quinoa pancakes

Do you ever toss left over quinoa, cous cous, or rice into a tupperware and into the fridge, after dinner, only to find it shoved in the back a week later and think, man what a waste?  That happens almost every time around here.  I usually pack it up because I hate to throw it out, but we rarely find ourselves pining for quinoa two nights in a row.  And then it gets forgotten.

In a random "pancake" search on Pinterest, I stumbled across a recipe for quinoa pancakes.  Quinoa is a super grain, so why not start off the day with some baked into a pancake?  I was skeptical, but they looked and smelled really good as they were cooking.

The recipe made 11 3.5"(ish) pancakes.  About 79 calories per pancake.  2 pancakes, paired with 2 of yesterday's sweet potato hash browns (and a cup of coffee), was a pretty tasty way to start off the day.

These pancakes are not your typical pancake.  They are more dense and savory, compared to your light, fluffy, sweet buttermilk ones.  So a little sugar free syrup and the sweetness of the sweet potato hash browns gave it just that bit of sweetness that these needed to start the day.  

These would probably be pretty good for dinner with an over-easy egg on top.  And a slice of perfectly cooked bacon.  Mmmm...I think I know what I'm having for dinner.  (Our pantry is pretty bare, so I'm having to make everything stretch until pay day.)

So these are good, but in all honesty, I wouldn't go out of my way to make them.  I prefer my pancakes sweeter and lighter, but this is a really great way to make use of that leftover quinoa.  So, I probably will make these again, I just won't cook a batch of quinoa solely for these pancakes.

By the way, when did my blog turn into a recipe review?  Geesh.

[You can check out my Pinterest pinboard of "tried and true recipes" with a few comments I have added on each of them.  I'm still working on flipping through my recipes to update this board, since this is a newly developed board.]