Discovering the Glory of Overnight Oats

I have a complicated relationship with making breakfast.

I am a huge pro-breakfast person and never skip it. I love so many breakfast foods and I’m always up for trying new recipes.

But…

Making breakfast is kind of a pain in the butt. Most of my meals are prepped on Sundays with the exception of breakfast. Besides protein waffles, it’s been hard to find foods I like that I can pre-make and are relatively good for me.

This is my second week in a row making overnight oats in the crock

pot.  After confirming that oats would last a few days in the fridge I started searching recipes to find a common base-recipe and choosing a combination I liked.

This is what I found after pouring through a dozen recipes:

1 cup of steel cut oats
2 cups of milk (I use almond milk)
2 cups of water

From there people added these sorts of sweeteners/spices:

Vanilla
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Honey
Brown sugar

And these sorts of hearty extras:

Flax seeds/meal
Chia seeds
Hemp hearts
Nuts
Fresh or dried fruit

My first week I added mashed bananas, dried cherries, and sliced almonds, along with some spices. It was kind of bland and something about the texture was off.

Disappointed Courtney.

This week I grated three apples, used ¼ cup of sliced almonds, ¼ cup of dried cranberries, a couple tablespoons of brown sugar, 2 teaspoons of vanilla, 1 teaspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon, 2 tablespoons of chia seeds, and 2 tablespoons of flaxseeds. So much better!

The one thing I learned about texture is you need to allow it to truly be an overnight recipe. Last week I actually cooked the oats in the slow cooker for eight hours in the day and I obsessively kept opening the lid and stirring the mixture to make sure it wasn’t burning. Wrong. This week I cooked it about nine hours and it was only stirred once when I initially dumped everything in the crockpot. When I woke up in the morning it was perfect. The oats were cooked thoroughly, somehow managing to be moist and fluffy without being soggy.

It was seriously so exciting to come home after an intense, early workout and dig into this bowl (after this picture I had a second-thought and added another huge pile of oats).

What are your favourite breakfast foods? Are you an oatmeal person?