Dutch baby pancake

With the stress of finals wearing me out, I've barely had a chance to realize that Christmas is less than one week away.  Oh gosh.  Yesterday while we were driving home from seeing The Fighter (good movie btw), it finally hit me that in a week Alex and I will be home in Minnesota for a long string of Christmas-related events.  I have a rather large family on my mom's side, which means a lot of family events (pizza night, cousin night, ladies luncheon, and the grand family finale) and that is just for my mom's side of the family.  All of these events are food-centric. 

  So, this realization of the impending holiday has definitely made me have Christmas grub on the mind.  One of my favorite things to eat is a nice German pancake/panacookin (I have no idea how to spell it) on Christmas morning.  Naturally I smother them with cool whip and strawberries.  I happened to pick up Ellie Krieger's cookbook, So Easy, from the library and there just happened to be a healthy recipe in there for a panacookin (I blame all the plaque on my artery walls on my mother's panacookins).  However, she calls it a Dutch pancake.  Pfft.  ANYWAYS, I decided that I needed to try this out and see if it could compare to the butter-heavy version.  Did it ever!  Had I been a kid I probably would choose the unhealthy version, just because I was a chubby little butter-obsessed porkster for quite a while.  However, this was equally delicious without butter gushing into my mouth while chewing.  AND the whole-wheat flour made each portion much more filling.  I couldn't even eat half of one panacookin, whereas normally I could eat a full one.  One panacookin from this recipe could easy feed 3 adults. Rating 9/10.

Recipe from Ellie Krieger
Adapted by me!

1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat pastry flour- or regular whole-wheat flour
4 tsp sugar (I used 2.5 tsp of turbinado because Alex drank a whole big gulp sized soda by himself yesterday and I'm afraid any more sugar than necessary may cause him to keel over)
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup 1% milk (I used skim)
2 large eggs
2 large egg whites
grated zest of one lemon (I used a lime since I didn't get a chance to go to the grocery store)
4 tsp butter

Preheat oven to 450 degrees with a pie plate inside.
Combine the flours, sugar, and salt in a medium sized bowl.
Combine the remaining ingredients (except for butter) in another bowl. 
Mix the combined ingredients until just blended.
Remove the pie plate from the oven and melt the butter in it, swirling the butter around until the entire bottom and the lower half of the plate walls have been coated.
Add batter to the pie plate and place in the oven for 23-25 minutes.  DO NOT OPEN YOUR OVEN DOOR TO LOOK AT IT until the very end.
Remove from oven.
Divide and devour.
Good toppings- cinnamon, whipped cream and strawberries, banana slices, apple sauce, peach sauce, pretty much any fruit or regular pancake topping.


This is the super healthy smoothie that I made to go along with breakfast.  It was healthy, but the grapefruit didn't really play well with the other ingredients as much as I had hoped :(.

2 1/2 bananas
1/2 cup squeezed pomegranate juice- or POM
1 lime
1 tsp sugar
1 grapefruit that was previously peeled and broken into pieces then frozen.
produces 3 cups of smoothie

Blend everything!