Perfect Pancakes Recipe

Pancakes are one of my favourite breakfast foods due to their versatility. You can pair them with a variety of fruits (incorporated into them or fresh cut on top of them), add other sorts of mix-ins (chocolate chips, anyone?), or serve them plain. Real maple syrup is always a winner in our house, but sometimes my husband likes to use plain pancakes as the outside of a sandwich, adding some eggs, cheese, and bacon or sausage between it.

Better yet? They freeze really, really well. Make extras and freeze them in a huge gallon freezer bag, and you can pull some to toast or microwave for a quick, yummy breakfast some other time! For easier storage, put pieces of wax paper between the pancakes and don't freeze them until they've cooled down completely.

Anyway you look at it, pancakes are awesome.

Yes, I accidentally let one get a bit too brown. Oops! Still tasted good, though! You can see some of them have chocolate chips mixed in, others don't. 

Problem is, for the longest time we didn't have a good recipe. We tried recipe after recipe, and we finally stumbled across a winner. Actually, we stumbled across this recipe over a year ago. We've used it multiple times since then, and it's always fabulous. The only reason I never shared it before now is because I kept forgetting to take pictures!

(I apologize in advance for the quality of food pictures on my blog. I only have a cell phone camera to work with right now. I try to make the best of it, though!)

The following recipe was found on Allrecipes.com and is for 4 servings. You can change the number of servings you want on the website and it will do all the adjustments to the ingredients for you, though. I normally double the recipe, but if I'm freezing anything I triple it.

FLUFFY PANCAKES

INGREDIENTS:

• 3/4 Milk
• 2T white vinegar
• 1c all-purpose flour
• 2T white sugar
• 1t baking powder
• 1/2t baking soda
• 1/2t salt
• 1 egg
• 2T butter, melted
• cooking spray (or whatever you prefer to grease your pan)

1) Combine milk with vinegar in a medium bowl and set aside for 5 minutes to "sour" (aka: make buttermilk).

2) Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl.

3) Whisk egg and butter into buttermilk/soured milk.

4) Pour the flour mixture into the wet ingredients and whisk until smooth.

Fully mixed batter. Now is the time to mix in any extras like chocolate chips or berries!

5) Heat a large skillet over medium heat and grease. Pour 1/4c of batter onto the skillet, cooking until bubbles appear on the surface. Flip, and brown on other side.

Due to sodium restrictions Bobble has from previous medical issues, we use a sodium-free baking powder to help reduce the sodium content of the pancakes.

I like to use butter to grease my pan before cooking the pancakes, and I like to mix in chocolate chips or berries. I've also become rather fond of adding some cinnamon to the batter or very lightly sprinkling some cinnamon on them as soon as I put the batter in the pan. So yummy!

If you're in need of a pancake recipe, you should definitely give this one a try!

Disclaimer: Thoughts of Fluff is responsible for the content of this post. The recipe is the Fluffy Pancakes Recipe from AllRecipes.com. All opinions are my own and may differ from those of your own.

MOMables Homemade Chicken Nuggets

My children are huge fans of meat in finger food form. Fish sticks, sausage links, chicken strips, chicken nuggets... yeah. All of the above. We dislike the processed foods aspect, and we buy the organic nuggets when we do buy them. Still those are expensive. We make chicken strips from scratch, but we had never made nuggets from scratch.

MOMables changed that with their chicken nugget recipe. The recipe can be gluten free if you use GF breadcrumbs, too. We didn't have ground chicken, but we did have chicken breast that needed to be used so we used our blender and ground it ourselves.

My husband was the chef for nuggets, so I had the opportunity to take more pictures of the process since I didn't have to worry about potentially burning food (though he did fry some of the nuggets a bit long).

You can bake the nuggets or fry them. We opted to fry them, then made popcorn with oil later that night.

Sadly, hubby only made enough for the kids (...I may have stolen a couple nibbles), and froze the rest of them. He said that it was super easy to do and much cheaper than buying them in the store, so we will do this from now on.

The thing that took the longest was cleaning our immersion blender after using it on the chicken breasts. We don't have a grinder, a food processor or even a standard blender. That aside it was easy-peasy.

No action shots of the kids eating them, as they were devoured way too quickly. I actually had to keep trying to get a shot of the inside of the nugget because Bobble kept swiping them as I was focusing the camera! They also tasted soooooo much better than the organic nuggets we had been buying.

Don't forget to enter the giveaway for your chance to win a 3 month subscription to MOMables!

Disclaimer: Thoughts of Fluff received a trial free of charge in exchange for a review. This did not alter my opinion of the product. All opinions are my own and may differ from those of your own.

Salmon Patties

Finger foods are always great for toddlers and munchkins just learning to eat. Salmon patties are one of those great finger foods... if you like salmon. I dislike salmon. In fact, I hate the SMELL of salmon. Just because I don't like something, however, doesn't mean I will deny my children the opportunity to have it.

We were grilling fish the other day, so hubby opened up a can of salmon, took out the bones and skin, and made some (apparently) delicious salmon patties. They were so good (again, apparently) that Bobble ate an entire patty (which was the size of an adult burger), and Squiggle ate a third of one.

It's not a fancy recipe, but the kids love it, so I thought I would share it.

Salmon Patties
1 Can pink salmon
1 egg
~ 1 tsp. dill
~ 1/2c. bread crumbs

Take bones/skin out of fish.

Mix together and form patties.

Cook like you would a burger (approximately 5 min. a side)

That's it! We served it with a box of organic shells and cheese and some left over veggies.