I woke this morning craving pancakes. The fact that today is Fat Tuesday (aka Pancake Day) didn’t help. Nor did that fact that I’m Jewish and don’t celebrate either of those events negate the craving.

However, I’d planned on a simply filling day for me and didn’t want to swap or eat the points associated with pancakes. So instead, I tried to build up my desire for oatmeal while sipping my coffee and watching the news.

The oatmeal desire never took hold so instead, I did the next best thing. I asked the magic Genie (aka Google) to find me a good pancake recipe that followed Weight Watchers’ simply filling technique and the Genie found me this.

Now I don’t keep ground flaxseed in the house, nor do I keep Stevia as the recipe used, so I changed it to fine polenta and 1t sugar (though not simply filling 1t has zero points).

The recipe makes about four pancakes, a little soft in the middle. Were they the second coming? Not really. But I don’t think substitutes for the real thing always have to be as good as the real thing. I ask, were they good enough to satisfy my craving? And in this case, they were. Sweet enough too that I didn’t even need to eat them with syrup. So in a pinch of a craving, I’d make them again.

Simply Filling Pumpkin Pancakes

Ingredients

  • 1/2C pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
  • 2 large eggs, beaten
  • 1T fine polenta
  • 1t sugar (original recipe used stevia)
  • 1/2t baking powder
  • 1t pumpkin pie spice

Directions

Mix all the ingredients together. The batter will be loose.

Simply Filling Pumpkin Pancake Batter

Drop 2-3T on a hot, greased skillet. I used my best non-stick skillet, sprayed with Pam, but the Pam got so hot that it started to brown, so I’m not sure what to do about that. Also, I used my big Pampered Chef scoop to drop the batter into the skillet which made it one big clump. So I shook the skillet a bit, when I first dropped it in order to spread the batter.

Flourless Pumpkin Pancake Batter

Clump of batter in pan

 

Simply Filling Pumpkin Pancake Batter

After swirling in pan a bit

Cook these until browned on the edges and bubbly then flip to finish off.

An aside, I kept waiting for not only browned edges but also for bubbles to form across the top, but that didn’t always happen so I flipped without the bubbles. It worked fine for the first two, but you can see, about the next. Oh well.

Simply Filling Pumpkin Pancake