Guest Author - Deborah Markus

I've written before about how wonderfully bananas and chocolate go together. What I may not have mentioned is how often I crave a bit of chocolate in the morning, and how rarely I can find some socially acceptable way of getting it. Hot chocolate is very nice, but sometimes I want something with more body to it.

Part of the reason I can't just breakfast on a chocolate bar and be done with it is that I have a young child, which means that even when I can't bring myself to care about being healthy for my own sake, I have to pretend to in order to set a good example for him. We eat a lot of hot, healthy, whole-grain breakfasts in our house, and one morning I stumbled on a chocolate opportunity quite by accident.

My son doesn't care for bananas straight from the peel, but he will eat them in the form of banana pancakes. These are very easy to make. Just peel and take a fork or potato masher to enough bananas (about three or four) to make one and a half cups of mashed banana. Sprinkle a little lemon juice over this, and then stir in one cup of oat flour, which you can find at the health food store or make yourself by grinding some rolled oats in a food processor until they make a flakey powder.

Separate an egg. Stir the yolk into the banana mixture, and beat the white until it's fluffy and holds a soft peak (you don't want it too stiff). Fold the white into the batter and you're ready to fry up some banana pancakes.

We eat these quite often -- they're sweet enough that I don't even bother putting syrup on them (though my son does). This week, as I was cooking up a batch of them, it occurred to me that we had a lot of mini-chocolate chips leftover from my holiday baking. It was still Christmas vacation, and I was in holiday mode.

"How would it be if I threw some of these into what's left of the batter?" I asked my nine-year-old.

It would be wonderful. It would be absolutely ambrosial, in fact.

How many chips should one add to the batter? That depends on you. Start sprinkling them in until you get a density that looks right. If you don't have mini chips, you can use full-sized ones.

Have a wonderful breakfast and a wonderful day.