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Do you ever find yourself with just a small amount of leftover whatever? In my quest to keep our food spending under control, I’m trying to limit food waste and using those small amounts of leftovers has been a challenge. In the fridge I had 3/4 of a leftover acorn squash (baked with butter) and about a half cup sweet potato (baked with butter and sucanat). Using this Squash Pancake recipe for inspiration we had a very tasty grain free breakfast using nothing but the leftovers, eggs and almond meal/flour plus a little ghee for cooking.

What is Almond Meal/Flour?

Apparently these are two different items according to this very informative article even thought my bag said meal/flour on it. I’m very new to cooking with nut flours so I don’t know any more than what I read from others. I do know that the almond meal/flour that I have in my kitchen is from Azure Standard and was $21.35 for 5 pounds. This is a great price on it compared to what I could pay at my local store but at $4.27 a pound it is considerably more expensive than a grain flour. Since we are limiting our grains the occasional use of almond flour seems reasonable. Not to mention, almond flour is high in protein, low in carbohydrates and low in sugar which makes me feel better about the cost.

Cooking with nut flour is different than cooking with wheat. The almond flour seems much heavier. I have had good results with these pancakes and also muffins (like these only with apples instead of zucchini). I’ve also used walnuts ground up on my food processor as the flour in muffins.

These were super easy to make and cooked up very quickly. I kept them just over ‘silver dollar’ size which made them easy to flip. I really wanted to share a picture of them so you all could see how nice they turned out. But I bought this really cheap camera to replace my decent camera that broke and let’s just say, the camera does not photograph food well. Out of about 15 pictures taken of those little pancakes ZERO turned out good. All were blurry. Be sure to take a look at the inspiration recipe which does include a beautiful and not blurry picture. Since I couldn’t take a decent picture of the pancakes, you can look at my beautiful eggs that my chickens lay instead.  Eggs are important part of this recipe. 🙂

Almond Meal Pancakes

Leftover cooked squash/ sweet potato/or combination to equal 1 to 1 1/2 cups
2 eggs
1 cup almond meal

I used my stick blender to mash up the squash and sweet potato combination. Then added the eggs and the almond meal mixing into a smooth batter. In a hot cast iron skillet, I added a little ghee (coconut oil or other healthy fat can be used). Keeping the pancakes on the small side seems to work better for ease of cooking/turning. Also spreading the batter out with the back of a spoon or a fork helps so the batter isn’t too thick for cooking all the way through. Cook on side one for 2 or 3 minutes then carefully flip. Continue to cook on side two for another 2 to 3 minutes.

I served these with yogurt and applesauce. Yummy!

Note: While these are grain free and high in protein, using sweet potato makes them Non GAPS legal. Use only squash if you wish them to be GAPS legal.

Variations

I’m thinking that these pancakes would work with many other things besides squash (winter or summer) or sweet potatoes. Carrots seem very likely. Bananas would be lovely. Perhaps broccoli would work but I think I’d want that to be more of a dinner style (savory) pancake than a breakfast. Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon has a recipe for Vegetable Puree Pancakes (page 412) that I might use as a guideline to make a savory pancake using the almond flour. I suspect that with a little creativity my options could be endless and provide me with a great grain-free ‘bread’ choice. Also, see the comment below from Mrs. Logan suggesting pureed beets.