Photo Credit Morena Escardo
I’m always talking about healthy foods, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like or crave the same foods everyone else does. Pancakes, for example, are one of my favorite things to eat. My mother used to make them from scratch several times a week when we were kids, and my brother and I would eat these fluffy, syrup-drenched cakes sitting at the kitchen table or in our rooms on a tray if we were running late for school. Such delicious memories.
Fast forward to the year after I finished college, when I was living in New York with two friends. We were all interning at different companies and going out a lot in our free time, so cooking was not at the top of our priority list at this point in our lives. We ordered take-out almost every night, and once we discovered that the diner across the street from us had chocolate chip pancakes, that became a weekly ritual. So good!
Now that I’ve become more conscious about everything I put in my mouth and how it makes me feel, I don’t eat traditional pancakes nearly as often as I used to. In fact I don’t really eat them at all. But that doesn’t stop me from eating pancakes every once in a while, made with gluten-free flours, dairy-free milks, and using only the most wholesome sweeteners possible (if they’re sweetened at all).
This is why I got so excited when my friend Ale Crovetto, gluten-free expert and entrepreneur, posted a video of her pumpkin pancakes recipe on Facebook. Ale gives all kinds of workshops in Peru about living a gluten-free lifestyle (her daughter has celiac disease), and she sells the most exquisite gluten-free breads, cakes, cookies, and more. I knew if it was her recipe, it had to be super tasty, so I had to try it!
As always, I made a few changes to her original recipe. For example, I used dates instead of coconut sugar, and coconut milk instead of almond milk. I also used half of the rice flour, and replaced the other half with buckwheat flour to use more whole grains, and for convenience I used store bought pumpkin puré. You can follow my changes, or try this her way. Either way, I hope you enjoy them!
For the full recipe, click here.
–Morena Escardó is a bilingual health & wellness coach and author. You can get all her healthy tips on her website.