Breakfast for a Week in 10 Minutes or Less

No doubt you’ve heard breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

It’s also one of the hardest ones to fit in for some people. You don’t get a “breakfast break” at work and if you want to make something and sit down and eat it in the morning, you have to get up earlier. In the battle of sleep vs. breakfast, sleep almost always wins.

10 Minutes = Breakfast for a Week

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Sure, you can grab something portable on the way out the door, but you can also have a hot meal without using up those precious extra morning minutes. It just takes a little planning ahead 1 day of the week.

Take your basic overnight crockpot oatmeal recipe- it takes a few minutes in the evening when you’re cleaning up the kitchen, and when you wake up, you have breakfast ready to go.

A batch made with a cup of dry steel cut oats will feed me three or four times, depending on what else I eat with it. So stick with a cup of oats, or double or triple it depending on how much you want to make.

How to Keep the Same Breakfast from Getting Boring

This week I made a batch of apple cranberry crockpot oats. Now, I could honestly probably eat cran apple oats four days in a row without batting an eye, but I also like to mix it up a bit.

The first day I usually eat the oats as-is, right out of the crock pot.

After I serve my helping of oatmeal, I turn off the crockpot and leave the let off to let the rest of the oats cool. When I’m done eating, I get breakfast for the rest of the week ready. This is the only time I have to spend preparing breakfast for 4 days. {More for a larger batch of oats.}

Divide the oats into individual microwavable containers. You can put them in one big container if you want, but I like the grab and go ease of the individual bowls, and the ability to  make them all a little different.

Prepare each bowl of oats however you want it. Some of my favorite combos:

Cranberry almond oats: stir in slivered almonds, chia seeds, and a drop of almond extract.

Banana walnut oats: mash a banana and add it to the mix, along with chopped walnuts, nutmeg, extra cinnamon, and vanilla.

Pumpkin oats: my favorite combo to make, especially with the cran apple oat base. Stir in pumpkin puree, pecans, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and ginger.

I sprinkle some of the extra nuts on top so I can easily see which bowl is which.

Top it Off

You can further mix up the variety of your oats by the toppings you add in the morning. I almost always add some kind of nut butter: peanut butter, almond butter, or cashew butter. I like the almond butter on the plain cran apple oats and cashew butter on the pumpkin cranberry oats.

Now’s also the time to add any toppings you want to stay crunchy, like extra nuts or granola.

Healthy Fast Food

From now on, all I need to do for breakfast is grab a dish out of the refrigerator and pop it in the microwave for a minute or two. It takes more time to brew my morning coffee.

Depending on the day, I either bring the bowl with me, or I take a few minutes to sit down and eat it at home. If I’m feeling fancy, I use a real bowl.

Otherwise I just eat it right out of the container and have one less dish to worry about.

So in about the time that it took to make breakfast for one day, I had breakfast for four. Now tell me you don’t have time to eat breakfast.