Thanks to Facebook, I found out it was Pancake Day (or Shrove Tuesday) today ! Never wanting to miss an excuse for pancakes, I decided to whip up a batch of our favourite pancakes from one of the best healthy recipe blogs around, Health Food Lover.

Of course, you know I never make a recipe the way it tells me to. I am a serial tweaker. So here is my version of Michelle’s fabulous Green (Spinach) Pancakes recipe.

Healthiest Pancakes Ever…. They’re Green!

So, this is what you need:

3 organic eggs

1 large handful of washed baby spinach

1 and a 1/2 large bananas

1/2 cup almond meal

1/2 cup wholemeal spelt flour

1 tablespoon chia seeds

coconut oil for cooking

to serve:

vanilla yoghurt or cashew cream

blueberries

So, this is how you do it:

Whizz the heck out of the spinach and eggs in a food processor, blender or thermomix. You don’t want any identifiable green leaves or the kids might freak out !

Chuck the banana in and whizz again. Stir in the flour, chia seeds and almond meal.

For those of you with a thermomix, I made the almond meal in the thermy, then added the spinach, banana and eggs and blitzed on speed 10 for 20 seconds, scraping the bowl. Then I added the spelt flour and chia and mixed on reverse, speed 5 for about 10 seconds or until it was combined.

Heat up the coconut oil in a pan (medium high heat) and fling in tablespoons of pancake mix. Turn when little bubbles appear.

Serve with the vanilla yoghurt on top and the blueberries. Do not tell children there is spinach in their afternoon snack….. they will never know!! There is no spinach flavour, just delicious banana!

Well, okay, my New Age Natural Girl, did twig something funny was afoot because they were GREEN, but she loved them. So did my New Age Natural Boy – none left for Dad !

Some tips:

* you can make these pancakes fully gluten free by replacing the flour with almond meal

* you don’t need to add sugar to the mix if you are serving it with fruit and yoghurt, but if you aren’t you might appreciate a tablespoon or two of rapadura sugar in it

* don’t let this mixture sit for too long before cooking as chia seeds gel up

Happy Pancake Day !!