Wholegrain Nice-Cream Breakfast Bowl

Hello foodies! Welcome back to the blog. It’s funny, I feel like I haven’t posted in a while, but it was only last week that I published my Parsnip and Apple Fritters recipe, so I’m not sure why it feels like that. It must have something to do with the long weekend, which was wonderful by the way, and involved a somewhat impromptu getaway with my husband for Friday and Saturday, plus a gorgeous day spent with my parents on Monday, having an unexpected little explore locally which led to a beautiful park which my boys loved, and ended with a barbecue during which we sat at an improvised outdoor table, through which husb drilled a large hole and stood his positively ancient fishing umbrella through as a parasol! All set round with our jolly, yellow spray-painted, folding garden chairs. It really was very jolly indeed!

Over the weekend we watched Forks Over Knives, the incredible documentary about the American obesity and heart disease epidemic and the benefits of eating a plant-based diet. As I’ve said many times before, I am neither vegetarian nor vegan, but believe in taking the positives from all types of diet, and really all food (that is, unprocessed, healthy foods) and combining them in a way that works for an individual. For me, this means we don’t eat a great deal of meat. I plan anything from absolutely no meat in any meals during one week, to three meals containing meat the following week. But it’s never usually more than three, and never particularly meat-heavy. I firmly believe that meat maketh not the meal, and that there are so many delicious, abundant, and far healthier plant-based and wholefood ingredients which continue to provide the required nutrient intake, particularly protein, which many believe they need to eat meat to obtain. I personally don’t eat any store-bought cakes and biscuits, though I’m perfectly happy to eat them homemade because I know what has gone into them (this goes for all my cooking: I cook everything from scratch, which guarantees you know what’s in it, and that it will taste much better!) For my own sweet treats though, I make plant-based and often free-from. This is because I want what is going into my body to be nutritionally beneficial and also because I love experimenting with different ingredients, using non-conventional flours for example, and adding vegetables to cakes, to my husband’s incredulity.

After finishing watching Forks Over Knives, I decided I was going to try to eat a little less dairy (I used to eat a bowl of natural yogurt with fruit for breakfast every morning and did so for years) and the friend who’d recommended I watch Forks Over Knives said she’d be interested to see what I come up with as breakfast alternatives. After thinking about it a bit, I realised that I have already actually taken this step unknowingly, and that I’ve been experimenting with alternative breakfasts for longer, and more frequently than I thought. I now only have yogurt for breakfast about twice a week; the rest of the time I tend to make all sorts of oat-based delights, chia puddings, and nice-cream bowls. I was quite chuffed when I realised that this was the case, so I decided this week to share one of those super nourishing and delicious breakfast recipes with you. This incredible bowl contains banana, oats, buckwheat, berries, almond butter, nuts and seeds, and is sweetened a little with honey. It really is the most satisfying start to your day, and a great opportunity to venture out of the realms of breakfast cereal (if that’s where you reside) and into an exciting new world of breakfast possibilities!

Ingredients

• 1 chopped frozen banana
• 1 tbsp jumbo rolled oats
• Large handful frozen berries
• 1 dessertspoon almond butter
• Half a dessertspoon creamed honey
• 2 dessertspoons buckwheat groats
• Sprinkling of berries, nuts and seeds

Equipment

• Food processor

Method

Remove the frozen banana from the freezer about 20 minutes before you want to eat breakfast to allow to soften just a little.

Place the banana in the food processor along with the oats, berries, honey and almond butter.

Blitz until the mixture comes together in a lovely big, ice-creamy clump. This will take about a minute. Serve into a bowl.

Put a frying pan on the hob on a high heat and dry-fry the buckwheat groats until golden. Sprinkle on top of the nice-cream with the berries, nuts and seeds.

Enjoy eating ice-cream for breakfast!

A note on frozen bananas; freezing bananas is a great way to avoid wasting them when they start to overripen. Either place the banana as it is in the freezer, and you can then defrost fully before using in banana breads and cakes; or peel and chop your banana and place it in a freezer-proof tub. This works better of this type of recipe where you want the banana to remain frozen for as long as possible, and it avoids the faff of cutting the skin, still frozen, from the flesh. 

I do hope you enjoy this really incredibly delicious breakfast. Please leave some feedback in the comments below or follow me on Facebook and Instagram to get far more recipe inspiration and leave your comments there.

Thank you for reading.

Xxx Sam