Often in my life (and especially in my kitchen) inspiration is born of desperation. This was the case this morning. Our Spud order doesn’t arrive until tomorrow and there was nothing for breakfast. Literally. No fruit, no bread, no cereal, no muffins, no granola bars, and one egg. While Adri would have been happy eating leftover rice, I was aiming for something a little different.

At the bottom of the pantry I found a jar of oats. I must tell you that I’ve never made oatmeal from scratch in my life. Oatmeal comes in those handy little paper bags that you add boiling water to. If I’m being really healthy, I get the low sugar kind. But in an effort to clean up our pantry (and our eating), we haven’t bought those in a while. So I pulled out the oats, and my mobile and googled “Homemade Oatmeal”. Inspiration struck when I found this post by the ladies over at A Beautiful Mess. Given that our ingredients options were seriously limited, I decided to modify their basic recipe with the few items I had. This is how my Banana Chocolate Oatmeal was born.

Banana Chocolate Oatmeal

(yield 6 servings)

Mix together in a bowl

3 cups steel cut oats

1/2 cup coconutsugar

3 tablespoons raw cacao powder

1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon sea salt

In a separate bowl combine

5 tablespoons melted butter

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup almond milk

Thinly slice a banana and layer on the bottom of a well greased oven safe baking dish. Had I had more than one banana I would have likely used at least 2

Pour dry ingredients on top of banana layer. Pat down evenly before pouring wet ingredients on top of the dry. Make sure to uniformly cover the dry layer so oats will cook nicely and not burn or get soggy in spots.

Pop into the oven at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. Best served piping hot with a steaming cup of coffee 🙂

UPDATE: This dish is makes awesome leftovers! Today for breakfast we dished it out into bowls, poured a little almond milk on top before reheating (oven or microwave). Enjoy!

Tell me, what would you put in your oatmeal?

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