As a total creature of habit, I’ll admit out loud that my household typically has 1 of about 3 things for breakfast on a given day: apple-cinnamon oatmeal, oatmeal pancakes or a smoothie. Breakfast is not a meal I want to spend much time on — thinking about it, prepping it, cleaning up from it or otherwise.

But this week I decided to get adventurous. Why not have the oats some new way? And yes, I know that if eating oats in a new way is my definition of adventurous, I need to get a life. (My life is full of other adventures far more exciting than food, I assure you!) :)

The recipe below is simple, healthy and can easily be doubled, tripled, etc. as long as you have a pot big enough to fit in all the ingredients with a little room to stir. Here’s the basic ratio:

1 cup rolled or steel-cut oats*

2 cups water (or for slightly sweeter oats, you can use half apple juice and half water)

1 tsp. cinnamon

1-2 cups blueberries (frozen is fine and requires less work!)

1/2 tsp. alcohol-free vanilla flavoring

Put water, oats and cinnamon in small saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring often with a wooden spoon. Once oats begin to boil, turn down to very low setting and allow to simmer, stirring often to make sure oats don’t stick on the bottom. (On a gas stove, use your smallest burner for the simmering stage no matter how big a pot of oats you make and you’ll cut down on the sticking problem considerably.) When oats reach desired consistency — approximately 12 minutes of cooking time — remove from the burner. Add in blueberries and vanilla. Stir well. If using frozen blueberries, you may want to heat for another minute on stove or in microwave.

If oats are too thick after you’ve added the blueberries (which contain a lot of liquid), simply add in water 1/8 to 1/4 cup at a time until desired texture is reached. (I personally prefer slightly thinner oats and make mine with about 2.5 cups liquid for every 1 cup of oats.)

* Note that steel-cut oats take a good bit longer to cook — up to half an hour. You can either put the oats on to soak the night before (simply put oats and water in the pot you will cook them in in the morning, cover and refrigerate), use your crockpot (which I haven’t done before, but have been told that a fuzzy logic style crockpot handles this easily without burning the oats) so that you wake up to freshly cooked oats or just start the batch of oats when you first get up and stir occasionally while you get ready for your day.

Healthy eating notes:

If you follow Dr. Fuhrman’s Eat to Live dietary recommendations and are trying to lose weight, approximately 1 cup of this recipe before blueberries are added is considered your serving of starch for the day. If you want a larger portion without increasing your amount of starch, simply increase the ratio of blueberries to oats, add in a little more vanilla if desired and enjoy.

Wheat-free/gluten-free diets: The regular oats you buy at the grocery store are often highly contaminated with wheat and other glutinous grains, unfortunately. I personally cannot tolerate any gluten in my diet, but I do not have celiac disease, so I buy special oats that are both grown far away from other glutinous grains and then are processed (to the small extent rolled and steel-cut oats are processed) in special plants where there is zero risk for cross-contamination. Some celiacs can handle these oats, and others can’t. The tastiest GF oats I’ve found are the rolled oats from GlutenFreeOats.com, but you may find the Bob’s Red Mill GF oats more easily at your local health food store or grocery.

Copyright 2009 Jennifer McCay

www.LeanGreenMama.com