hot breakfast cereals

I never used to have to be so prepared in advance with regards to food. I had a lot of bad habits, and that included rarely having a real lunch at work. Let alone breakfast. Now that I’m riding my bike to and from work, I can’t afford to do that. I need to eat something when I first get to work, and I need to eat lunch. And then I need to eat dinner too.

It is a lot of food. Am I the only person to get tired of thinking about food? I’m sure I’m not. I might just be the only person who decided to participate in VeganMoFo who gets tired of thinking about food though!

The post-ride meal has been a challenge for me – I was never much of a breakfast eater, so I don’t have anything to fall back on.

Sometimes I eat Supercharge Me! cookies, sometimes I eat oatmeal, I had a lovely week with a nice tofu scramble too. This post over at Zoey’s Kitchen got me thinking about hot breakfast cereals. Seemed like a great way to get in some different grains as well as whatever else I might throw into the mix. I remembered a friend talking about using her slow cooker for this purpose, and since I have a slow cooker that I’ve hardly used, I decided to give it a try.

So I cracked open “Fresh from the vegetarian slow cooker” and threw the ingredients into the slow cooker on Saturday night.

1 cup millet
3 cups apple juice
1 cup water
1 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 fresh apple, cut up (the recipe said pear, but I had an apple, and no pears)
1 cup chopped dried fruit (I used pineapple, unsweetened)
1/2 tsp salt

Cooked it on low for 7 or 7.5 hrs. It was supposed to be 6 hours, but hey, I was sleeping! (I’m going to pick up a timer at the hardware store this weekend.) It was a little overcooked, but not bad. The millet was a bit of a hard clump on the bottom, which I’ve been told by the slow-cooking-breakfast-cereal friend is a common occurrence with millet in the slow cooker, but luckily I was able to stir everything up, and it turned out really well in the end.

It looks like a mushy anonymous concoction, but it tastes *really* good. It was really satisfying after my ride this morning. Sweet and rich tasting, and it kept me going until lunch.

There are other similar recipes in that cookbook that I plan on trying in the next few weeks. I’m actually excited about these morning mushes! Go figure!

I also realized that Get It Ripe has quite a few similar grain-and-fruit based morning hot cereal meals, stovetop based. I’m going to have to give those a try as well, in addition to the recipe on Zoey’s blog. I might have to start eating breakfast for dinner!

morning millet melange