A lesson learned, Low Carb Pancakes

Earlier this week I decided I wanted breakfast for dinner, so I researched low carb pancake recipes.  I was looking for simple recipes that didn't use crazy ingredients and had good reviews.  I found a recipe using Pinterest (of course) at Skinny Momma's Blog.  All it required was almond flour, sweetener of your choice, eggs, and oil.  I bought the almond flour awhile ago, on a whim, and stored it in my freezer, so I was happy to find a recipe that used it.  I followed the recipe, tweaking it just a bit.  The recipe was incredibly simple and came out really good.  After dinner I decided to enter the recipe into a calorie calculator and that is where I was shocked, three small pancakes equaled almost 700 calories!  I still had to add in my scrambled eggs, bacon, and jam... this took my dinner to well over 1,000 calories.

I ended up feeling bamboozled, but then I realized that it was my fault.  Focusing on carb counts is great, but I need to make sure to see the WHOLE picture and consider the calorie count of the ingredients I use.   I guess I am bound to make mistakes on this journey, but I kept thinking, "I could have had a cheeseburger for less calories!" The lesson has been learned... for pancakes at least!  I am still sharing the recipe because it was quite good and if you are just doing a plain old low carb diet it could become part of your repertoire or if you are gluten free, this is a great recipe!

Jack Sprat and his Wife (Cauliflower Pizza Crust)

My husband and I are like Jack Sprat and his wife.  Except I can eat few carbs and he is an endurance athlete who needs to eat 2-3,000 more calories than me and a LOT of carbs.  Needless to say, this is annoying when it comes to menu planning.  Notice that I say ANNOYING, but not impossible.  Last night's dinner was an example of how I do split recipes to meet both of our needs.  I made him a whole wheat pizza with regular pepperoni and then I made myself a low-carb cauliflower crust pizza with turkey pepperoni (HELLO, you can have 17 pepperonis for 70 calories, am I the only person astounded by this factoid?).

Our dinners, side by side.  Not too much difference, right?

The cauliflower crust pizza is a hybrid of two recipes.  The first one comes from the blog "What's That Smell?" All cheese crust.  The other recipe involves cauliflower and is from http://sleeploveeat.com/category/recipes/.  I chose to make a hybrid of the two that kept the cauliflower and added cream cheese and an egg white as stabilizer.  

You will not be able to pick this up and eat it like pizza, but it will hit all of the flavor profiles that you love from pizza.  As a friend at work who I fed it to said, "It is almost like lasagna", I agree with that too!

Ingredients

Crust

1 small head of cauliflower, core removed and cut into florets. 

1 1/2 cups mozzarella cheese

4 oz cream cheese

1 tbsp. freshly grated parmesan cheese

sprinkle of oregano

sprinkle of basil

1 egg white

salt to taste. 

Directions
1.  Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.  Place the cauliflower in the microwave safe bowl, cover.  Place in microwave and cook until the florets are soft (5-7min.).  Remove and set aside to cool. 

2. When the cauliflower is cool enough to handle, place it in a potato ricer and rice them.  I used a food mill and that worked okay, I should have used my die with the larger holes.  If you do not have a ricer or mill then go ahead and chop the cauliflower until it is small.  Drain any liquid that comes out. 

My handy dandy food mill that I have used 3x since I got it as a present 8 years ago. 

3.  To the cauliflower add the 4 oz. cream cheese, 1 1/2 cups mozzarella, salt, and egg white.  Mix until it is combined.  


4.  Spread the mixture out onto a greased baking sheet (it might not fill the whole sheet, no worries).  Sprinkle it with the herbs and parm.  Bake it for 15-20 minutes or until it is lightly browned and has some crispy edges (that is the BEST part).  Remove from the oven and turn the oven up to 400 degrees.

5.  Top it with whatever you like!  I used pizza sauce (1/2 cup for the whole pizza, if you are watching your carbs really closely, then you might want to just top it with sliced tomatoes), mozzarella cheese, and turkey pepperoni.  

Ready to go for the 2nd bake. 

**word of caution, if you like a LOT of veggies on your pizza I would precook them to remove some of the moisture.  This crust could get soggy, really easily.  


6.  Bake until it is bubbly and hot, about 15 min.  

7.  Remove from the oven and let it sit for 10 minutes before slicing and serving.  

Looks like pizza, right?