Sweet Potato Pancakes

I mentioned in an earlier post that P-Daddy and I have been experimenting with making healthy alternatives to typical convenience foods. We try to use up the foods we have, and often have to come up with creative ways to use up fresh produce. This is especially true with potatoes. I'm a carboholic, as is Pooh, but P-Daddy really doesn't eat a lot of potatoes. Since we get at least one kind, and sometimes several kinds, in our produce co-op every 2 weeks, we virtually never run out of them. These homemade french fries are just one way we've found to make them last, and to use them when it's most convenient for us. Today, we'll talk about another way: Sweet Potato Pancakes!

We've been making pancakes in bulk and freezing them for a while now. Here's our basic recipe, but any that you typically use will work (we've even used boxed mixes with good results):

Basic Pancakes:
2 cups flour (we often do 1/2 whole wheat and 1/2 white)
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 TBSP sugar
2 cups milk (or water)
2 eggs
2 TBSP butter/oil

Mix wet ingredients first, then add dry. Pour by 1/8 cup measure onto a hot griddle, turning when bubbly.

Last time we made pancakes, though, we decided to use up some of the potatoes we had. We started by slicing up several sweet potatoes and putting them on to boil:

Once they were soft, P-Daddy used an immersion blender to mush them up a bit, then assembled the ingredients for basic pancakes.

He just added the mashed up sweet potatoes to the wet ingredients and made pancakes as normal. Typically, as the pancakes come off the griddle, we layer them on a cookie sheet, as you can see in the pic at the top of this post. Then we freeze them for a couple hours, remove, and stack the pancakes into a bread bag. That way, we have frozen pancakes ready to grab from the freezer and pop into the toaster on rushed (or lazy!) mornings:

This works really well for us, because Pooh's favorite breakfast is "pancake faces" - basically, it's toasted pancakes, spread with peanut butter and a tiny bit of honey, with cut up fruit strategically arranged into a face. He'll often eat all the fruit first and ask for another face before he eats the pancake, and we tend to oblige, since we love that he loves fruit so much!

And a final note: Life as Mom hosts the Ultimate Recipe Swap on Thursdays, and there are tons of recipes over there for using up fresh produce - it's gonna take me a really long time to try them all out! But rest assured, when I do, you'll hear about it right here!