Sweet Sweet Baadasssss Oatmeal Pancakes

Yes, this food blog will most probably feature movie puns as they are the one thing I love more than food itself. Perhaps I should add food puns to my film reviews?
I think I just challenged myself.

There are several reasons behind my decision to start writing a blog about cooking/baking/food-hunting/anything related really:

1) If you know me just a bit, you also know how much I love talking about food. So much I'm getting worried I may be annoying you. Therefore this page will function as a medium for my food craze and, hopefully, I won't have the need to inform everybody I live with on how wonderful coconut oil is. Or it will make me even more crazy. It's too early to tell. Boo!

2) Words. I used to write them a lot before falling in love with the motion picture (age 15) and completely redirecting my attention from the written to the filmed. I wish to get back into the habit. Word.

3) I can cook and I can type, but there's one new skill I'm meaning to take up - photography. What is a documentary filmmaker who does not take photographs? I've been telling myself so for the past two years. I think food photography will be a nice starting point.

4) Lately, I've been obsessed with visualisations. So I decided to take up Adobe Illustrator and contribute to the fairly unknown area of food infographics. Check out the cheat sheet I prepared for you at the bottom of the page. You can download/print/do whatever you with it. I personally like to save recipes in image formats for easy access.

So to completely undermine my third point I took lazy photos of yesterday's dinner with a mobile in a badly lit/-tered kitchen. Don't judge me!

Jonno and I decided to check out Beth's Whole Wheat Oatmeal Pancakes while modifying them a bit. I've been wanting to learn a healthy version of pancakes for ages! The original recipe says it serves four, but I decided to double the amounts as:

1) I accidentally ate tomorrow's plane snack for lunch and needed to prepare something new for the journey.
2) When given pancakes, I will eat A LOT of them.

Okay, okay, enough chit-chat (or banter as they call it here), voilà recipe.

Sweet Sweet Baadasssss Oatmeal Pancakes

PANCAKES
1 1/2 cups oats
1 1/2 cups spelt flour
2 eggs
2 tbs brown sugar
3 tbs butter
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/3 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp salt
Hemp milk*
Coconut oil*
Shredded coconut*

TOPPINGS*
Honey, ice cream, maple sirup, nutella, walnuts, yogurt, whatever makes your taste buds tingle

*If the recipe doesn't contain a particular dosage, I simply used my instinct. You'll see how much you need during the process.

PROCESS
1) Soak oats in hemp milk for 30 minutes - this is the wet bowl.

2) In a seperate bowl mix spelt flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt - this is the dry bowl.

3) Melt butter.

4) Mix eggs, brown sugar, shredded coconut and melted butter into the wet bowl.

5) Pour the dry bowl into the wet bowl and whisk the batter until its ingredients are evenly mixed.

6) Melt some coconut oil on a frying pan and pour batter to form individual patties. Turn over patties regularly until they're nice and brown. We managed to fry up 11 biggies from our batch.

They say the first pancake is a 'trial' pancake - it will inevitably come out malformed. I think that's just a method of consoling oneself. All our pancakes came out funny-shaped.

7) Apply toppings to your heart's desire! My friends and I usually have each pancake with something different.

Our assembly line. This one looks like it has a face!

In the end I understood that when given oatmeal pancakes, I will actually eat three, maybe three and half of them. They are very filling and yet remain soft and moist for days. They are tasty sans sauce as well if you are personally not into sweet food.

EXTRA LOVE
Spelt flour - ancient grain with many lovely nutrients that are lost in the processing of wheat; a great source of manganese, phosphorus and magnesium; also I like its funky Czech name - špalda
Hemp milk - probably the healthiest alternative to cow's milk, no intoxicating effects; also my alternative to sea food as a source of omega 3 fatty acids (the perfect ratio)
Nutmeg - Malcolm X made me buy it. I was rebelliously excited when I first purchased nutmeg oh-so-legally only to realise that I don't really want to go through the symptoms of influenza. It's nice for soups though.

RECIPE CHEAT SHEET