Thoughts of THAT Mom

I am all about convenience. However, I'm also all about saving money. How do I combine the two?

Is it really possible to turn this into a convenience food?

But of course! You turn your from-scratch cooking into convenience foods.

Today, I'm doing that with pancakes! Store-bought, gluten-free alternatives are expensive, to say the least.

The first thing you do is make your own pancake mix (similar to Bisquick...you only need to add the wet ingredients when it comes time to cook them).

For me, the first step is grinding my grain.

Here is my favorite mix:

Ingredients

-12 cups flour (we use freshly-ground spelt flour)

(If you are wheat or spelt berries, you will only need 9 cups pre-ground)
-4 cups powdered milk
-3/4 cup baking powder
-3/4 cup sugar (You can use as little as 1/2 cup. We use evaporated cane juice.)
-2 Tbs sea salt (or any other salt)

***For 1 batch, add:

-1 ½ cups of the dry mix

-1 cup water

-1 egg

-2 Tbs oil (We use olive or coconut oil; depending on what we have on hand.)

Directions

-Mix all ingredients together and store in an airtight container until ready for use

-To make pancakes, add additional ingredients to make 1 batch

-Cook on med-high heat as you normally would pancakes

Mix it all together!

You can stop once you've made the dry mix if you like. Store it in an air-tight container. Just add the wet ingredients when you're ready to make pancakes.

I use a 1/4 cup measuring cup to drop mine onto the griddle.

If you want to make the mix even more convenient, then you can divide the mix now into individual batches before storing them.

Or...you can take it even a step further (which is what we do now). We go ahead and cook up ALL of the pancakes now and freeze them. When we're ready for pancakes, we usually just throw ours in the toaster oven to warm them up. You could also wrap them in foil and warm them in the oven or pop them in the toaster just like you would waffles.

I put a towel on a plate & just stack them up as I cook them.

Once I'm done, I put them on a parchment or wax paper-lined cookie sheet & throw them (single layer) into the freezer to freeze them before putting them in a baggie or other container for storage (this keeps them from sticking together).