Better breakfasts

I am an owl. I work best at night, and tend to stay up pretty late to finish chores and do my planning for meals and lessons. Which means I usually have difficulty getting up in the mornings, and the kids tend to be the ones waking me up. Most days I crawl blearily into the kitchen, and prepare them a simple breakfast. They love the crunchiness of cereal, and previously we rotated a few types of cereal for them, plus they would get milk and yoghurt. Things that took me less than 5 minutes to put on the table.

However, I've been feeling the urge to introduce more variety into their breakfasts, plus I wanted to cut down on the amount of processed food and sugar they were eating with all that cereal. And I discovered overnight oats. It's been quite the rage in Singapore, but for those who have not heard of it, you basically mix up oatmeal with other stuff, add milk and yoghurt, and leave it in the fridge overnight. The next day, the oatmeal would have soaked up all the milk, and you get this wonderful creamy breakfast, no cooking needed. I was a little skeptical at first. I mean, we did love the bircher muesli that we got in Europe, but the kids always chose cereal and bread over that. And they were not too keen on warm oatmeal.

To my surprise, the boys have been lapping it up. They love it so much that they have not asked for cereal thus far! And it's great, because I can prepare it the night before, lumber out of bed in the mornings, scoop the oatmeal into bowls and add chia seeds, and still have breakfast on the table in five minutes flat. I don't follow an exact recipe, but usually mix up raisins, rolled oats, milk, greek yoghurt, and a dash of apple juice into ours, and add fruit and chia seeds in the morning. You could also try this recipe.

Overnight oats aside, we've been making smoothies for breakfast too. Junior J has refused to drink milk since a few months back, and he's been asking for juice every morning. Again, I wasn't too keen on so much sugar, so we've been trying simple smoothies (Usually milk with banana and blueberries, or milk with melon and bananas. We tried avocado but the kids didn't like it.). I love that it keeps him fuller after breakfasts, which is great, because otherwise he tends to get hungry and starts to meltdown just before lunch (which is terrible, because it means you have a hungry, angry child that is going berserk, and refusing to do the one thing that would help him, which is to get some food into his tummy).

And this week, I'm trying to change things a little by making buns for breakfast too. These I've been making for a while, but we usually have them for dinner with soup. I love how they include whole grains (and I know because I had to grind up the grains myself!), and I'm also trying to add more variety by making our own cheese spreads (I'll write up the recipe soon, once I tweak it!).

Breakfasts are still quite the challenge, because so many typical breakfast meals contain eggs, and we have one boy who has an egg allergy. I don't like to feed the kids too much ham and sausages, and they are not used to having Chinese breakfasts like noodles or porridge (our German friends were so horrified to hear that we are used to hot, savoury breakfasts!). Anyway, I can't get up in time to cook those! So help me here, do you have any other healthy, easy to prepare breakfast ideas, that don't contain eggs in them? Other than sandwiches or toast that is!

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