When things go right - Paleo Zucchini Pancakes

Lately there has not been much baking in our house. For one, trying to tackle the world left me beyond exhausted. I had to realize that there had to be a compromise between feeding my family healthy quality food, and working myself into exhaustion. It is a balance that I am still working on. I am afraid it will be something I will continue working on.


I will be honest, I missed baking. I am not much of a cook, and I do not have the same appreciation for food that other people have. However, this is something amazing about taking whole foods and combining them to make everyday food, such as pancakes. I think it is a bit sad that it was not until I was thirty before I really learned that food should not come from a box.

Yet the truth of the matter is, sometimes at our house it does have to come from a box. Yes, I am admitting that I can not do everything.

Baking now requires planning. It revolves around the vegetables in our CSA box that I just cannot get around it. Then it takes a day where I can actually take the time to cook. I also have to enlist the kids, helping me cook is the basis of their after school chore. Which means the rest of the house gets messier instead of cleaner.

This is the third week we have gotten zucchini in our CSA box.

Week one - I attempted to make zucchini pancakes from the Practical Paleo book. It was an epic fail. This was majorly because I tried to grate the zucchini using our Ninja. It turned it into liquid. The kids demanded I never cook these again.

Week two - I tried to fry the zucchini and yellow summer squash in a pan with some coconut oil. It did not look very appetizing. J was the only one who would eat them, and he was not a fan. Another epic fail.

The sad thing is that I LOVE ZUCCHINI. I had made an amazing zucchini bread earlier in the year. Yet pancakes just seemed easier.

Week three - I attempted zucchini pancakes again. This time I used the recipe from The Preppy Paleo. Instead of using the Ninja I pulled out our mandolin and sliced the zucchini on the small fry setting. Since the zucchini is soft it went really fast.

I did not include the chopped walnuts - chopping walnuts was to much for me this night. I also did not add any mix ins. While my kids would have loved it if I would have added in chocolate chips, I am really working on sugar at the moment. Enjoy Life chocolate chips have brown sugar, which eliminates them. Unfortunately there is no replacement outside of bar form.

In addition to the pancakes I also cooked up some amazing pork sausage that we get from our local CSA. This stuff is as addictive as chocolate! I then used the grease to cook up some daikon radish hash browns. J helped me out by slicing these also using the mandolin. They did not have much of a taste (we poured hot sauce or ketchup on them), but the constancy was almost an exact match for hash browns.

When S looked at the food and saw nothing she would eat, she pleaded for me to just include two eggs for her. She tried all her food - a few bites of each and gobbled up her eggs.