The Most Important Meal of the Day

I tend to get into breakfast ruts. For most of my grade school days, I started the morning off with a strawberry Nutrigrain bar, hastily grabbed as I ran out the door. In college, I ate the exact same dining hall breakfast every morning from my first day of orientation through my final year: scrambled eggs, grits, and a biscuit/wheat toast. From the beginning of my pregnancy through the first year + of Ethan's life, I ate a Bruegger's rosemary olive oil bagel almost every morning. Then when I discovered the overnight slow cooker method, I switched to steel-cut oatmeal to help boost my milk supply. As an added bonus, Ethan loves it, too, so every morning for the past several months, he and I have split a big bowl of oatmeal. Until the past few weeks.

Maybe it's the warmer weather, maybe it's just not the sort of breakfast you can have for months on end, but I began to get positively sick of steel-cut oatmeal. I had seen a few interesting breakfast oatmeal recipes on Pinterest (for those of you who aren't "in the know," it's like a virtual corkboard/pinboard), so I decided to take advantage of my breakfast boredom to try them out. And I'm so very glad I did.

I began with overnight refrigerator oatmeal since I thought something cold might break my breakfast rut. Oh man was I right! This stuff is fantastic!!! I've tried almost all the flavors she writes about (the only exception is the banana-cocoa since I didn't have any cocoa; I also did a variation of the raspberry-vanilla using strawberries instead since that's what I had on hand). While I've loved them all, my favorite by far is the mango-almond, followed by the raspberry-vanilla or maple-blueberry. The apple and the banana-peanut-butter are both good, but the cinnamon and peanut butter, respectively, are a bit overpowering, and I prefer the lightness of the fruit-centric varieties. In this morning's, I decided to add some coconut to the mango-almond, and it was absolutely divine!

 I think I could happily eat this every morning for quite some time. Plus, it's really healthy with the protein from the greek yogurt, the fiber from the oatmeal, and the Omega-3s from the chia seeds. Unfortunately, Ethan is not remotely impressed. I don't think he likes lumps in his yogurt because he spits it out every time.

So now I needed to find a breakfast for him since I'm not making the steel-cut oatmeal anymore. Enter Pinterest, again. I saw this recipe for individual baked oatmeal, and since Ethan loves muffins so much, I decided to give it a try. I took all these pictures of the process, but then Ethan did something to my iPod, and I had to reset it, thereby losing 3 weeks worth of pictures. Very sad. So you'll have to settle for a picture of him scarfing one down for breakfast this morning, even though it doesn't show all the varieties we made:

He absolutely loves them and would (and has) eaten one for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I love that it's a balanced breakfast in one little muffin cup, plus it's so easy to pull one out of the freezer and just heat it up for him. They're pretty tasty, though I don't know that just one would satisfy me for breakfast. They do make good snacks, though.

Now my only issue became not having the steel-cut oatmeal to boost my supply. In looking back at the baked oatmeal recipe, I realized she had derived her recipe from another blog. When I went to the original source, I saw that she had just the day before posted a recipe for individual baked oatmeal with steel-cut oats! So this morning, we did some more baking, and this time I stuck with plain (Ethan didn't care for any of the toppings on the others) and coconut (my favorite of the toppings we did):

I think these are just as good, if not better, than the originals. They are definitely a bit crunchy, which could be off-putting to some, and they have the nutty, hearty flavor of steel-cut oats. But they are also slightly sweeter (there's much more honey in these than there is maple syrup in the others, and even though I didn't use all the honey the recipe called for, I still could have backed it down a touch and had it taste fine). Ethan didn't seem to notice much of a difference, and I am happy to have a handy, healthy snack to help with milk production.

One of the best things about all of these recipes is that none of them require any real work in the morning, which has been really great lately since I'm flying solo most mornings due to busy season. If you try any of them, be sure to let me know what you think!