So we’ve had dinner, dessert and lunch, time for Reba Ray to throw a little breakfast on ya, don’t ya think? Now for this recipe yur gonna have to buy something you may have never bought before – two somethins in fact: molasses and whole wheat flour. Don’t you worry about when you’ll ever use them again. Don’t you like pancakes? If you fix yurself some nanner pancakes once a week, you’ll be going back to the store for more molasses and whole wheat flour in no time. Yur also gonna need to buy some unsweetened applesauce. It’s plain as the nose on yur face when you go a lookin for it in the store. And don’t worry about that “unsweetened” part. Nature made er plenty sweet.

I know what yur thinking, this sounds too healthy to be tasty. Well, recently I used about 35 people from my church as guinea pigs for this recipe and I had people comin’ up to me a week later sayin’ “Why don’t you cook us up some pancakes ever Sunday?” How about cuz Sunday sposed to be my day of rest!

OK, let’s get going.

 

– 1 cup whole wheat flour

– ¼ tsp. salt

– 1 ½ tsp. baking powder

– ½ tsp. cinnamon

– 1 real ripe nanner (banana, for you city slickers)

– 1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce

– 1 egg

– 1 ½ tablespoons molasses (you can substitute brown sugar if yur a weenie and didn’t buy molasses)

– ½ cup or more of milk

– Smart Balance spread if you gotta have something akin to butter on yur pancakes

– Walnuts to sprinkle on top – optional 

– Light syrup (whaddya think I was gonna say full-throttle sugary syrup – this here is healthy cookin!)

 

Start out by mixing up yur whole wheat flour, salt, cinnamon and baking powder. Then in a cup, peel (duh!) and mash that nanner till it pret near liquidy. Throw it in the bowl with the dry ingredients, but don’t mix it up until I tell ya to. Now add the applesauce, egg slightly beaten, molasses and milk to the bowl and once you got all that wet stuff in there, then you can mix it up. If yur batter is too thick to pour, keep adding milk until it’s just right. You can cook these pancakes with thick batter, they’ll just make dense pancakes and one or two’ll fill ya up. Or if you want yur pancakes to be more like they make at IHOP, then just keep adding milk until you can pour that batter out on a hot griddle (or skillet) coated with some cooking spray over medium heat. 

I’monna let you in on a little secret about cooking pancakes. When you got the temperature just right for your first pancakes, then turn it down just a smidge for the next batch. Medium heat gets hotter the longer it sits and yur second and third batches’ll be more prone to burning if you don’t turn that heat down just a smidge. 

Ok, here’s where we gotta do the most difficult procedure that’ll ever be required of you for cooking Reba Ray style: we gotta flip them pancakes. If yur a newbie, only pour out two smaller pancakes on yur griddle or in yur skillet. That-a-way you’ve got plenty of room to miss the mark when you flip, without landing on top of the other pancakes.  How do you know when a pancake is ready to flip? It’ll start bubblin’ and getting little holes on the top. Don’t go a flippin when you first see that. Give about 30 seconds more, then flip. If you can’t slip yur spatula under that pancake without it starting to break up on ya, then you need to wait longer. If the bottoms’re gettin too dark, turn down heat, blast it! 

Keep on cooking till you got all that batter used up. Then eat the last ones you took off the griddle. The first ones, you can wrap in foil and heat up for a quick breakfast one day within a week. Either stick em in a toaster over, if they’re small enough, pop em in the toaster, or you can heat yur griddle up again and reheat the pancakes in the griddle or skillet. I don’t recommend using the microwave. Something about microwaves and bread just don’t mix too well. If yur gonna be obstinate you use yur microwave anyway, at least wrap the pancakes in a moist paper towel before you heat em up. That’ll keep em from turning all rubbery on ya.

Well girls, just one last word on pancakes. You love em, I know you do – who doesn’t? But if you go and fix pancakes a la Bisquick or Aunt Jo, you’ll get yurself some tasty pancakes, but not healthy ones by far. Yur actually eating something very akin to cake – it’s not just a cute name – nutritionally, it’s cake. And that means it’s gonna show up on that belly or on those hips if you make a habit of eatin em regularly. Even if you don’t, regular pancakes leave you empty about two hours after you eat em. They’ve got what’s called a high glycemic load – a fancy way of saying they hype yur blood sugar in a skinny minute but don’t have the umph to keep it high and so it comes crashing down, leaving you feelin hungry, tired and brain fogged. Girls, don’t do that to yurselves! These pancakes solve that cake problem by using applesauce instead of fat and they solve that high gly problem by using whole wheat flour, and the light syrup is mighty important to prevent a crash too. 

You can have yur pancakes and eat em too, but be smart about it, for Pete’s sake!