Banana Pecan Buttermilk Pancakes

So you know when you're about to leave on vacation, or when you're at the end of the shopping week and you have to play your own version of Chopped in order to use up the ingredients that are gonna go bad? Yeah....well that was us tonight. My ingredients: an overripe banana, buttermilk that expired today, and 1 egg (what a great basket, huh?).

So ran to my pantry, that is admittedly less well stocked than the Chopped kitchen, and added some pecans to the mix. Well, when I see buttermilk I think pancakes, and growing up we always had tons of banana pancakes, so I was all over it. I thought it might be fun to try something new though, so I looked up some buttermilk banana pancake recipes and came up with this scrumptious recipe. Did I mention we ate these for dinner? ANNNND, I only had enough ingredients to do a third of the recipe. The good news? It was still 100% delicious. 

I am so used to mashing my bananas straight into the batter, that I thought this was really weird to have them sliced on top. The result, though, was amazing. You end up cooking these pancakes in melted butter (I never said these were ultra healthy) and when you flip the pancakes over, the bananas get all caramelized. Mitch and I both decided we liked it this way better than mashed. 

No time to get fancy with the plating tonight---the bellies were grumbling at this point and I was just lucky to GET the picture! 

The batter DID come out thicker than I'm used to, which resulted in some lopsided looking pancakes.

Luckily Mitch didn't seem to notice! ;) 

I guess neither did I. Happy Breakfast, or I guess Dinner!

RECIPE