Make breakfast! Eat yam-cakes!


If you thought I was just weird about dinner, you are mistaken. Consider this the first entry in my also being particular about breakfast! Especially if you have little ones that eat at home before they head to school. If your schedule allows it, I highly recommend feeding your children at home before school, too. Its one more chance to sit as a family, together, and share about the coming day, enjoying each other's company before the hectic beginning of things. We vary breakfast, have a rotation of about 8-10 go to meals we run through every two weeks and eat them all, as I mentioned, together. We have three young kids to get up and feed in the morning, so I don't have time for an IHOP style buffet, but did you know that the awesome pancakes I made from scratch this morning with a full serving of vegetables in them only took 30 minutes to conjure up, and 15 of those minutes were the yams boiling on their own while I took a shower!

This morning we were out of cereal (which accounts for maybe one breakfast a week anyhow. We already cooked oatmeal this week. Already had parfaits. What now? This morning, it was yam pancakes. My four year old called them yam-cakes, my six year old yum-cakes. I called them super nutritious. Yam are high in vitamin B6 which protects against cardiovascular disease, potassium which can help keep blood pressure down, and fiber, which fills you up and keeps you full longer. Yam's have a natural sweetness to them that you don't necessarily need to add any additional sugars to the batter, just the yam itself. I recommend tasting the batter before you cook it and if needed, add a tablespoon or two of honey and mix it in.

I based our yam cakes off the following recipe that calls for sweet potatoes, but added 1 teaspoon of cinnamon to the mix and used about 2 regular sized yams, boiled until soft and then hand mashed with a fork. I also used half white all purpose flour and half whole wheat flour to up the nutritional goodness.

Yam Cakes recipe base from all-recipes.

 Try these drizzled in butter and honey (skip the Aunt Jemima stuff, its mostly corn syrup!)