World of Wati: In Place of Wheat

Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day? I think it all depends on your lifestyle including your overall dietary habit.

Breakfast is a meal I sometimes skip simply because I am not hungry. If I do eat breakfast, I usually feel like eating something sweet. Eating a healthy breakfast, or any meal, is of course important, but how many of us know what is a healthy breakfast to begin with? Not cereal. Not toast.

I love pancakes and since I've stopped eating wheat, I've discovered that I can make pancakes using rice flour. Rice is a safe starch, at least for people who are not metabolically ill. I've been putting back rice into my diet after reading one of my favourite health blogs, The Perfect Health Diet.

After the quake, my buckwheat starter had died sitting in the fridge while I was away for a month. So I've stopped making sourdough buckwheat pancakes as I don't have the time to create another starter nor the patience anymore.

Enter rice pancakes.

Rice flour is an ingredient quite common in Malay traditional desserts, and in Japan, they use it to make rice crackers or desserts such as mochi.

I've made different kinds of pancakes with rice flour, such as coconut pancakes, dark chocolate chips pancakes, and cheese pancakes. I even made plain pancakes for Wilkie and he can't tell the difference. He likes them just as much as the wheat based, which I don't use anymore. Wilkie is used to eating toast with Nutella, so he'll ask for Nutella to be spread of the pancakes too. I spread it thinly.

I usually make a batch of coconut pancakes to be frozen and re-heat 4 pancakes in a toaster for breakfast. I love to eat them with full fat yoghurt, full fat cream, macadamia nuts and cooked frozen berries. Good healthy fats are a very important ingredient in a healthy diet that most people don't eat them enough due to mainstream low-fat diet advise. I have a sweet tooth, so I drizzle just a tablespoon of maple syrup, and wash it down with Starbucks coffee with cream and no sugar. Yes, I've learned to drink my hot tea and coffee without sugar before I discovered low carb diet, and I love them this way that I find drinking sweet hot beverages disgusting! Except for the occasional Starbucks Cafe Mocha.

Apart from pancakes, I also use rice flour to make sweet potato muffins. Sweet potatoes are another safe starch, as well as regular potatoes and other tubers.This is a new recipe I created myself, using olive oil. It's still a work in progress as there is room for improvement. I'll blog about it when I get the chance.

Recipe for basic rice pancakes:

1 cup rice flour (not glutinous or sweet rice flour although you can try and use it)

3/4 cup full fat milk
1 egg
1 tsp baking powder
vanilla
1 tbsp rice syrup or sweetener of your choice (optional)

Method:

Mix everything together. If batter is too thin, add more rice flour. If too thick, add more milk. Let it stand for 10 minutes. I find that it gives the pancakes a good rise.
Pour about a tablespoon of pancake batter onto non-stick pan and cook for about 1 minute, or until bubbles appear on surface. Use a bigger spoon or whatever size you like.
Flip pancakes and cook for another minute.

For variation, add desiccated coconut (or coconut flakes), dark chocolate chips or grated parmesan cheese. For cheese pancakes, I usually add some green onions, a touch of garlic powder, salt and pepper to taste. The recipe is versatile to allow as much creativity as possible. I've even tried using coconut milk (in place of cow's milk) and palm sugar and they are yummy!

It is not difficult to eat a healthy meal when wheat is eliminated. This means I don't eat pasta either, so in place of pasta (which is wheat), I eat rice noodles. Who says you can only have bolognese with spaghetti?