This might sound surprising, but I thought breakfast might be the hardest meal to switch to a new, ‘clean food’ diet.
That’s because I bloody love breakfast cereal, me. Cheerios, Shreddies, Apricot Wheats …they’re some of the things that make getting up in the morning worthwhile.
They’re also full of crap – particularly the crap I’m trying to get rid of.
The nice, clean food alternative is (predictably) ‘breakfast oats’, or in other words, porridge. So I’ve had to find ways to make that as appealing. One attraction has been provided by the experimentation, but that can’t last forever.
As an aside, I read recently that breakfast cereal wasn’t invented as a breakfast dish. It started in the 1800s as an efficacious oat mixture which you had to soak in milk for several hours before eating. People liked it, but the long preparation time meant they left it to soak overnight and ate it when they got up in the morning. So the manufacturer quickly restyled it as being ideal for breakfast. Everything this giant industry has developed into has stemmed from there.
So the fairly trendy, 21st century ‘overnight oats’ is simply a return to breakfast cereal’s origins. Funny old world.
I’ve tried both the overnight version and the cooked version, and I’m marginally preferring the cooked one, maybe because of the time of year. I’ve been playing with adding fruits and berries, cacao nibs*, etc. I’ll report back if I ever find my ultimate favourite.
*Why ‘cacao’ nibs? Why not ‘cocoa nibs’? Is it just pretentiousness or marketing nonsense? I have a feeling it is.