Ali is someone I’ve known for about, ooh, nine years. I ‘met’ her on line via I Want My Mum, which was a parenting forum I used to co-run. I’ve never actually met her but we seem to share similar tastes in certain foods and I always look at her recipes with particular interest.

She shared this recipe for oatmeal pancakes which I wanted to try. We’ve been making these pancakes for a good few years now. And whilst I love them, and they do contain fruit, I’m aware they have a lot of flour in them. Even though we now always make them with half white/half wholemeal, we always seem to be starving a few hours after eating them and without wanting to sound like a carb bore, if I have these for breakfast, and say a sandwich for lunch, I feel really carbed out.

But! Ali’s pancakes are mostly oatmeal which is so good for you. They do contain a bit of flour but not much comparatively. You do need to make them the night before, but I don’t actually mind this now that I am an organised mother-type and not a rock and roller who traipses into the house at 4am wanting immediate carb satisfaction.

But anyway, my friend Emily has also reported great success with just warming the milk and oats up the morning you make them, so you could also try that.

I was almost quivering with hunger when I made these on Saturday morning so too greedy and impatient to take a pic. We served ours with live yoghurt and blueberries and strawberries. And maple syrup.

The recipe below is halved and, really, for me to have handy as we found the original made too many for us. Although we are four, my two girls eat just one or two pancakes. Do follow Ali’s original recipe though if you are more than two adults and two small children with bird-like appetites.

Here they are, Ali’s oatmeal pancakes:

65g oatmeal, the proper pinhead stuff. I have some by a company called Rude Health

125g plain full fat, live yoghurt, I used Greek style as that’s what we always have

112g milk, I used semi skimmed organic as that’s what we get

half a teaspoon of honey, mine is from the beehives of Gabrielle Palmer no less (get ME)

15g plain white flour

15g plain wholemeal flour (I now use 30g wholemeal flour and leave out the white flour completely)

half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda

a big pinch of salt (quarter of a teaspoon kinda thing)

1 egg (note if you have very small eggs use two)

The night before. Mix together the oatmeal, milk, yoghurt and honey. Leave in the fridge overnight. This is the ideal, if you can’t then even just an hour soaking helps.

The next morning, add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.

I use a cast iron griddle. Mine is this one if anyone is interested and it’s brilliant for pancakes. I put a tiny drop of oil and spread it around with a silicon pastry brush (if it were natural bristle they would melt) and then put on three tablespoons of mixture per pancake and on that griddle I can fit three pancakes. When I say tablespoons I mean just the spoons I eat soup and puddings with, not an actual measure.

Turn the pancakes when they look ‘holey’ on top. About two minutes each side. Use your common sense here..I keep my warm in the warming drawer but a low oven would work. Or dish them out, as they’re done, to eager recipients.

They are delicious and everyone in my family loves them and declared them much better than our regular ones. They are nutty, ‘bitey’ and so much more filling than regular pancakes. So good to have that amount of oatmeal (and yoghurt) in pancake form. Of course we won’t talk about the amount of maple syrup I marry them with..

Try these this weekend. Next I must try Emily’s sourdough pancakes.

Eating notes: I have kept this mixture, i.e. the whole mixture with the eggs and flour etc added, overnight when I made too much one greedy Saturday; it keeps really well until the next morning when you can have pancakes all over again.