Hot or Cold: How Do You Like Your Oats?

I love breakfast. Always have and always will. I can eat breakfast foods for any meal of the day, no problem. When I was young, my Dad would sometimes be tasked with the job to make dinner on Sunday evening so my Mom would have the night off. My Dad is great at making breakfast - pancakes, waffles, eggs, yum. (To this day when we go home for a visit, we always try to find one morning for him to make his pancakes.) So he'd often make breakfast for dinner, so the concept is not unusual for me. Lately I've been having eggs for lunch one day a week. I mean, really. Why not?

If you typically eat breakfast on the run during the week, weekends are a great time to try out a full, sit down, stomach filling meal. Here are two of my recent oats combinations that fit that would work perfectly!

Chocolate Cherry Oats

Ingredients:
1/2 rolled oats
1 cup water
1 banana
1/4 dried cherries
1 tsp chia seeds
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground flax seeds
1/2 tsp cocoa powder

1. Cook oats to degree of done that you like, if you like thicker oats, use less water, thinner oats, use more!
2. Stir in all the powders and seeds and mix well
3. Add in banana slices and dried cherries
4. Enjoy!

I usually add 2tsp of peanut butter or almond butter to my oats, but I wanted to try something a little different, so this week I added a little cocoa powder instead! Next time I'll use a little more, closer to 1tsp to get a more chocolatey taste since it was a little weak this time, for my preference. Still, it was very tasty!

Nutty Overnight Oats

Ingredients:
3/4 cup water
1/2 cup oats
2tbs organic rye flakes
1tbs wheat bran
1tsp ground flax seeds
1tsp chia seeds
2tsp peanut butter
2tsp sunflower seeds
1 banana
1/4 cup blueberries

1. Mix the first 5 ingredients at night, cover and store in the fridge.
2. The next morning, add the remaining 4 ingredients and mix all together.
3. Enjoy!

This is really simple. I'm really enjoying the cold oats. I didn't think I would at first, and some people commented on my first post about overnight oats that they didn't think they'd like cold, soggy oats, and you may not, but I suggest giving it a try. If you like hot oatmeal, you never know! Some people put everything together the night before, but I think in this case, you'll at least want to leave the sunflower seeds for the morning because they give it a little crunch!

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workout stats -
3mile walk/jog intervals
30minutes elliptical
25minutes bike
3x10 cable pull twists
3x10 cable pull push down
foam roller and stretching