Recipe
You all probably know by now I have an unhealthy obsession with oatmeal. Well I supposed it’s more like a healthy obsession…oatmeal lowers cholesterol and fills you up with fiber after all. 
Whatever you call it, it’s my favorite breakfast {aside from pancakes…but I put oatmeal in those too…}. To keep from getting bored of the same old thing every morning, I try to mix it up.
Steel cut oats are my top pick; I love the bite of the grain and the hearty texture. I usually make a big ol’ batch of steel cut oats in the crockpot at the beginning of the week, but even that I like to mix up from time to time.
On the meal plan last week? Baked steel cut oats. Just as easy as crockpot oats; just a little twist.
To up the chewy factor of the steel cut oats, I mixed in a handful of oat groats as well.
An hour in the oven, then in the fridge overnight…breakfast for the week is ready and waiting!
To make things even more fun {if you can call breakfast fun?} I made a batch of fresh blueberry sauce to pour on top of the baked oatmeal. Now that’s a good breakfast.
Frozen blueberries, a tiny bit of sugar, and a splash of lemon juice and vanilla make this blueberry sauce both easy and delicious.
The perfect topping to a hearty slice of baked oatmeal.
It would be delicious with frozen cherries or mixed berries too.
I made it even easier on myself and premade a couple blueberry topped oatmeal bowls so all I’d have to do was pop them in the microwave in the morning.
Heck, I might’ve even skipped the microwaving step a time or two.
Not one to eat a bowl of oats the same way twice, some of the bowls got a few additions. My favorite was blueberry smothered oats topped with crunchy, toasted walnuts. I bet it’d be even better with a drizzle of honey or agave…
Pardon me while I go eat yet another oatmeal breakfast. One I definitely won’t get sick of.
by Heather Neal
Keywords: bake breakfast vegan vegetarian
- 1 cup steel cut oats
- 1/2 cup oat groats
- 2 cups almond milk
- 3 cups water
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp ginger
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
Combine all ingredients.
Pour into 9 x 13 baking dish.
Bake at 350 for 1 hour.
Remove from oven; let cool. Refrigerate overnight.
Note: oats will look liquid after cooking, they’ll firm up overnight.
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by Heather Neal
Keywords: breakfast vegan vegetarian
- 1 cup frozen blueberries
- 1/2 cup water
- 1 Tbsp sugar
- 1/2 tsp vanilla
- splash of lemon juice
Combine all ingredients in small sauce pan.
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat until sauce gently bubbling.
Use spoon to lightly smash blueberries.
Simmer for ~10 minutes until sauce is thickened.
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Recipe
I’m a big fan of simple swaps. People are often surprised when I tell them to switch from instant oatmeal to regular oatmeal, and even more surprised when I suggest the old-fashioned oats over the quick cooking.
Did you know all three of those types of oats take almost the same amount of time to cook? So you have wasted yourself any time, and you’ve bumped up the nutritive value of your breakfast without changing the taste of anything.
The next step in improving that same breakfast? Switching to steel cut oats, or even groats. Now these take a little more time to prepare, but with a few tricks can be done with little effort. It’s worth it for the extra nutrition.
So what’s the difference between the oats?
They all start as oat groats. Groats are the hulled grain, which still include the germ, bran, and endosperm. {All good for you!} These parts of cereal grains are removed during processing as you move down the line towards rolled and instant oats.
Consider the groat the “whole” oat.
Next comes steel cut oats, which are groats that have been chopped into smaller pieces to make them cook a little quicker. They still contain all the good parts of the grain, but they’re broken down a little. {Any breaking down your body has to do is beneficial, so grains because less and less nutritious the smaller they get before eating.}
The next in line are rolled oats; the oats most people are familiar with. Rolled oats are simply groats that have been flattened, or rolled. It makes the surface area larger and therefore greatly reduces cooking time. These oats are often called “old fashioned” oats. They take about 2 minutes to cook.
If you keep venturing down the oatmeal processing line, you end up with “quick-cooking” oats. These are rolled oats that have been pressed a little thinner and cut into slightly smaller pieces, again decreasing the cooking time. Quick cooking oats cook in about a minute.
The last in succession are instant oats. The kind that most often come in the individual serving packages. Instant oatmeal is made from the thinnest pressed rolled oats that have been cut into small pieces and slightly precooked. They take 30 to 60 seconds to prepare. By this point in the oat chain, you barely have to do any work to digest them, and you can hardly call them “whole grain”. To add to that, instant oats usually come pre-mixed with sugary flavorings and a heap of preservatives.
So if you’re a instant oatmeal fan, I challenge you to make the switch to old fashioned. If you’re feeling adventurous, jump right on up to the big guys: steel cut or groats. They’re delicious and chewy, and can be ready for you to eat when you wake up in the morning.
To make groats, the wholest of whole grains, you can use this same crockpot steel cut oats strategy.
Crockpot Oatmeal: How to Cook Groats
-
1
cup
groats
-
3
cups
water {or milk or a combo}
-
cinnamon to taste
-
Pour groats and liquid into crockpot.
-
Set on low and let cook overnight.
-
Add extra spices or add-ins before serving.
-
Feel free to double, triple, half, etc. the recipe. Stores in fridge well.
-
{Cooking time will vary based on crockpot & amount cooked- 8 hours on low works for me}
In the AM you have a big, chewy, bowl full of oat groats. {You can also mix them into rolled oats to make them chewier but not as dense as a whole bowl of groats.}
Have you tried groats?
Plus: Find out what I think are the best pregnancy books.
Recipe
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. 
Recipe
There’s something about the onset of cooler weather that has everyone scrambling for their first can of pumpkin.
I, of course, am often one of them. But there’s another fall flavor that so easily gets neglected. Apple.
The smell of hot apple cider, homemade applesauce, or apple cobbler is enough to put a smile on your face. Add apple picking and caramel apples, and how could you not love the season?
The cool weather has paid us a visit this weekend, but there are 80 and 90 degrees still on the forecast, so I’m not getting too excited yet. In fact, apple season really hasn’t hit us here yet.
That doesn’t mean I don’t yearn for that spiced apple fall flavor already, the same way I reached for my stash of pumpkin a month ago.
Luckily, this dish gives that satisfying apple flavor without the need for freshly picked apples. {Although you can bet I’ll be making it again as soon as I can get my hand on some of those.} Instead, this dish can be made all year long- with apple sauce!
Cran-Apple Oatmeal!
It starts with a base just like my overnight steel cut oats. Just add in a few extra ingredients and you’ll be blown away that this breakfast cooked itself while you slept.
Cran Apple Steel Cut Oats
Ingredients
- 1 cup steel cut oats
- 4 cups water {or mix of almond milk}
- 1 cup applesauce {prepared or homemade}
- handful dried cranberries
- Spices: cinnamon, cloves, allspice
Instructions
- Place all ingredients in slow cooker.
- Set slow cooker on low and let cook overnight, about 6-8 hours.
- In the morning, stir oats, and add more spices as desired.
- Serve warm.
- This makes 4 servings.
- Note: I have a small, newer crock pot that cooks very quickly- I set it on "Keep Warm" overnight, then bump it up to low or high in the morning, depending on how soon I'm going to eat. It keeps the oats from burning and drying up too much. You can also try adding more liquid.
3.1
https://www.sideofsneakers.com/crockpot-steel-cut-oats/
There’s nothing like waking up to this in the morning. The smell of apple and clove, with the sweet hint of cranberry. Ready for you to dig in immediately with a spoon, no stopping to pull out ingredients, pots, or turning on the stove.
Incidentally, this bowl of oats goes perfect with a dollop of cashew butter. So perfectly that I didn’t stop to take a picture as I downed the bowl in record time, burning my mouth along the way.
Are you a fall person or are you hanging on to summer?
Recipe
This Crockpot oatmeal is a great make ahead breakfast. Just put the ingredients in the Crockpot and you have overnight oatmeal ready and waiting in the morning. It’s a great gluten-free breakfast too!
One of the most common reasons for people skimping on the all-important breakfast is time. People just don’t have time to cook a breakfast when they’re scrambling to get 1,000 other things done in the morning before they head out the door.
Although that doesn’t have to be your excuse.
9 times out of 10, I have oatmeal for breakfast. 9 times out of 10 it takes less than 3 minutes until I’m eating it. And that includes steel cut oats.
I used to think I was being all smart and fancy by soaking my steel cut oats overnight and then microwaving them for 6 minutes in the morning. Still a pretty quick breakfast, but this happened more than occasionally:
Steel cut oats are what you have before the oat grain is rolled and smashed into the flake most of us are familiar with- the part that makes oatmeal cook so quickly and easily. But steel cut oats are just as easy to prepare, and are even better for you since they’re in a more whole form.
My trick? A big batch of steel cut Crockpot oatmeal – then I’m set for the week and have no excuses not to eat a healthy breakfast. This overnight oatmeal is so simple it’s not funny.
Crockpot Oatmeal || Easy Overnight Oatmeal
1 cup steel cut oats {gluten free oats if necessary}
2 cups almond milk
2 cups water
cinnamon
Put everything in the slow cooker before you go to bed- turn it on low, sleep, and when you get up, you have perfectly cooked, creamy, steel cut oats. A great gluten free breakfast that’s dairy free too.
Eat them hot and fresh the first day, then store them in the fridge. For the rest of the week you can just pull out what you want to eat, add a little almond milk, and pop them in the microwave for 1 minute. Stir and you’re done.
Feel free to add in your favorite mix ins, like dried fruit or nuts, to your big batch of oats before you cook them. I like waiting until afterwards so I can make them different every morning.
[Tweet “Have breakfast ready & waiting in the morning with these Crockpot steel cut oats. #fitfluential”]
Like today’s peaches and cream oats:
Steel cut oats topped with warm almond milk, sliced peaches, chopped pecans, and drizzled with honey.
How’s that for breakfast in less than 3 minutes?
What’s your favorite quick-fix, no hassle breakfast?
