A Diet Cheater's Pancake Paradise

Yesterday’s adventure was an experiment in a breakfast classic.  Pancakes.  Let me preface this with the fact that my mom is on a new crazy health food diet, which I have ended up, half willingly, participating in.  

However, when I get a hankering for something tasty, there is usually little that can stand in the way of me obliging my taste buds.  For sure, this diet did not stand a chance against my desire for a stack of pancakes that has been growing over the last week.  This is where the need for an experimental pancake came in.

(Side note: Evidently pancakes are thought to date back to prehistoric caveman times when the cave people mixed carb-rich seed flours with protein-rich liquids like milk, and then cooked the combo.  They obviously missed out on the Aunt Jemima Maple Syrup memo, but still.  How can some new-age diet fight a tradition as deeply rooted in human history as the pancake? Easy. It can’t.)

So once I reduced myself to being the diet cheater that I am, I began looking for a way to ease the guilt, and what I came up with was not only nutritious, but incredibly delicious!  So I obviously must share the secret to this success.

1)    Begin by gathering the ingredients listed on the back of the Bisquick box.

2)    I decided to make a half batch, so I adjusted accordingly.  You may do as you please.

3)    This is where it gets funky.  Substitute part of the required Bisquick mix with a pack of Maple and Brown Sugar High Fiber Quaker Oatmeal.

4)    Next add blueberries to the batter. (The biggest juiciest ones you can find.) 

5)    Put those puppies on the griddle and flip away.

Tip:  This is very important! And according to my mother, everyone knows this. But never use Pam on a calphalon griddle.  I found this out the hard way yesterday when I RUINED my mother’s $70 griddle.  Needless to say she was/is a little less than pleased with me.  While this was definitely a little bit of a damper on the success of my new “healthy” recipe, I can’t let it completely ruin my excitement.

The oatmeal pack not only added 40% of my daily needed fiber, which is pretty awesome within itself, but it also added a brown sugary mapley taste to the batter. Yum!  These oatmeal blueberry pancakes provided me with a tasty, fiberful (yes I know this is not a real word, but it fits well here), and antioxidant rich breakfast.  It left my taste buds singing and my guilty conscience silenced.  I recommend this to other dieters feeling a little naughty.