Sometimes Saturdays mean putting on pants that make your butt look good, rocking some thick 4 inch wedge heels that make you feel like a badass, and traipsing around the downtown mall with unwashed hair because WHO CARES you feel great. So you stuff yourself with Indian food and french macarons and PDA all over the place with your lover and giggle too much because YOU GUYS there was a carousel on the walking mall today. A CAROUSEL. So many tiny children riding plastic ponies with half-enthused parents hovering, guardian-like over the slowest-but-potentially-most-thrilling experience of their 3 year olds' young lives. Memories.

It's so funny seeing your hometown blink blearily into consciousness after a slow, sleepy, frigid winter. The only people I saw on the walking mall for the last 4 months were moms running errands, street musicians, homeless folks, the suits (lawyers, real estate agents, etc.) who work on the mall, dedicated restaurateurs, and coffee nerds. Yep. That about sums it up.

But today was warm. Which means the swarm has begun. People were eating ice cream today. IN PUBLIC. Does that mean it's Spring? I know Spring's "officially" here (yeah, I see you buds on the trees and robins chillin' in my front yard). But a storms a comin' next week. Which means more snow. And more of me grumbling from underneath of a knit blanket with lots of toast and coffee.

But today convinced me -- and I think everyone else -- that the worst is over. I might even laugh in the face of the impending ice storm and drink iced coffee next Tuesday while the buds on my cherry tree frost over -- just to show Winter that I'm over it. I've moved on. Our break up is for real.

Today was a great day for flaunting how good it feels to have warm weather return. I might even wear a dress next week (and not black dress).

So these pancakes. They're the best pancakes I have ever made. Their fluffy and thick and sweet without being too sweet. And they're made with einkorn!

Let me tell you a bit about Einkorn. Einkorn is one of the original wheats that man ate back in the days before mass agriculture. At the time of man's early farming career, there were two major types of cultivated wheat: einkorn and emmer. At some point in human history, man decided to continue cultivating and hybridizing emmer wheat and pretty much forgot about good ol' einkorn.

Modern wheat is all derived from emmer. Emmer is what we call "polyploidy." That means when you hybridize two different types of wheat together, the resulting baby wheat has twice as many chromosomes as it's individual parent plants did. So for example mom and dad might have 8 chromosomes each, and baby wheat has 16 chromosomes.

Because of this, when modern wheat is hybridized and further refined in attempts to create more productive plants, the resulting wheat is unlike its parent plants. In fact, the baby emmer wheat will contain proteins that have never before been digested by humans. Some believe that the highly hybridized wheat developed in the 1960's -- the high-yield dwarf wheat responsible for solving a lot of world hunger problems -- is to blame for the massive modern development of coeliac disease and wheat intolerance.

The proteins in einkorn wheat are different entirely from those in emmer derivative wheat. And einkorn was never highly hybridized. In fact, it has barely been developed for the last 9,000 years. Modern einkorn -- the stuff in these pancakes -- is genetically almost identical to the einkorn grains found in the stomach of Otzi the ice man.

There's some evidence that the proteins in einkorn are less toxic to those with non-coeliac wheat intolerance (it's not safe for full blown coeliacs). In fact, I can eat it (YAY!) whereas I have an intolerance to all wheat and spelt.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE.

Einkorn is a better source of calcium, protein, phosphorous, zinc, and the antioxidant lutein than regular wheat. Einkorn has as much lutein in a serving as a large egg -- which contributes to it's pale, yellow-ish color. It has a nutty, slightly lemony flavor and makes a damn fine pasta. 

But the main win on einkorn, for me, is that it's wheat that I can eat without feeling sick! Huge. plus.

And here's a prettymuchperfect pancake recipe to prove my undying love for Einkorn.

Lemon Einkorn Pancakes w Honey Whipped Goat Cheese & Blueberries

 adapted from Sprouted Kitchen's Lemon Pancakes w Yogurt & Berries

Ingredients

• 1 cup einkorn flour

• 1 tsp baking powder

• 1/2 tsp baking soda

• pinch salt

• 2 tbsp natural cane sugar

• 2 eggs, yolks and whites seperated

• 1 cup non-dairy milk of your choice (I used Calaffia Farms monkfruit-sweetened coconut almond milk)

• 1/2 vanilla bean, scraped of its seeds

• 3 tbsp fresh lemon juice

• 1 tbsp melted coconut oil, plus more for cooking

• *honey whipped goat cheese

• 1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen, or other fruit topping of your choice (optional)

Method

1. Heat a frying pan or griddle to 325F (medium high). Coat the griddle w coconut oil.

2. In a medium bowl, combine einkorn flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar. Stir together.

3. In a separate bowl combine yolks, milk, vanilla bean, lemon juice, and coconut oil. Add to dry ingredients, stirring to combine.

4. In another bowl, whip egg whites with an electric beater until stiff peaks form. Fold the egg whites into the batter, until just combined -- you should still see some thin streaks of white in the batter.

5. To cook, ladle out batter into 3-4 inch circles and cook until bubbles form and pop in the center -- then flip and cook one to two minutes more until golden brown. Add more oil to the griddle, and repeat until all of the batter is used up.

6. Top the pancakes w honey whipped goat cheese and a plethora of berries!

Honey Whipped Goat Cheese

Ingredients

• 5 tbsp goat cheese

• 1 tbsp wildflower honey

• 1 tsp non-dairy milk

Method

1. In a small bowl beat goat cheese, honey, and milk together until aerated. You can just use a fork, or go all out and break out the electric beater if you really want to fluff it up.

enjoy!

xo, Renee