Blueberry Cinnamon Swirl Steel Cut Oatmeal
When I was little I liked to watch videos after school. (Ah, the days when I had that much extra time!) One of my favorites in elementary school was “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory“. Not to be confused with the Tim Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, this is the older movie based on Road Dahl’s classic book (which I also read several times.) I just remember loving the movie for all its fantastical elements and outrageous characters: Veruca Salt,the quintessential brat, the unnamed little orange Oompa-Loompas who also happened to be talented singers, and last but not least, the obnoxious gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde. It was always fascinating to watch the old-school special effects transform the gum-chewing girl into a blueberry when she sampled Willy Wonka’s prototype gum. That’ll teach her not to chew gum anymore! Though the scene strangely always made me think of eating some blueberries.
What was your favorite childhood movie? Fave scene?
Now, for the health lecture: blueberries. Extremely low in calories, packed with antioxidants. Antioxidants are important because they prevent the oxidization of other cells. Cell oxidization is needed to a certain degree, but if it occurs in excess it may cause certain diseases. Studies are currently under way to see if antioxidants could even be used in medicine to prevent problems such as heart disease and cancer. Blueberries just happen to be an excellent source of antioxidants, containing 5562 TE per 100 grams. (For more information on this, see this article.) Blueberries also contain many vitamins such as vitamin B-6, niacin, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, and folic acid. These are nutrients that help the body metabolize food. Pretty amazing, that all this good stuff can be packed into such a tiny little fruit. But wait, there’s more! Blueberries are a good source of fiber, and contain chlorogenic acid that may help lower blood sugar levels and control glucose levels in type-II diabetes patients.
Are you ready to eat some blueberries? Me too. Let’s have some delicious steel-cut oatmeal with the healthful stuff. To make it even better, this oatmeal has a cinnamon swirl in it, reminiscent almost of a cinnamon roll. But of course much healthier. This tasted awesome, of course. How could one go wrong with oatmeal and cinnamon?
Blueberry Cinnamon Swirl Steel-Cut Oatmeal
makes one serving
Ingredients:
for cinnamon swirl
- 1 tsp Earth Balance Original Buttery Spread
- 1 tsp brown sugar
- sprinkling of cinnamon
for oatmeal
- 1/4 cup steel-cut oats
- 1/2 cup warm water
- 1/4 cup vanilla almondmilk
- 2 tsp pure vanilla extract
- about 1/4 cup of fresh blueberries, for topping
Directions:
To make the cinnamon swirl: Blend the Earth Balance with the brown sugar and cinnamon until the mixture is homogenous. (I guess I’ve got chemistry finals on the brain!) Set this aside.
To make the oatmeal: In a medium pot, combine the warm water and almondmilk. Heat on high until it boils. Then turn the heat down to medium-low. Add the steel-cut oats and the vanilla. Cook oats for 4-5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
When oats are done cooking, remove from heat. Pour oats into serving bowl. Top with the cinnamon swirl mixture and allow that to melt a little as you ad the blueberries. Swirl the cinnamon mixture into the oatmeal with a spoon.
Allow oatmeal to cool for a couple of minutes, then enjoy!
Please note: 1/4 cup of blueberries is not a full serving of fruit. So go ahead and enjoy more yummy blueberries alone as healthy snacks, as well as accompaniments to yogurt and such throughout the day!
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Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_radical_absorbance_capacity, http://www.nutrition-and-you.com/blueberries.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioxidant
Strawberry Lemonade Steel Cut Oatmeal
Don’t you just hate when you try to bake something, investing hours of your time, using up a ton of ingredients and getting several bowls dirty… and then the end result is a flop? That’s what happened to me last weekend, a total of twice in one day. Late Sunday afternoon I tried to make muffins using no sugar. I tried to sweeten them with honey, but we only had less than a tablespoon left so you can imagine how the muffins turned out. Blech. But I really wanted to have some muffins for breakfast during the upcoming school week, so in the evening I got everything out all over again, whipping up another batch of muffins as if in a panic. Instead of honey I concocted the clever idea of blending a giant navel orange into the batter using a hand mixer. I got a pulpy orange mess all over my clothes and the bowls and stuff, but persisted and plopped the “take two” muffin batter into the muffin tin to bake. It was in the oven for almost five minutes before I realized I had forgotten to add baking powder. Oops. Frantically I took them out of the oven, scraped the batter out of the paper liners, and blended it with the baking powder before returning it to the oven, still hoping for the best.
The next morning I tried one of those muffins, and I have to say it may have been the worst muffin I’ve ever had. The orange pieces that didn’t get blended very well were still stuck together forming a weird clotted thing inside the muffin, there was almost no sweetness, barely any flavor at all. I resolved to try making muffins again that afternoon. But I had too much homework, so I set my sights on the next afternoon, or the next… of course I never did find the time to try again. So I did not have muffins this past week. What did I have for breakfast instead? Well, as they say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Or in my case, when life gives you bad muffins, make strawberry lemonade steel cut oatmeal!
This was really one of the best bowls of oatmeal I’ve ever had. Even though oatmeal is generally a cold-weather food, this summery flavor was wonderful and I totally recommend it to brighten up a frigid June-gloom morning. The taste of lemon really came out in the hearty oats. And since it’s finally spring, I was able to get amazingly fresh, tart strawberries. Any time you combine lemon with strawberry, you’re sure to get a superb result!
Strawberry Lemonade Steel Cut Oatmeal
serves one
Ingredients:
- 1/4 cup quick cook steel cut oats
- 1/2 cup hot water
- 1/4 cup vanilla almondmilk
- 1 tbl lemon curd
- 1 tbl organic light agave syrup
- 3-4 fresh strawberries, sliced
Directions:
In a small to medium pot, heat the water and vanilla almondmilk to high. When it starts to boil, turn the heat to medium. Add the oats, lemon curd and agave syrup. Cook this mixture for a few minutes. Stir occasionally.
When the oats are done cooking, pour into your bowl for serving. Top with the fresh strawberries. Let cool a minute or two before enjoying this delicious springtime oatmeal!
With a fun breakfast like this, I didn’t even miss having muffins last week. But I will definitely try to make some edible ones for this week. No promises, but if they do happen to turn out well I will post the recipe!
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Weekday Breakfasts, Updated! Monday: Whole Wheat Blueberry Lemon Coconut Muffins
Weekday Breakfasts, Updated! Tuesday: Oatmeal Cookie Oatmeal
Yes, you read that right. No, I did not make a typo and write the same word twice twice. (It drives me crazy when people use rotten grammar and speling b/c it’s just the internet and shorthand = acceptable.) This is not a recipe for oatmeal cookies, but for cookie oatmeal. Oatmeal cookie oatmeal, to be exact. I’ve been seeing lots of bloggers lately posting about breakfast oatmeal cookies, and I figured, why not flip the idea around and make steel-cut oatmeal with cookie dough in it?
Whipping up this steel-cut oatmeal is much less time-consuming than putting together a batch of cookies on a busy weekday. The “cookie” theme with just a little bit of chocolate is a nice healthy option that may help prevent unintentional cookie/junk food snagging later on in the stressful day. Many people tend to eat less healthy when they are stressed. Instead of depriving myself entirely of unhealthy foods, I try to make healthier versions of these “stress-relieving” treats and eat them instead. That way I don’t have to feel like I’m missing the real thing – in this case, a cookie full of butter and sugar. So start off your day right with this warm and hearty steel-cut “cookie” oatmeal.
Oatmeal Cookie Steel-Cut Oatmeal
serves 1
Ingredients:
- 1/4 cup quick-cook steel-cut oats
- 1/2 tbl dried cranberries
- 1/2 cup hot water
- 1/4 cup vanilla almondmilk
- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 1 tbl walnuts
- 1-2 tbls Eat Pastry brand vegan gluten free chocolate chip cookie dough (I only used a tablespoon, but if you want to make this a little more indulgent I recommend using two for a little extra cookie-ness.)
Directions:
The night before you want to have the oatmeal, I recommend measuring your dry oats and cranberries into a ziplock for a quicker assembly the next morning.
In the morning, cook your oatmeal. First, place 1/2 cup hot water and 1/4 cup vanilla almondmilk in a small or medium pot and bring to a boil. Once it begins to boil, turn the heat down to lowish-medium. Add your oats and cranberries and cook, stirring occasionally. At some point while cooking add the vanilla extract, and mix in the dollop of cookie dough. Cook for about five minutes total.
When oatmeal is done cooking, remove from heat. Pour into a medium bowl and top with the walnuts. Let cool a minute or so before digging in!
I do love how chocolate chips melt into oatmeal, don’t you? Maybe some more chocolate could be added… after all it is testing season and we all need our dessert for breakfast!
To see Monday’s Weekday Breakfasts, Updated! post, click here!
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Better Than Banana Bread Steel-Cut Oats
All my life I have been an instant oatmeal kind of gal. As you may have noticed, many of my past recipes contain the stuff. When I was really little I ate “Dinosaur Egg Oatmeal” for breakfast – it had these cute little dinosaur eggs made of sugary chemicals, and you had to guess what kind of dino (also made of sugar) was inside. I got a little older and graduated to the “healthier” instant oatmeal packets with dehydrated apple bits and about a bucketload of sugar. At one point I started using “lower sugar” oatmeal to cut calories, but even that was still made with lots of highly processed ingredients and was barely fewer calories per packet than the regular packets, so eventually I returned to regular, full-sugar instant oatmeal. I tried “healthier” brands, such as Three Sisters instant oatmeal. While this oatmeal is yummy, all-natural and has fewer unpronounceable ingredients listed on the box, it still contains 9 grams of sugars per serving. Furthermore, organic foods can be expensive, and one box of that oatmeal costs more than a box of not-organic packets of instant oatmeal, so usually I would just buy the cheap stuff and pretend it wasn’t full of artificial flavors, preservatives, and sugar.
Until now. I’ve been seeing steel-cut oats around quite a lot lately on the internet. I tried some myself at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf during spring vacation, and I found them pretty good. But they weren’t as sweet as the instant oatmeal I was used to. Still, I discovered that steel-cut oats are healthier than store-bought instant oatmeal packets: for one thing, they only contain ONE ingredient: 100% whole grain steel cut oats. I find it so refreshing to look at the ingredient list on a product and find it nearly empty. For another, the amount of sugar involved in a bowl of steel-cut oats you cook yourself is entirely under your control. You can choose to use alternatives such as muscovado sugar, Truvia, pure maple syrup, honey… the options are endless and there is a choice for every taste and health philosophy out there.
Today I cooked my first successful serving of steel-cut oats. The first time I tried this, I was making it ahead of time to have ready for the next morning. I thought it would be so much easier to make the oatmeal in the microwave rather than cooking it in a pot with hot water. So I used the directions on the container for microwave cooking, but I didn’t have the recommended “deep bowl” so I used a sort of shallow one. The result was an explosion of half-cooked oats all over the microwave. So I cleaned it up and thought, maybe if I cover the dish the oats are in while microwaving, they can’t explode like that. So for microwaved oatmeal, take two, I put the oats and water in a pasta dish and sealed the lid on tight. Clever idea, right? WRONG. A few moments after popping that batch of oats in the microwave: BANG! I nearly jumped out of my skin in terror, (it was late at night, okay?) then opened the microwave to find an oatmeal mess of even greater magnitude than the mess from take one. After cleaning that up, I was all done with the microwave method and made my oatmeal the old-fashioned way: in a pot on the stove. I put it in a bowl and covered it to be refrigerated overnight. The next morning, it had congealed into an unappetizing, hard ball. I had to add hot water , chop at the mass with a spoon, and even (apprehensively) microwave it before it became edible. And even then it was not very good.
The second time I tried making steel-cut oats (or 4th time if you count the microwave fails) I cooked it in the morning right before eating it, so the overnight congelation wasn’t a problem. But I didn’t add enough sweetener, so it wasn’t really to my taste. I’m used to my oatmeal being pretty sweet, so for this banana bread oatmeal I used several different types of sweeteners. But all of the sweeteners I used are organic and more healthy than the refined sugars you’d find in most instant oatmeal packets.
So I’d call this oatmeal a successful, healthy alternative to the instant kind! It does take a little bit more time to cook, about five minutes total. I measured out most of the ingredients and mashed the banana the night before so it didn’t take as long in the morning.
I call this oatmeal “better than banana bread” because it has the delicious, sweet taste found in a banana nut bread, as well as the hearty, filling texture of steel-cut oatmeal. It is also much healthier than most banana breads which are usually made with white flour and choc-full of sugar and butter. It is full of fiber and other nutrients such as potassium from the banana. The taste is very delicious and comforting as well as filling. Enjoy!
Better Than Banana Bread Steel-Cut Oats
makes one serving
Ingredients:
- 1/4 cup steel-cut oats
- 1/2 cup hot water
- 1/4 cup vanilla almondmilk
- 1/2 of a small or medium banana, mashed
- 1 tbl pure maple syrup
- 1 tbl walnuts (for topping)
Directions:
Place the water and almondmilk in a pot over high heat and bring to a boil. Turn heat down to medium and add the steel-cut oats. Cook for about 2-3 minutes. Stir occasionally. Add the banana and maple syrup and cook for another couple minutes, or until the oats start to bubble quite a bit.
Remove from heat and carefully pour oatmeal into medium bowl. Top with walnuts if desired. Let cool a couple of minutes before digging in.
Bon appetit, and may this oatmeal be a great start to a super morning!
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True Healthy Me 