Whole grain apple pancakes

Update: please also see this alternative version, where I used steel cut oats instead of rolled oats.

These are a big hit with Baby B, my 20-month-old daughter. They're also about as healthy as you can get a pancake to be. I can almost kid myself that they're healthy because the flour is 100% whole wheat. The ground flax seed holds everything together beautifully so you don't need the higher gluten content of white flour. You can add oat bran and wheat germ to make them extra fiber-rich if you feel like it, but no big drama if you don't.

Ingredients:
1 cup rolled oats (the old-fashioned kind, not the quick kind)
1/4 cup ground flax seed*
1 teaspoon oat bran (optional)
1 teaspoon wheat germ (optional)
3/4 cup milk (I used skim, but any kind would be fine, including non-dairy milks)
2 eggs
2 apples, grated with the skins on**
2 tablespoons brown sugar (you could leave this out to be extra healthy, but I find it improves the texture)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Half a stick of butter (2 oz or ca. 55g), melted
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder

Mix the rolled oats, flax seeds, oat bran (if using), wheat germ (if using), sugar, salt, cinnamon, milk, and eggs together with a fork.

Stir in the grated apple and the melted butter.

In a separate small bowl, mix the flour and the baking powder. Tip into the wet ingredients and stir with the fork until just combined. Don't overmix or the pancakes may be rubbery.

Melt a tablespoon of butter in a cast-iron frying pan over medium-high heat. (A non-stick pan is fine too, but I'd steer clear of a stainless steel one.) Using a 1/8 cup measure (or a large spoon), drop up to five spoonfuls of batter onto the pan. When little bubbles start to appear on top, flip them over with a spatula and cook the other side until it's a light golden brown, pressing down on the pancakes with the spatula to flatten them slightly.

Test out one of the pancakes before you take them all out of the pan to make sure they're cooked in the middle. The first lot may not be any good, but don't despair, this recipe makes a lot of batter and you'll have plenty of chances to make better ones.

Serve unadorned, or with butter, or maple syrup, or a dusting of icing sugar, or fruit, or...anything you like, really.

Serves 6



*This might not seem like a particularly frugal ingredient, but I can get a pound of it for absolute pennies in my budget supermarket's bulk aisle. You can get it pre-ground, but it tends to go rancid fast, so I buy the whole seeds and grind small quantities in my coffee grinder.
**You could peel them if you really wanted to, but I'm too parsimonious to waste anything edible.