Cricket Flour Pancake Recipe!

Hello and Happy Presidents Day to everyone reading this!

Today I will be revealing the recipe for my delicious cricket flour pancakes as requested by Aspire Food Group on Twitter! Get excited!!

But first I would like to share with you a cartoon from this week's New Yorker, one of my favorite magazines, it made me laugh so hard! Here it is:

New Yorker cartoon by Will McPhail

Isn't that hilarious? All right, now to the recipe!

This recipe is actually a combination of two pancake recipes, one from Bitty Foods and the other from the amazing cookbook The Family Cooks by Laurie David which I HIGHLY recommend that you all purchase!

Decadent Cricket Flour Oat Pancakes

A heart-shaped blueberry batch that I made for Valentines Day

Yields: 10 (5-inch) pancakes

11/2 cups of milk (can be cow, goat, almond, soy...)

3 eggs

1 tablespoon of maple syrup or honey

1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon

11/2 cups of cricket flour

1/12 cups of rolled oats

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

coconut oil (for the pan)

Optional: Add-ins like banana slices, blueberries, nuts, or chocolate chips

1. Blend the oats in a blender until desired grain size is reached, I prefer finer grains, but whatever floats your boat! Combine oats in a bowl with the milk, eggs, maple syrup, cricket flour, cinnamon, baking powder, and salt and mix in an electric mixer until smooth. Let the batter rest for 10 minutes to let it thicken. 

2. At this time if you wanted to add anything in, mix in your fruit or nuts now!

3. Melt the coconut oil in the pan and let it heat up before spooning in your batter. Keep in mind that these pancakes are thick and that you will need to spread the batter around the pan in order to achieve a flat pancake.  Because these pancakes are thicker, they will need to cook for longer so cook and flip until both sides and edges are golden brown.

4. Serve with whatever fixings you want! I like to add clementine slices, banana slices, walnuts, ground cinnamon, and a spoonful of almond butter to top off my stack.

I just recently made a large batch of these pancakes and I have enough to have pancakes for breakfast for the rest of the week! Woohoo!!!

I hope you guys enjoy this recipe! Let me know how they turn out in the comments or you can show me via Instagram post with the hashtag #gourmandacricketpancakes. I want to see your beautiful stacks and I will repost all of your photos to my account @gourmanda_

Have a great Presidents Day!

More,
Gourmanda

Jiminy Cricket!

Last Sunday I ate bugs for the first time.

No they were not crunchy or bitter, salty or squishy. They were actually quite delicious! This probably was due to the fact that I was eating pancakes made from cricket flour (see previous post about crickets!), and not whole bugs, which I do plan on doing. In fact, if I was unaware of the fact that I was eating insects, I would not have known the difference!

I made cinnamon cricket pancakes with bananas, topped with almond butter more bananas, and almonds. They were sweet and savory, fluffy and nutty, a perfect weekend-morning pancake! I really feel that insects are the new frontier for American cuisine and that I am a pioneer by being the first to try it out.

That is why it was crazy when on last Thursday evening, I received an email from someone I admire very much. Cynthia Graber of the new podcast on the science and history of food, Gastropod, replied to an email that I had sent for Gastropod's giveaway to the first four emailers of cricket treats from Aspire Food Group. She said that she and Nicola (her co-host) had already chosen four lucky listeners, but that they had contacted Aspire and agreed to send a gift basket to me as well!! I will be honest here, I was so happy when I heard this that I collapsed on the floor of my kitchen and started to cry. Oh, teenagers! :) If by any chance Cynthia or Nicola are reading this, I would like to thank you again! I am so excited to receive my gift basket and will share my review of it on this blog.

Whew! So that is where we are in my adventures with crickets, stay tuned to learn what becomes of me after I O.D. on bugs and I will also tell you more about Gastropod and how much I love it!

As always,

More,
Gourmanda

My New Obsessions!

Hi foodies!

Here is just a mini post to tell you about my new food obsessions! If you follow me on Instagram (@gourmanda_) they you may already know about these, but if not, keep reading!

1. Dried Figs
The other day here on the east coast, we were all scared out of our minds by meteorologists and newscasters about the big "Blizzard of 2015." In preparation for said blizzard my brother and father were sent on a shopping excursion to Stew Leonards to stock up on storm goodies and non-perishables. When they came home, they had to take four trips from the car to carry in all the bags. I will guesstimate that there were around 40 bags covering our dining table and kitchen island and flooding the floor. It was insane. Why am I telling you this? Well, one of those 40 some-odd bags contained a bag of dried figs, which I discovered a day later in the nut and dried fruit drawer. I had seen plenty of pictures of fresh figs on Instagram, and heard the claims to their juiciness and yumminess. So I prepared some toast with goat cheese, sunflower seeds and figs for myself. Oh yes, figs are heavenly. And sweet. And delicious. I cannot wait until I can get my hands on some fresh ones, but for now I am perfectly content with my sun-dried version.

2. Tazo Chai Tea
As you readers may or may not know, I love to write! I am part of a wonderful writing program called Writopia in which you are mentored by a published writer and you get to write whatever you want! Sounds like heaven, right? Well it is. And as part of the program you get to go on trips, usually to Manhattan, to participate in events like reading poetry in a club (so cool!) or getting to go to a publishing house and learn about the publishing process. Well on this trip we went to go listen to Young Adult authors read and talk about their newly published books. On the way there we passed one of my favorite restaurants in the city, Max Brenner's and I insisted that we go in. I ordered a chocolate syringe (it's exactly what it sounds like) and my friend Kaley ordered Chocolate Chai tea. now I had heard about chai tea before, and since my vacation to California in 2013 in which I had a sore throat the whole time and ordered tea with honey and lemon at every restaurant, I was becoming an amateur tea drinker. Of course we tasted each others orders and hers was very yummy. Fast forward several months later and Tazo Chai Tea is a main stay in my day-to-day diet.

If you guys love dried figs and chai tea too, let me know! Or if you've never tasted either, let me know that too! What are your present food obsessions? Comment them beloooow!

More to come!
Gourmanda

TIME Magazine Cracks Open the Labeling Shell/Vegetarian Considerations Brought to you by Buzzfeed

Image from www.ferretharmony.net

In their January 13th issue, Anita Hamilton, writer for TIME Magazine, wrote a piece about what the labels on your egg carton really mean. "Omega-3?" Your hen has been fed algae, flaxseed, or fish oil. "Cage Free?" Your chicken was probably living in a giant house, suffocating on the feathers of it's neighbor. This article is a very important one because we innocently believe what the producer wants us to believe, and that is not how it should be. I urge you guys to read the full article here.

Another brilliant thing that I came across this week was a video made by Buzzfeed. It showed some of their staff, who considered themselves foodies, go to a farms and go through the whole chicken raising and "harvesting" (slaughtering) process. As I consider myself a foodie, I really enjoyed watching this because it really made me question whether killing an animal for my consumption is a just and humane thing to do. I have been considering going vegetarian for a while now, and I have been slowly eating less meat at home, ordering tofu instead at restaurants, and cooking new Asian dishes that use tofu. I recently made a recipe that included firm tofu, enoki mushrooms, and rice that my neighbor suggested I make and it tasted amazing! I wish I had some pictures for you, but I will definitely be making it again, so you wont need to wait long!

I have been having so many snow days recently (not complaining!) that I have had a lot more time to think about what I am eating and also experiment with more sophisticated dishes.  It has been really fun, I wish I usually got this much time for food!

That said, the snow in New York is getting to be a little much. What did Punxsutawney Phil say? Six more weeks 'til Spring? I guess I can wait. :)

More,
Gourmanda