Blueberry almond buckwheat beer pancakes

If you’ve been following my blog long enough, you know how much I love beer pancakes with blueberries. Since I had a larger arsenal of ingredients to work with this time, I decided to improve upon my classic recipe, Vegan buckwheat beer pancakes with blueberry syrup by:

• Substituting 1/3 of the buckwheat flour with almond meal
• Substituting 1/4 of the rice milk with beer
• Adding freeze dried blueberries to the batter

Everything else was the same and it was as vegan as ever. The almond meal and freeze dried blueberries were from Trader Joe’s. The almond meal makes the pancakes tastier, a bit crunchier, and boosts the protein and fat(the healthy kind) content. They also make the pancakes less fluffy, though luckily the beer can help compensate for this a little. If you like your pancakes fluffy use only a small amount of almond meal, substituting 20% of the buckwheat flour or less. You may also need to use more liquid lecithin(egg replacer) if you use a lot of almond meal, to help thicken the batter and bind everything together.

Another idea for those who prefer fluffy pancakes but also want them to taste almondy is to use almond milk instead of rice or soy milk. If you have time, I recommend making your own almond milk. One of my most favorite vegan/vegetarian blogs, Love and Lentils, has a terrific almond milk recipe.

The amount of beer I used was different this time. Last time, I substituted half of the rice milk with beer. Although the pancakes came out well last time, the beer tended to overwhelm everything else. I think 25% beer is better, but you can use as little or as much as you want. Some beer pancake lovers will use nothing but beer.

All in all, they came out better than last time. Sweet without being too sweet, blueberry-ish, chewy, buckwheaty, cinnamony, and beery! I highly recommend it!

Trader Joe’s 17 Bean & Barley Mix

Trader Joe’s 17 Bean Mix is terrific for making a hearty winter soup. It has baby lima beans, black turtle beans, blackeye peas, dark red kidney beans, garbanzo beans, great northern beans, green lentils, green split peas, large lima beans, light red kidney beans, navy beans, pink white beans, yellow split peas, and pearl barley(if I am missing something, let me know). I’m used to eating just one type of bean or lentil in a meal, so this was an interesting change last night.

It has 13g of protein per serving, but I made and ate about 3 servings. I soaked the bean mix overnight, then cooked them in vegetable broth, along with kale, olive oil, black pepper, red pepper, and garlic powder for about 50 minutes. I had a little bread on the side. It was a very filling meal, full of so many different textures and subtle tastes, due to all the different types of legumes.

It was delicious, but the only problem was that the smaller lentils and beans cook a lot faster than the larger ones. So the lentils have to be turned to mush just to ensure the kidney beans are soft and cooked enough. This is the reason I usually prefer cooking just one type of legume.

Other than that, you can’t go wrong making soups or stews from this. It’s a great, high protein meal to come home to after joggling for several miles in the cold.