Pumpkin Pancakes

I love cooking and I love pumpkin... so you guessed it, that means we make a lot of pumpkin flavoured things around here! Our most recent pumpkin treat was pumpkin pancakes. Made from scratch these pancakes are wonderfully healthy, deliciously moist, and they freeze and re-heat well too. It's also a great way to sneak some extra veggies into your little ones!

These pancakes are a big hit with the boy-o too because he loves finger foods and being able to feed himself. Because of all the spices in them they're quite flavourful even without any toppings added.

Here's the recipe:

Pumpkin Pancakes

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 cup canned pumpkin purée (not pumpkin pie filling)
1 1/4 cups whole milk
1 egg
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Vegetable oil

Directions:

1. Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger and sugar in a large bowl. Set it aside.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk together the pumpkin with the milk, egg and melted butter. Slowly add the wet mix into the dry ingredients and stir to combine. Allow the batter to rest at room temperature for 20-30 minutes.
3. Heat a large frying pan over medium-low heat and add just enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan, allowing it to heat for 2 to 3 minutes.
4. Cook pancakes of your desired size until bubbles appear in the center, then flip them once and continue cooking until no longer doughy in the center.


These pancakes are amazingly delicious with some maple syrup added on, but you can play around to find your favourite flavour combinations. And don't forget, you can freeze any leftovers in a freezer safe food storage bag and simply pop thawed pancake into the toaster to re-heat them.

Fall Fun: Pumpkin Patch

Last weekend we started off Fall right by taking a trip out to a pumpkin patch. We had a lot of fun, and they had all kinds of neat decorations made with hay bales and signs. The boy-o loved running around in the field and he kept trying to pick up the pumpkins with his strong man grunts. The pumpkin patch also had all kinds of varieties that I'd never seen before--some of my favourites were the "warty pumpkin" and some gourds that looked like flowers and jelly fish.

They had hay bales painted to look like different things too. They had a rooster one, a spider, a group of three pumpkins, and some angry birds ones! Definitely some creative decorations for sure. They also had a corn maze and a pumpkin lawn bowling section where you tried to knock down 2L pop bottles by rolling a pumpkin at them!

My sister was down visiting last weekend, so we made a big group family trip out with my parents too. They provide you with huge wagons to load your pumpkins in, and the boy-o was pretty determined that he wanted to help push!

And like all good farms they had some painted cut-outs too! We look pretty spooky don't you think?

It was a really great way to start off the Fall season for us, and hopefully we'll get a chance to go apple picking sometime soon too. We've already put some of the pumpkin to good use making pumpkin pancakes! Mmmmm..... 

Happy October!

October is my favourite month of the year--the changing leaves are in full swing, the temperatures are perfect for wearing your favourite cozy sweater, and it holds all my favourite days: My birthday, Thanksgiving, my Wedding Anniversary, and of course Halloween!!

Every since I was a little kid Halloween has always been my favourite day of the year. I LOVE decorating and picking out my pumpkins and often start planning out my pumpkin carving a month in advance. Now that it's officially October... the search for the perfect pattern is on!

This Halloween will be extra special, because it will be the boy-o's first Halloween! He's already got a costume and several Halloween themed outfits to wear on the surrounding days.

Because Halloween is such a favourite day in our household, we also chose last Halloween to be our "Official Announcement" to the world that our family was going to be expanding. Below is the photo that we posted along with our announcement.



"The Layman family is expanding! The newest Spook is due to arrive in April. Hadrian's not quite sure what to think about it all, but I bet he's hoping it's a Trick. Happy Halloween!"

 

 

 How did you make your "New Arrivals" announcement?

Was is seasonally themed?

Fall is coming--and that means canning season is too!

Last year hubby and I tried our hand at canning. We tried making our own salsa and we made some spicy dill beans. I come from a long line of canners and I always loved having homemade pickles, jams and other preserves to eat throughout the year that we had made ourselves. I had never attempted to do any canning on my own though until last year, and it was definitely an adventure! It's a lot of work--but it's totally worth it!

 

This year I think we're going to make some more spicy dill beans (which we and guests have devoured all year long!), and we would like to try dill pickles as well as some elderberry jam this time.

Our salsa which looked delicious while being prepared and cooking, ended up tasting pretty terrible. It's really sweet and not spicy at all, so I think we'll pass on that one this time around. Maybe we'll attempt it again next year after consulting with the canning elders on what we might have done wrong!

 

 



The final products however looked pretty awesome, and let's face it, we consumed all of the spicy dill beans AGES ago. My sister tries to steal a jar whenever she can! It's sad really. I even gave her one for Christmas. The chili pepper in the dill beans not only adds lots of flavour, it provides a nice colour punch too!

I've never made Jam before, but I'm excited to give it a try! Elderberries are a particular favourite of mine, and appear to be an Ontario thing since many friends from other places have no idea what they are... what they are is DELICOUS! We're hoping to go berry picking this weekend, and in the meantime we need to re-evaluate our canning supplies to figure out what we need to pick up before then.

We need to get this skill down so that we can pass on the wisdom of canning to the boy-o, because lets face it, not much beats eating your own jam made from fresh fruit in the middle of winter!