Freezer Cooking & {Yummy} Recipe: Apple Pumpkin Pancakes

When my son had learned to walk, getting him to eat his food wasn’t a problem – the kid was a bottomless pit!  Our meal-time obstacle was getting him to sit in his chair!  With his new-found freedom, he certainly did not want to be constrained by his highchair.  Frankly, battling with him for hours minutes to sit down wasn’t much fun for me either.

One morning I was experimenting with recipes (big shocker there!) and took a basic pancake recipe and started adding things that I thought would be nutritious for him (since flour, water and baking powder alone don’t do much for the growing bones).  I peeled an apple and diced it into ultra-small pieces, added pumpkin, oatmeal, cinnamon, sugar, vanilla… and the end result was a much more nutritious pancake that was super dense.

Waitaminute.  A dense pancake?  What was I going to do with a dense pancake, use it as a hockey puck?

Absolutely!

Well, almost absolutely.  I realized that this dense (and delicous!) pancake was perfect for my son who didn’t want to sit and eat his breakfast.  He was able to hold this pancake in his little hand and it wouldn’t flop out.  It wouldn’t crumble apart and it didn’t make many crumbs as he took his bites.  It didn’t need syrup, he asked for seconds and was versatile enough for snack time!

Thus, the toddler pancake was born (aka Apple Pumpkin Pancakes).  The perfect pancake to get you through the I’m-not-sitting-in-my-chair-no-matter-what phase.

1 c flour
1 c oatmeal or oat flour
4 T sugar
1 1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt

1 1/2 c milk
3 T vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 t vanilla
3/4 c pumpkin (half of a can)
3/4 c peeled, diced apple (half of a large apple)

Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.  In a separate bowl, whisk the wet ingredients together well.  Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and whisk until just combined.  Measure 1/4 batter onto hot skillet or griddle and cook until the edges are golden brown; flip and continue to cook for 2-3 minutes more.  Makes about 20 pancakes.

I made a batch of these this morning and now over two years later, my son still gobbles these up in no time.  I served him breakfast and stuck the rest in the freezer for future meals.  Pancakes freeze beautifully – once the pancakes have cooled, wrap them in saran wrap or in freezer bags.  You can pull out as many as you need, or the whole bag.  Yummy!