Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Quinoa for breakfast

Ram's mom recently gave us The Healthy Gluten-Free Life (200 delicious gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free and egg-free recipes). It is not a Paleo cookbook. Ram's mom thought it would be good for us because we aren't eating totally paleo but are trying gluten free. They use several flour substitutions like teff flour that I'm not sure we want to buy those ingredients and go that route. Because of this at first I wasn't that impressed with this cookbook.
But Ram liked the breakfast section. When Lamb 1 was a baby we tried millet for breakfast and I wasn't that impressed. This recipe book has several recipes for quinoa for breakfast. For Ram's birthday breakfast we had vanilla honey quinoa with strawberries and almonds. Other recipes in this recipe book include apple cinnamon quinoa, brown sugar and cinnamon quinoa, and maple pecan quinoa with blueberries. The possibilities are endless-toppings that you would normally put on oatmeal.
Our Lambs love oatmeal for breakfast mainly because Lamb 1 and 2 can make it by themselves (on the stove, not the microwave). I think replacing the oatmeal with quinoa will be a good change for our diet. We have bought quinoa at Costco for the few years, before we even moved here.
What I did with this recipe was prepare the quinoa according to the package directions and add a tsp of vanilla before it rests for 5 minutes. I chopped up almonds and frozen strawberries and added a jar of honey to the table for toppings.
The only problem was that I did not make nearly enough to feed our family the first time I made this. Thankfully we had some leftover oatmeal so some Lambs had oatmeal and some had quinoa with the toppings. Lamb 2 loves this breakfast, Lamb 3 hasn't been willing to try quinoa for breakfast. I have now learned to make enough quinoa to feed 4 plus have leftovers so we don't have to cook quinoa every morning. Lamb 3 continues his normal breakfast of peanut butter on bread for breakfast.

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