Baked Steel Cut Oatmeal with Tart Cherries & Pepitas

Name: Baked Steel Cut Oatmeal with Tart Cherries & Pepitas
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 55 min
Total time: 65 min
Ingredients: 3/4 cup steel cut oats; 1/3 cup pepitas; 2 tablespoons ground flax seed; 1 teaspoons baking powder; 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt; 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon; 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg; 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger; 2 cups unsweetened almond-coconut milk; 1/3 cup pure maple syrup; 2 tablespoons melted coconut oil (slightly cooled); 1 egg; 1 teaspoon vanilla extract; 1 cup dried tart cherries

Jan 5, 2015 by Dara 66 Comments

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This is the recipe that made me fall in love with baked oatmeal. Filled with tart cherries and pepitas, it’s nutrient-dense (and dairy-free!) Thank you to the Cherry Marketing Institute for helping me to share this recipe with you.

Whenever someone tells me that they skipped breakfast that day, I start to twitch a little. First of all, skipping any meal (or snacks, for that matter) is just not in my wheelhouse. That’s the price of just loving food SO MUCH. But if I even considered skipping breakfast, my family would stage an intervention, primarily out of self-preservation. They know what Mum is like when she is hungry. Cra-a-a-b-b-y!

Despite my mood…um…issues linked to missing breakfast, it’s also been shown that regularly eating a nutritious breakfast can lead to great improvements in weight control, energy and overall performance.

Do you know the saying “Eat the rainbow”? It refers to eating fruits and vegetables with a range of colors to provide your body with a wide array of nutrients. Well, I don’t know about you, but my breakfast tends to look decidedly brown before I dress it up. Brown cereal, brown oatmeal, brown toast…blah.

It’s easier than you think to take your breakfast from blah to nutrient-packed, simply by tossing in a few ingredients, such as raw or toasted nuts and dried tart cherries. Tart cherries contain and Vitamin A and anthocyanins, which are antioxidants that have been linked to a number of health benefits, such as decreasing inflammation, soothing arthritis symptoms and easing exercise-related muscle pain.

Now let’s back up to the “oatmeal” part of my breakfast routine for a moment. In the spirit of complete honesty, I have never been able to convince myself to enjoy oatmeal. That always bums me out because oatmeal is such a fantastic, heart-healthy breakfast.

Well, miracles do happen and I am here to tell you that I absolutely LOVE this baked oatmeal. Once it came out of the oven, I couldn’t leave it alone. The texture was dense, not mushy or runny (my previous oatmeal pet peeves) and the flavor was fantastic. Between the tart dried cherries that plumped up while baking and the caramelized edges of the oatmeal, I was in heaven.

The beauty of this recipe is that you can make it on the weekend, then heat up pieces for breakfast during the week. Just store it in the fridge to keep it fresh.

Tart cherries can be found in well-stocked grocery stores, as well as healthy food stores, such as Whole Foods. We always have tart cherries available in at least two forms in our house. My husband tops his cereal with dried tart cherries every morning and I snack on a mixture of handful of dried cherries and raw almonds to hold me over from lunch to dinner. As I mentioned in this post about running a half-marathon, my husband and I drink tart cherry juice two times each day to help with recovery from our long runs, and our kids love it when we add the tart cherry concentrate to smoothies.

For more information on tart cherries and recipe inspiration, be sure to visit the Cherry Marketing Institute site, and follow Choose Cherries on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Other healthy breakfast recipes:

Cookin’ Canuck’s Skinny Southwestern Crustless Quiche {Vegetarian}
Cookin’ Canuck’s Whole Wheat Carrot Muffins
The Vegetarian Food Lab’s Mexican-Style Avocado Toast
Foxes Love Lemons’ Make-Ahead Breakfast Muffins
Spicy Southern Kitchen’s Whole Wheat Pancakes