Lightened Up – Sweet and Savory Pumpkin Butter Crepes

I’m super excited to be Matt’s featured blogger this week.  He always has amazing meals, new foods, and great advice for athletes (and those of us who wish we were).

There’s something about leisurely weekend breakfasts.

I woke up on Saturday morning and made my way to the kitchen for coffee and to make my husband pancakes before he had to leave for work.

I’m still loving the Kodiak Cake mix that I got for such a great price.  The simple, natural ingredient list and the fact that all you have to do is add water. 

When I started pulling items out of my “baking” basket in the pantry, I tried to decide whether my husband would want coconut, walnuts, bananas, or chocolate chips in his pancakes.   They all ended up in the batter.

Two large, fluffy (somewhat healthy) pancakes, made in minutes.

As good as his pancakes looked, I was still thinking about the pumpkin butter and goat cheese combination I’ve been enjoying on toast recently.

Then I thought about the sweet and savory blintz/crepe-like nalesniki I had in Poland.  Traditional crepes often contain more butter and egg yolks than regular pancakes, which makes the batter more moist; the batter is also much thinner than a regular pancake batter, which allows you to make them very thin.

I didn’t feel like making a real crepe batter with extra fat and calories, so I just thinned out the Kodiak mix. 

It worked beautifully.

I got 4 crepes from 1/3 cup of dry mix, which has the following nutrition stats:

[source]

Pretty good, right?  A savory blintz or crepe filling often has some kind of mild soft cheese – typically cream cheese or ricotta.  I wanted to keep the filling calories to a minimum too, so I substituted a mix of cottage cheese and 0% fat Chobani (both of which make this breakfast packed with protein), with a dash of cinnamon and a few drops of vanilla stevia.

Each crepe got spread with a thin layer of pumpkin butter…

Then topped with the “cheese” mixture…

Rolled up and sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Sweet, savory, and most of all – simple.

Approximate nutrition facts (3 crepes, with filling): 290 calories, 2 grams fat, 21 grams carbs, 25 grams protein (!)

1/3 cup of the mix made 4 crepes – and 3 had the pumpkin butter filling.

The last one?  Dessert of course!

White Chocolate PB&Co and a few dark chocolate chips.

Rolled and eaten by hand. 🙂

Questions for you:

Can you enjoy pancakes plain?  I need to have something in the batter / topping to really enjoy them!

Crepes, or hearty, thick pancakes? I think there’s a time and place for both!