Pancakin’.

When something successful happens in the kitchen, I need to tell the world.

My boyfriend, who I live with, has Crohn’s disease, and is one of the healthiest eaters I know. By “healthy” I don’t mean weekday vegetarian or vegan or Atkins or South Pacific Beach Cookie Monthly Juice Cleanse diets. He specifically follows the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), which is like a specified take on the increasingly popular Paleo Diet.

One of the primary distinctions between Paleo and SCD is the inclusion of grains. In Paleo, you don’t eat gluten. This means gluten-free pastas, breads, and sometimes rice are fair game. In SCD, you don’t eat grains. This means you pretty much can’t eat pastas, breads, or rice. (The former two require flour, made from grain. The lattermost, much to the disbelief of my Chinese relatives, is a refined grain. [My Aunt: “But, there’s no grain in rice.” -No.]) Gluten-free is the umbrella category that encompasses grain-free. Grain-free is a square; gluten-free is a quadrilateral.

I personally don’t have major stomach issues, and between being American Born Chinese and Most Likely Italian in a Past Life, I cannot and do not give up my own consumption of rice, pasta, and dumplings in our house. It all works out for the both of us, though. Bill is a talented and resourceful cook, whereas my entire arsenal of recipes consists wholly of fallbacks: Annie’s mac and cheese, spaghetti, tuna and/or egg salad sandwiches, pancakes, and rice from the rice cooker. (I included that, which makes me even lamer.) Only recently have I started using yellow curry paste for stuff outside of this small grouping of entrees.

As Bill has gone through his dietary journey for a nutritional plan that works for him, we have acquired some obscure ingredients: jars of grains from the experimental macrobiotic days (pretty much the exact opposite of what works for Bill’s body), packets of fancy seaweeds which we now know he shouldn’t touch, and a cardboard flat full of almond flour weighing in at the size of a toddler.

Almond Flour.

Almond flour is made from almonds, which are nuts, which are not grains. Bill bought tons and tons of almond flour because he misses baked goods traditionally founded on grains, and almond flour is a wheat flour substitute on the good list in SCD. However, after taking a food allergy test, Bill learned he’s been overdoing the almond flour, so he scaled back on usage shortly after acquiring this 25-lb. box of almond flour.

The result is this toddler of almond flour in my kitchen.

I didn’t know what to eat for breakfastlunch.

We just had a three-day weekend, and I was intent on sleeping in every day. On Saturday I read magazines for a couple of hours and dicked around on the Internet like we all do. Pretty soon it was noon o’ clock and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything yet. How weird.

I went downstairs but didn’t know what to eat. It wasn’t cereal hour, and I wasn’t mentally ready for a sandwich. Real “brunch” was also too advanced for my headstate. I’m a bit obsessed with not wasting anything (but haven’t reached hoarder state yet), so I looked around the kitchen for something on-hand that involved making (so I could could believe that I exercised my brain a bit and thus make it a more significant meal).

There it was: The Toddler of Almond Flour.

Something I can make when there is mix, and which I think is hearty enough to count for lunch, is pancakes. We had no pancake mix. But we did have a Toddler of Almond Flour. Surely, something could be done with that.

So. I hopped onto Foodily and searched for “almond flour pancakes,” which brought me to a pretty awesome Paleo Diet site, Health-Bent. Their recipe for Low Carb, Gluten-Free, Dairy Free (Read: Almond Flour) Pancakes is ridiculously simple. You just throw everything into a blender. (and eventually, a pan) It does require five eggs, so it’s going to taste more eggy than traditional pancakes. Kind of like a thick crepe. I also modified it by mixing in Nestle Toll House Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips (not SCD nor Paleo but I’m not the one with stomach problems) because I have a bag of those that will not go away, and chopped walnut pieces because I’m convinced they’re healthy to include. Without the chips and walnuts, the blended pancake batter is pretty smooth, so if you’re craving texture, I suggest adding something in.

Success! Momo said these look like walruses, which is a happy thought.

I topped mine off with some of the Maple Syrup Institute’s International Gold Medalist, hand-carried to us from Canada. Slice up some strawberries and you get a greater extemporaneous breakfastlunch than you even imagined.

Recipe as Health-Bent prescribes it after the jump.

Low Carb, Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free Pancakes

I just like Health-Bent because of their cheeky attitude:

We get a lot of B.S. for labeling things like what we’ve got pictured above as ‘paleo’. All I can say is…I don’t want to type this lonnnnnng title out every single flippin’ time we have a recipe that’s grain/gluten free, dairy free and low carb. It’s just easier to type the word ‘paleo.’ It’s all encompassing–you know what we mean when we type it. Did they use almond flour in paleolithic times? No. But they also didn’t drizzle olive oil, drink coffee or chow down on the modern day bovine cow.

Ingredients

• 1 ½ c almond flour
• ½ c coconut milk (we used the refrigerated carton kind)
• 1 T sugar
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 t baking powder
• 1 t vanilla
• 5 eggs
• F.O.C. (fat of choice), we used bacon fat—mmm, bacon flavored pancakes.

Method

Blend all the ingredients in your blender. Set your cast iron pan or griddle on medium heat and melt some of your F.O.C. Ladle the batter into whatever size you’d like–coin, silver dollar, big ol’ fatties. Once tiny, little bubbles form around the edges of the pancake, it’s ready to flip.

Yield: 10-12 big ol’ fatties