Quinoa for Breakfast!

Give oatmeal and cream of wheat a break and try some quinoa for a hearty hot cereal breakfast! Qunioa is a crowd-pleasing seed – its actually not a grain as many people think. Fluffy, light and packed with healthy stuff. Adding quinoa to your hot breakfast rotation is a smart thing to do. And your kids will fall in love with this fluffy, nutty, tender bite. Here are a few ways you can enjoy quinoa in the morning – including my recipes for Coconut Papaya Quinoa Cereal and Quinoa Cherries . Plus, find out why its so good for you!.. plus it is a good source of phosphorus, riboflavin and iron

Quinoa is so incredibly versatile. Toss it with fresh fruit, add warm milk and cinnamon for hot cereal. Or try exotic milks to quinoa cereal like coconut, rice or hemp. You can even add some quinoa to your pancakes or morning muffins. Quinoa is also great tossed into your morning scramble. I folded some cooked quinoa into my tofu scramble for a delicious AM entree.

When you add quinoa to your morning, you’ll be adding fiber, fun and flavor. Give it a try!

And the great thing about quinoa is that you can cook a large pot of it and store it in the fridge to use and quickly re-heat when needed for a fast breakfast.

Basic “Fluffy Quinoa” Cooking Rule: Most directions call for 1 cup quinoa and 2 cups water. I always reduce the water a tad – to about 1 3/4 cups for ever cup of dry quinoa. This usually gets me perfectly fluffy, not soggy quinoa. For more specific directions: How-to cook fluffy quinoa.

So today I’m featuring two quinoa breakfast recipes: Quinoa Cherries and Coconut Papaya Quinoa (below)

Becca's Baked Goods: My, My, Oatmeal Pie

I love oatmeal. It is probably the most delicious thing on the planet. I believe I have Quaker Maple Brown Sugar Oatmeal at least five out of the seven days of the week. My hands are always cold and in the morning it’s nice to just hold that nice warm bowl of hot oatmeal and then slowly eat it, which in turn makes my body feel all cozy. Now, I love oatmeal in many forms: as breakfast, as dinner, sometimes lunch, streusel, especially as a cookie, but what about pie? The idea came to me in the beginning of the week as I was having my daily bowl of oatmeal. I am not your typical fruit pie find of gal, in fact, I hate chunks (well fruit chunks that it) and I just don’t like fruit either, so I like the idea of cream pies, pumpkin pies, cinnamon pies , etc. Oatmeal is very versatile, I think, and so I Googled oatmeal pie and low and behold, I found a few recipes for oatmeal pie. However, some I just didn’t get the right feeling about and usually when I find a recipe I like, I favorite it and then go searching, only to come back to the first one I liked. That’s why I stuck with this recipe for Maple Oatmeal Pie. I liked the ingredients, but it lacked directions and I’m one of those people that need everything written out for them step by step (yay visual learners!). So I kinda of had to improvise with the directions, but this recipe also called for a heck of a lot of honey, and not a whole bunch of maple and I’ll choose maple over honey any day, so I decreased the amount of honey and increased the amount of maple syrup. I also had to decrease the amount of butter by a tablespoon, because I was short on it. Now, this pie GREW! I was expecting it to just kinda sit there with about an inch of crust peaking out, but noooo. This thing grew as if I had put some kind of extra strength leavening in it. I planned on having this pie for lunch, but as it was cooking, the minutes were going by and I was getting so hungry, that I decided to eat some lunch and instead of having a few granola bars to compliment my usual sandwich, I would have the pie. This was a pretty good pie, I must admit. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t not make some changes. First change, is add some more flavor to the crust. I wonder if it’s ok to add some vanilla to crust to make it taste better. Second thing is, I think I would use quick cooking oats instead of old fashioned oats, it might make the pie a little more tender.

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