Today's Butter Soaked WOW....

 

Kefir Sprouted Buckwheat/Almond Buttery Pancakes, Cooked in Butter and Smothered in Crème Fraîche

Oh yes! So this is heart-attack material is it? Funny, because there is plenty of evidence suggesting that it might just be high blood glucose that contributes most to high triglycerides and the inflammatory processes now understood to be behind atherosclerosis, not fat per se. And both short-term clinical studies, such as this one, and long-term epidemiological studies in which other risk factors have been appropriately excluded have failed to so any correlation between high-fat diets and cardiovascular disease.

I made a couple of these pancakes spontaneously, just felt like them and had no other particular plan for nice fatty quick lunch. They were so heavenly, I keep checking to see if I am hungry for them again, which would be good because I still have a bit of batter left that I don't want to waste. Hmmm, a certain tired hungry philosopher I know might have them foistered upon him when he gets home from work, because I still don't seem to have my appetite back again some 6 hours after eating just 3 of these, even though they were heavenly.

I put this down to 2 things: firstly the sprouted flour is very high in fibre and protein and relatively low in carbohydrate. The fibre does get broken down into available energy, but this is not a quick process and it is not OUR cells that do that work. It is the bacteria in the gut and their metabolism of it converts it fatty acids, not glucose. Among the actual carbohydrates that it does contain, there are non-starch polysaccharides in the form of inulin derived from agave cactus (no, not the yucky fructose syrup extract you see marked as a 'health food', but rather the vegetable polysaccharides in the fibrous parts of the plant). I seem to recall in one of my nutrition textbooks in biomed sciences claiming that NSPs have been found to be associated more than any other molecule with satiety...

Secondly, there is a large amount of saturated fat in this meal. It is just one of those meals that seem to give you exactly what you want.

So this is what is responsible for my frustratingly profound satiation:

- 1 genuinely free-range egg
- 2 tablespoons of Living Intentions organic sprouted buckwheat/almond flour
- a splash of  home-made organic raw-milk kefir
- about 15g of melted cultured pastured butter
- a half teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate
- a drip of organic non-sugared pure vanilla extract

The batter was somewhat runny, and without gluten, these pancakes do not stretch. So I just put lots of butter in a cast-iron pan on very low heat and let the batter barely sizzle until the pancakes were barely firm enough to flip. I keep them small so that this is easy to do.

On removing them from the pan, I put more butter on them, let them cool a little and then smother them with a generous blob of crème fraîche.

 These are slightly crispy on the outside but softly spongy inside and when you bite them, the butter oozes down your chin causing a deep feeling of contentment, and a powerful sense that everything in your life is going to be just fine.