Wednesday 16 March 2011

Choc Chip Pancakes with Homemade Chocolate Almond Butter for Dinner... Yes Please!

On Tuesday, I finally got round to getting out the reduced bag of peanuts I'd bought. Luckily I checked the packet before I put them in the blender...these were dry roasted in paprika!


Not ideal for the nut butter I had planned!! Luckily a quick switch to almonds saved the day...


Inspired by Angela at Oh She Glows, I decided to make dark chocolate almond butter. I put 200g almonds in my blender...


and was ready to go! It took my little blender 20 minutes to turn the almonds into almond butter, with much side scraping...


and breaking up of a big almond dough ball after about 15 minutes...


the wait was finally over...and so worth it...


this was delicious as it was, but I added 60g dark chocolate, melted in the microwave with a tiny bit of coconut oil...


to make dark chocolate almond butter...


Ah-mazing! It should've made about 250g, but only 180g made it into the jar!


I plan to make many more nut butters in future :) maybe next time I need to make one Liam will eat though - I only made this yesterday morning, and the entire jar has been eaten, only by me, by this evening...oops! It tastes even nicer once it has been in the fridge for a bit...similar to Nutella, yum yum yum!

I enjoyed some on top of banana porridge (with a scoop of vanilla protein powder in which made it all bubbly!) this morning...


delicious, but the best way to enjoy it (apart from by the spoonful!) was tonight's dinner...


Pancake recipe from here, I followed it except I used 3 tbsp liquid egg whites instead of 1 whole egg as I have a couple of cartons that need using, and I dropped some chocolate chips on top once the batter was in the pan. The first pancake was a bit mis-shapen...


but I soon got the hang of it! As well as the chocolate almond butter, I enjoyed these with maple syrup...


Gorgeous! Perhaps not the healthiest of meals, or indeed the quinoa stuffed peppers I had planned, but it was needed!!

I have had a horrible couple of days! (I realise my problems are nothing in comparison to the suffering of people in Japan etc, I feel guilty stressing about my problems when such horrible things are going on in the world) However...daughter is still off school ill, it's been a week now! I phoned the doctor yesterday but he said it's probably just a virus and we have to wait it out...poor little girl is so not herself, barely eating (which is not at all like her!), high temperature, sleepy, majorly swollen glands etc...not good. She seems to perk up a bit in the fresh air, so yesterday we took her for medicinal ice cream (!) I had a scoop of raspberry ice cream and a scoop of mango yoghurt...


how can I complain when I get to enjoy this by the seafront?!


Yum. Frozen mango yoghurt is my absolute fave, and the raspberry went really well, very summery. Liam was home as well - nice to have his company but that's hassle number two - on his way to uni yesterday morning the car broke down - turns out the whole engine would need replacing and basically the cost of repairs just weren't worth it - a write off. My poor car! If someone had told me a week ago that we'd have been happy to get £100 scrap money for our reliable family-friendly Ford Focus I would not have believed them, sob! So now Liam is hunting for a new car so he can get back to uni...and any hopes of buying an SLR camera anytime soon are now firmly out the window! :( Not the end of the world in the grand-scheme of things, but pretty unexpected and unwelcome for us!!

Anyway, moan over. Having Liam and our daughter home the last few days has sent my eating all over the place! Today especially - I managed my porridge breakfast but, as already mentioned, dinner ended up being pancakes, and lunch was vegetable crisps dipped in houmous and guacamole...


supplemented by many handfuls of Brazil nuts & almonds whenever I went into the kitchen! Tasty, but not what I'd planned!

Fingers crossed for a better day tomorrow! Or at least daughter feeling better, I hate seeing her so poorly and not being able to do much to help her! :(

1 comment:

  1. Hope your daughter is feeling better. That mango sorbet sounds amazing, and so does the nut butter :)

    ReplyDelete

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