…I got up to go running. I said it’d just be an easy 3, but I’d rather be sleeping. I thought I’d go anyways, made my way down the stairs, hoped Lefty wouldn’t hate me, but earning pancakes kind of trumped the knee. (To the tune of ‘5 o’clock in the morning - T-Pain, Lily Allen, Whiz Khalifa)
This is what I do when I don’t bring music with me and I’m halfway through my run, still half asleep, dreaming about a stack of pancakes. I change the lyrics to whatever song pops into my head. This morning I was very preoccupied with the fact that I woke up at 5:35AM on my own. Who does this? Well, I do, apparently. All I could think was ‘5 o’clock in the morning…5 o’clock’. You aren’t really all there at 5am, you know? I mean, I was moving around and awake, technically, but complete mental function was lacking. Still, I downed a bit of water with lemon juice, laced up, strapped on my HRM and Garmin and headed out the door.
Weather=perfection at this hour. The sun’s up but it’s too low in the sky to be beating down. Some parts of the trails/forest I ran through were still dimly dark (if that makes sense?), and I realized this was the prime hour for serial killers and rapists to be lurking. I was also a prime target because about a 0.25 mile into my run I realized the reason the world looked so hazy wasn’t because I was still sleepy, but that I’d forgotten to put my contacts in. Basically, I was practically running blind. You know in movies when the picture is all blurry because a character is waking up from being knocked out? That was the view on this entire run. So, not only am I alone in a dim, secluded forest trail, I also can’t see for shit. As I came out of the forested area of the trail, I crossed paths with another runner and a slew of elderly walkers. Old people really like to rise and walk, don’t they? I love it, though, they’re so sweet and always out there bright and early. That will be me one day, shuffling along in a brightly colored pair of orthopedic shoes, waving a shaky hand and saying “back in my day, I was running these here trails”.
I noticed earlier on that, while the timer was on, my pace and distance was blanked out. I thought it was because I was trying out the workout setting for a 3 mile workout, that it would chime in and give me stats at 1 mile. But as I came up on the usual 1 mile mark along this familiar route, those stats remained blank. What. The. Fuck. Then I remembered I’d turned the GPS off last night for the gym last night. Damn it! I stopped, turned it on, and went on my way. The good thing was I caught it, the back thing was the first like, mile and a half-ish wasn’t tracked. Boo. I mapped out the course on Garmin Connect - it was really more like 2.6 miles + .3 walking to cool down. 2.9 miles, avg pace 9:50min/mi seems about right, as I finished in just over 28 minutes.
All I could think about were pancakes. Pumpkin pie pancakes. Paleo pumpkin pie pancakes. This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Not even kidding, I went to bed at 10, but then thought up these pancakes because I wanted to be creative and make my own, then I was worried I’d forget so I grabbed my phone to jot it down and realized I’d been in bed for an hour and hadn’t slept a wink. This is what breakfast does to me. Especially pancakes. I can’t really call the recipe original, I borrowed a bit from a super simple paleo pancake recipe I came across last night that is basically just egg whites and coconut flour, and the Pumpkin Powercake.
For the batter: 1 cup of egg whites, 1/3 cup pumpkin, 1/4 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon, vanilla, stevia, 1 tbsp flaxseed, 1 tbsp coconut milk, 1 tbsp coconut flour (originally omitted but the batter was really liquidy, so I added the flour to thicken things up!)
For the cream: 100(ish)g coconut milk yogurt, pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon, stevia
Super simple, and super delicious.
There was a slight fail in the cooking process. I always have issues in cooking things that start off as a batter. Doesn’t matter what it is: pancakes, waffles, breads, muffins, cupcakes - shit always sticks. So I heated my griddle and slapped some coconut oil on that sht, because nothing ever sticks with coconut oil! Wrong. Shit got stuck. I had the heat set to 200* thinking any higher and, well, stuff will stick. No. Even on low heat, it sticks. So, after waiting eons for 3 little pancakes to cook, and having to get all crazy with maneuvres so that they would unstick and flip, with half of the batter still waiting to be cooked up, I grabbed a small pan, sprayed it with PAM and cooked the rest covered over medium heat. The result: a beautifully giant, fluffy, perfectly browned pancake. Sometimes you need to ditch the fancy coconut oil and just grab a can of PAM. Shit, is PAM paleo? Ah, whatever, you win some you lose some.
I was just reading up on The Whole30 and holy shit are they hardcore! They’re all ‘no stevia or paleo pancakes, that’s sex with your pants on!’ I mean, essentially I totally understand the core of that principle, but my aim here isn’t to ‘replace my addiction to carbs and sugar’. I want a healthy breakfast and I want it to be delicious, too. That’s it. No addiction. No craving. Just nutritious food that tastes good.
Alright, alright, enough talking, on to the food porn:
Nutrition stats, Calories= 442 in case you were wondering. This also includes 1/2 tbsp coconut oil for cooking, so if you omit that then calories/fat will go down. Otherwise, pretty good!
Sometimes a girl’s just gotta have her pancakes, you know?
