Many weekends throughout my childhood, my mom pulled out her big metal mixing bowl and two large frying pans. She poured glasses of “crazy drink” for my brother and me, a combination of orange and mixed fruit juices along with carbonated water, and we held those sippy cups in our hands as we sat at the kitchen table and watched her work.
She whipped up every batch from scratch, starting with the milk and eggs and vanilla, followed by the flour and baking powder and salt. Since she was the best mom ever, she made pancakes for my brother and me first, always dolloping them in the silhouette of a Mickey Mouse face because she knew how happy and excited those specially shaped pancakes made us.
Once they turned golden brown, she quickly flipped them out of the pans and onto square pink plastic plates, set those in front of us at our places at the kitchen table, and handed us a bottle of Log Cabin syrup. Because we poured out enough to nearly cover the entire plate, she gave us the cheap kind… And saved the expensive, real, pure maple syrup for herself and Dad!
Smart lady.
Once we reassured her we had eaten enough, she tossed handfuls of fresh blueberries into the mixing bowl, stirred them in, and dolloped batter into circular silver dollar sized pancakes into the frying pans. My brother and I hated “bits” in our food back then, like onions in spaghetti sauce and blueberries in pancakes, so we never touched our parents’ hot blueberry pancakes!
Eventually, sometime during middle or high school, I finally tried one of Mom’s blueberry pancakes for the first time, and my eyes immediately widened…
Why in the world had I avoided those for my whole life?? The sweet juicy berries surrounded by warm fluffy pancake, finished with a little pat of butter that immediately melted across the top and a quick drizzle of rich pure maple syrup… In Mom’s eyes, and then mine too, that tasted like the most incredible and indulgent way to make—and eat!—pancakes.
So when I spotted the jug of maple syrup and pint of fresh blueberries in my fridge last weekend, I immediately knew what I wanted to make…
But I gave Mom’s pancake recipe a little makeover, which resulted in these Healthy Blueberry Oatmeal Pancakes! They’re just as fluffy as the ones from my childhood with plenty of plump juicy berries in every single pancake. However, these contain no refined flour or sugar and just 123 calories in each stack!
Continue reading & see the rest! ›› Healthy Blueberry Oatmeal Pancakes
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