FYI, these actually taste rather nice once they’re chilled and with nothing on them. The hot egg/banana thing doesn’t work but the cold egg/banana thing does. Weirdness.
Finally, boots that fit!
