Let's Cook and Be Friends: Sunday Morning Productivity

Every morning, I wake up hungry and thinking of what to eat. When I got out of bed this morning, I checked some of my favorite food blogs to see what they have to offer... this quinoa“cereal” with caramelized bananas greeted me. There’s more quinoa than we need in the pantry and Gina’s cereal suggestion was definitely the way to go.

Yes, my friends, quinoa can be turned into oatmeal and it is just as good.

Inspired by Gina, I made some quinoa oatmeal and it is beyond delicious. You can do anything you fancy with your oatmeal… be creative!

Play with the amounts of quinoa and milk that you use according to the consistency you want your oatmeal to have... I had a couple of things that needed to be used up because I don't want them to go bad, so I just made do with what I had on hand:

yellow quinoa

vanilla soymilk
leftover fig newton filling (check this link for the recipe)
almond butter
banana
agave nectar
butter
sunflower seeds, roasted (Sorry, can’t give instructions here because I just threw two handfuls in a pan and popped it in the oven after baking scones this morning. After a while, I remembered I was roasting sunflower seeds and took the pan out. They roasted perfectly, thank goodness! But I can’t account for the time.)

Then, made it up as I went:

I boiled a cup of yellow quinoa with two cups of water for 30 minutes, simmering the quinoa during the last 15 minutes. I slowly heated up about two cups of vanilla soymilk and dumped spoonfuls of cooked quinoa.

As this was heating up, I sliced a banana and cooked it in a small pan heated with a teensy bit of butter… dotted the banana slices with droplets of blueberry agave to sweeten it and cooked it for a few minutes until it softened. When this was done, I added it into the quinoa pot.

To give the quinoa oatmeal some flavor, I added about three spoonfuls of the leftover fig newton filling and a heaping tablespoon of almond butter for a thicker texture.

Served it in small bowls and sprinkled the top with roasted sunflower seeds.

Perfect way to start a Sunday morning!

While the quinoa was cooking, I quickly made some Alice Water scones…

This time, I went with my all-time favorite variation, cranberry scones with orange zest. I had some leftover sugar sprinkle topping from a mocha cake I made a while back and used it all up to cover the scones. It doesn’t look very pretty, but it’s pretty darn good!