Banana Pancakes, Bali-Style with Rice Flour

 Banana Pancakes Bali-Style!

by Lulu (makes 3)

3 T. butter (melt in a small bowl) Then ADD:

½ C. water (less 2 T.)

½ C. white rice flour 

1 egg

1/2 t. baking powder

pinch of salt

1 T vanilla

½ banana, smashed to puree with backside of fork, add to batter  --mixing all together

(2 bananas total)

Pour 1/3 batter into a heated & buttered, non-stick pan.

Working quickly Thinly Slice more banana on top of the poured batter.  Thin enough that they sink into the batter, so that when you flip it  the batter will cook evenly with the sliced banana.  

Serve banana sliced side up with lots of butter and powdered sugar.  

Fill your cake hole! 

Bali story of the pancake 2004 

Every now and then a delectable treat comes across my palate that keeps me dreaming and wondering and eventually, if persistent, brings me to a taste-graving moment which  ignites in me a ridiculous creative attempt in my kitchen to mimic a recipe.  I say ridiculous as this could, and should, include eating more  trials of a similar food in a short time then I care to share, pounds included. This is one treat in which I scrumptiously and happily found a  way to bring it back to me without  the inconvenience of  travel.  

Just before my daughter Morgan turned 12 we took off to Bali, Indonesia for a month, just her and I.  I wanted to be close to her one last, lengthy, time while she still liked me (before  Jr. High which  was looming ahead for that fall) and Morgan wanted  to travel  someplace new and exciting and actually be with me (because years later this will be nearly inconceivable ).  We thought of  the idea one Saturday afternoon.  Bought our tickets just two days later; twenty days after that, we were on a plane to Bali.

The first evening in our beautiful hotel everything was new.  The garden walls and trees were covered in  hanging vines, the smell  of exotic flowers and the meandering water fountains calmed us. Fresh-fallen pink, flower pedals lead up to the entry of our room and we could smell and almost hear the sea that was just down the lane.  Weary from our twenty-plus hours sitting in the cramped seats of three airplanes we chose  to relax now on our  beautiful  veranda.  We called up room-service and ordered a light dinner.  Guessing  off  the unknown  menu I ordered something referred to as Nasi Goring (a Balinese dish made with rice noodles, chicken, shrimp, vegetables and spices).  As a last minute add-on  I ordered a banana pancake.  It was listed in the dessert section. 

Before we left for Bali a friend of ours insisted that we cannot return to the U.S. until we tried a banana pancake.  I insisted that we were not pancake people!  Waffles, yes; dutch-style pane'-cook, yes; crepes, yes!  But fat and sickly heavy pancakes, NO, we never eat' them.  Even recently Morgan had come home from a sleep-over feeling ill after a breakfast announcing  she would never eat another pancake again and why do people like them?  This friend though, was persistent.  She insisted these were like no other (light and fluffy) and she promised us, we would be glad if we tried them.   So as a last minute add-on,  I ordered it on behalf of our dear friend hoping that Morgan would try it for me and make the determination. 

As the sun declined South of the Equator and the evening flowers amped up their fragrances our food came delivered by a kindly Balinese man in a  flowered shirt.  Planting our tired selves at the bamboo settee we tasted the delicious main-dish and our appetite instantly revived!  The spices perfectly balanced.  The meats tender and tasty.  The noodles thin and translucent, made from rice.  But then the pancake.  Oh, the pancake!  Morgan took one bite and looked up at me like she had tasted God.  She grinned and insisted that I must taste this cake.  I must? I must!  I did not want to, at all.  She came around to me with the cake on the fork and said “Mom, you HAVE  to”.  So I did, and at that moment I joined her in this new love, that was it, the end of the non-pancake eating life.  Somewhere in nearly every day that month, in the afternoons with a Balinese coffee;  in the mornings with fruit';  in the evenings with  tea, these pancakes became our best friends.   We left many friends in Bali at the end of our month together and banana pancakes was one of them.

Now,  it has been almost two years since I have had one, except for in my dreams.  My continual  background question was how can something so filling that is made here,  taste and feel in my tummy, so light from there?  A  pancake is not that complicated, not complicated at all!  I contemplated how in Bali  they grow a sweet and delicate white- rice.  They grow it in wet paddies that are tiered on the sides of  the rich soil of volcanic mountains.  Heavenly white-rice is the main crop in Bali.  The delicious noodles we ate were made of rice not wheat flour.  I decided to try rice flour in a  batter in place of American wheat flour.   Frustratingly the only rice flour I could find at the time was a dark and corse brown-rice flour.  Of course it was barely worth my effort as I knew while I was mixing the batter anyways.  I gave up on the idea for awhile until one day it occurred to me that I had in the pantry supermans blender, a machine that my parents gave us as a wedding gift 10 years ago.  This is also known as (drum-roll please) the Vita Mix!  Its engine so powerful the lights in the kitchen dim when I use it in high gear!  The high-entertainment video it came with shows I can grind popcorn into corn-meal!  If we needed to drink wood, we could do it with the aid of this machine.  So I pulled it out donned my ear-plugs and tossed  into the Vita Mix a few cups of  beautiful Sushi-quality rice.  Bingo! Fluffy white stuff came out and—the recipe was born. 

Here for you is the final compilation, about 20 pancakes later.   Another advantage besides the taste and pleasure one is that with these I don't get the usual sugar high/low feeling after eating something sweet like a pancake.   No I'm no nutritionist, but I''m guessing this is simply because  rice is not nearly as glutenous as wheat and likely explains why it is neither as filling nor  as fattening, to me as the American Pancake.  My physical apparatus should reflect this after so many of them, the first day  I  ate FOUR...  I have not gained one ounce (I think, though I would never  check a scale)  and I have eaten at least one nearly every day since! Enjoy!