I totally forgot about the strawberries that the little man and I picked last June until I reorganized my chest freezer a few weeks ago. I had frozen these to make a batch of strawberry jam but never got around to it. They are a great reminder that you don’t need to turn your fruit harvests into sugar filled jams and jellies if you’ve got enough freezer space! We’re approaching the end of winter, so the freshness of these sweet tiny berries was surprising. I just heated them in a saucepan, sprinkled with a teensie bit of organic sugar. They had just the right balance of sweet and tart, something we’ve been missing during the cold months!
I feel almost guilty saying it but, my household is sooooo ready for winter to be over! Why guilty? Well, less than 2 months ago I was harvesting the last of my carrots, beets, and celery. What does that mean? Well, that means that the weather hadn’t really dropped into a hard frost by Christmas. Actually, I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen until at least a few days after New Years. What’s the weather normally like? Well, I live in Michigan and I can tell you that there have been many Halloween’s with snow on the ground (or at least in the skies). And, there are very few Christmases that I can remember without snow, and even if we didn’t have snow, it was most certainly cold enough for it. Even with such a short winter, February, like always, is feeling like the longest month ever!
There’s a weird stress I’ve developed after having my son, a sort of anxiety I get that I’m not exposing him to enough, I feel this very strongly when we’re cooped up inside. Adding to that anxiety is the fact that my son, who was born with a cataract, has to patch his perfect eye for 5-6 hours per day, in order to strengthen his weaker eye (the one that is behind a bit because of multiple eye surgeries resulting from the cataract). To keep that patch on, we have to keep busy. It’s nothing new, because we’ve been doing it since his first surgery at one month old, BUT outside run around/play ground time seems to make patching time go by more quickly.
So, why this whole rambling story? Well, we’ve been doing a lot of gluten free, dairy free, soy free, nut free pancake making in my house this winter because it gives us something fun to do first thing in the morning. Sometimes we use the giant stand mixer because it gives the little man something new to play with. Just recently, we started using the hand mixer (which little man likes to pull out of the batter and place directly on the counter to splatter batter everywhere. Now, I’m sure my delicious strawberries would go great over the top of my gluten free, dairy free, soy free pancakes, but I speculated that they would be even better inside of a nice sweet crepe. My speculations were correct – these are delicious! So delicious that I made 2 batches for my husband, son and I and they both vanished (mostly eaten by my husband – seriously, I think he ate like 5).
We ended up making these gluten free, dairy free, soy free, nut free crepes three days in a row while testing the recipe (using up all of the strawberries I had frozen). On the third day I made chocolate crepes. My husband walked in and frowned when he saw me adding the cocoa powder. “Chocolate?” he said. Then he gobbled them up, topped with strawberries and a sprinkle of powdered sugar, proclaiming that they tasted like brownies. What a perfect sweet treat!
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup my homemade GF pancake mix
-
1 cup dairy free milk of choice (we like So Delicious Coconut Milk 32 Ounce
)
- 2 organic eggs
- 2 tbsp vegetable oil (we use avocado oil)
-
2 tbsp grass fed butter (if you can tolerate it) like Kerrygold Pure Irish Grass-fed Butter
or coconut oil (we like Kirkland Signature Organic Virgin Coconut Oil
) for coating the pan
- 2 cups frozen or fresh strawberries, washed and chopped in half
-
2 tbsp organic sugar (we like Kirkland Signature Organic Sugar
) Did you know that a lot of non-organic sugar contains pesticides? Check out this article)
Instructions
Add pancake mix to a medium sized mixing bowl. Add eggs, milk, and oil and beat to combine. Heat a ceramic skillet to medium/high heat then coat with butter or coconut oil. Use a ladle to add a spoonful of the batter to the middle of the pan, then tilt the pan to coax the batter to the edges. Try to make the crepes as thin as possible. Flip once the underside is golden brown and small bubbles have formed around the edges.
In a small saucepan, mix strawberries and sugar. Heat over medium/high heat.
[…] days doesn’t affect the quality a ton, they were still DELICIOUS when I used them to make my GF Crepes Filled with Strawberries. But, the fresher the better. Btw, the strawberries were in the freezer for like 9 months and were […]