Whole Wheat Banana Spice Pancakes | Zero Waste Food Recipe

Every once in a while, we indulge in pancakes. Sometimes it’s breakfast and other times it’s breakfast for dinner. This time, we dug out a recipe from the archives for a flavorful and slightly healthier alternative to regular pancakes. With cinnamon, nutmeg, banana, whole wheat flour and a bit of honey for sweetness, these are delicious!

When M is out of town, I make an extra effort to have really easy dinners. Not only do I want something that’s easy to make but also something about which I know the boys won’t fight. After a particularly long day as a solo parent last week, I dug out this recipe for banana spiced pancakes.

I had all but forgotten about it. M doesn’t love pancakes, and without protein, they make for a terrible breakfast for our boys. It’s a sugar overload to kick start our day, and no one needs that. Surprisingly enough, if we make them eat eggs or some protein before the pancakes, they don’t turn into wild animals.

We had a slew of bananas in our freezer, and I didn’t want to make another batch of banana bread or banana chocolate chip muffins. The muffins are a big hit but sometimes too popular. So banana pancakes made the weekly meal planning menu.

J helped me make the pancakes. He loves mixing all the ingredients. T can flip the pancakes and is usually in the kitchen when I make pancakes, but he had other tasks on his agenda for the evening. I love having the boys cooking and baking with me, so whenever they want to join me, I’m all in (mess included).

I’ve included this as a zero food waste recipe because I think pancakes can be a great way to use up extra produce that’s starting to get a little mushy but still is perfectly fine to eat. We filled our pancakes with mushy bananas.

Also, I made a note in the recipe that we sometimes use buttermilk and sometimes use an extra banana. In this case, we used the extra banana because I didn’t have an open container of buttermilk in my fridge. Buttermilk is something I often buy and then don’t use completely, so I like having a handful of recipes that use the buttermilk when I have it but don’t need it when it’s not already on hand. This will totally work either way.

The weather was perfect, so we ended up eating outside on our back patio. A nice summer evening is seriously the best!

We ate pancakes, played some basketball, made progress on the insane Lego project T was working on, and I put the boys to bed a little early.

I’m calling that a weeknight win!

If you try the pancakes, let me know what you think. I hope you love them!

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