Almond Butter Banana Pancakes

On my current nutrition plan I get one off-plan meal a week, when I can eat essentially whatever I want. The general guidelines are that it needs to be eaten within 60-90 minutes and should not be a gigantic binge, but instead a nice break from my regular structure and a chance to have something I'm craving. The purpose of the off-plan meal is to increase compliance with the rest of my plan, and also allow for life to happen (nice dinners out, birthdays, parties, etc are all great ways to use an off-plan meal.) I like having this flexibility in my plan and hoped I could manage myself well, but my first couple off-plan meals both involved A LOT of ice cream and both dairy and gluten (neither of which I am currently eating regularly) and the last one was definitely more of a free-for-all binge than a meal per se.

Falling into the I-can-eat-whatever-I-want-but-just-for-a-little-bit-so-OMG-imma-eat-everything-I-can-imagine-and-then-some-and-then-some-more trap is a potential hazard of having an off-plan meal in the first place, and also something that after my first couple attempts at it I knew I'd need to be better at avoiding. This week rather than torture my digestive system with dairy and gluten and repeat my bad habits from previous weeks, I decided to satisfy a pancake craving I've been having and at the same time keep my off-plan meal to just a meal, no more and no less.

These pancakes from Carrots 'n Cake fit the bill perfectly. I basically made them exactly as she does, but my explicit pancake cooking instructions are below, because this is pretty much the first time I have ever made pancakes successfully and perhaps I am not the only one who has struggled?

Ingredients:

• 3 bananas (the riper the better)
• 3 eggs
• 1/4 cup almond butter
• 1/4 cup almond flour (any flour works here)
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 - 1 tsp cinnamon (my addition, I think everything is better with cinnamon)

Recipe:

1. Blend the bananas, eggs, almond butter and almond flour in a food processor or with a stick blender (what I used) or in a regular mixer (you could also do it by hand, but mashing up the bananas and getting the almond butter incorporated will take A LOT of mixing.)
2. Heat up your nonstick pan or griddle over medium heat (I think this is why these pancakes were successful for me, non-stick is magic, especially if you don't want to use any extra butter/oils.)
3. Blend in the baking powder, vanilla and cinnamon (I like to add these at the very end because as soon as the baking powder hits the batter it starts to bubble and you want to get cooking ASAP once that action begins.)
4. Scoop 1/3 cup of pancake batter at a time onto your griddle or nonstick pan.
5. Let cook until there are lots of little bubbles visible on the pancake (3-ish minutes depending on how hot the pan is, when in doubt keep it lower then your pancakes won't burn.)
6. Flip and cook for 1-2 minutes on the other side. (If your pancakes are resisting flipping, they probably are not ready yet, so give them another minute. If they are burnt before they are flippable, turn your heat down.)
7. Continue process with remaining batter and then CHOW DOWN.

I got 10-ish small pancakes out of this recipe, and yes, I ate them all. Next time I should probably make a half or 2/3 recipe for my off-plan meal, or share some, but it's a work in progress and they were delicious.

I ate a couple with almond butter and jelly and the rest with strawberries, whipped cream (just a little bit of dairy . . .) and maple syrup. OMGAMAZING.