PA Day or "PANCAKE DAY" as its known in my house!

Every PA day off from school, when my kids wake up they ask for pancakes.

Every.

Single.

Time.

Today was no different.

Pancakes it is! (Like I have a choice). Every time I make them, they come out a bit different based on whatever ingredients I have in house. The base is generally the same: 1 cup of oatmeal, 1 cup of flour (today was whole wheat), an egg or two, milk, juice, vanilla, cinnamon, EVOO, some salt and baking powder. However, we can't forget the most important first step:

I always add fruit, and generallly that is what gets varied. Applesauce works best, but surprisingly, we are out of applesauce right now. We are also out of juice. I had about 4 tablespoons of OJ in the fridge, but its not really enough.

Pet peeve rant digression here:
Don't you HATE that? When people put empty (or near empty) cartons of juice or milk (or anything for that matter) BACK IN THE FRIDGE? Seriously... is it THAT hard to finish it or throw out when its finished?
C'mon people.

Anyway. Back to the pancakes. So I had a bit of OJ and some pears, so I chopped up the pears and threw them in a pan to cook down a bit.

In another bowl, I start adding everything and mix.

Toss it all together in the bowl and add your liquid (today it was only milk as we were out of all juice) until you get a nice drippy consistency. I have been known to add:
- raspberries
- blueberries
- mango
- apple
- pear
- jam (today I added a dollop of fig jam)
- berry juice (ceres apple berry cherry is my favorite to add - it tastes like jello!)
- chia seeds

Actually, I ALWAYS add chia, to the first couple of pancakes as they fry in yummy melted butter. My kids have asked me to add it only to the first one, so I really loaded it up.

I prefer chia to flax because it doesn't have that weird fishy taste that flax has. Chia doesn't have much taste at all, and it does all the same good things for your body. We are talking Fibre with a capital F here!

Using Chia eliminates (ha!) the need for stuff like THIS cereal:

Now its time to start planning dinner, trying to use up as many ingredients currently in my pantry . So far, I have used (some but not all):
- quinoa
- black olives
- oatmeal
- tomato sauce
- jam
- vinegars (balsamic and apple cider)
- one can of tuna (today's lunch for me!)
- some of the frozen bread that I have rescued from the bread graveyard, AKA the deep freeze
- some hot sauce

I think thats a pretty good start, to be honest. After having just reviewed the picture of my pantry I have decided that tonights dinner will be rice with chicken something something Indian. We'll see how it goes once I am in there.