Since green eggs and ham just weren’t going to fly at my dinner table, we decided to try a green pancake recipe for St. Patrick’s Day. By the shade of these pancakes you can see that they didn’t use green food coloring! The color comes from a nutritious blend of baby spinach, blueberries, and banana. My littlest leprechaun was making all kinds of faces at these green gems while they were cooking, but she announced at the dinner table that they were delicious and tasted like banana muffins. While the original recipe from Popsugar called for a banana sauce, I topped mine with Greek yogurt mixed with maple syrup.
This isn’t our first time baking with baby spinach – these adorable mini spinach cake muffins from Weelicious have also been popular in our house. Spinach is a good source of vitamins A and K, folate, fiber, and non-heme iron. With one daughter approaching her teenage years (when iron needs almost double), I’m thinking more about ways to incorporate iron in favorite foods. There is a lot to say about the importance of iron and how to optimize our intake, so stay tuned for a future blog post on that topic!