Our family loves to eat out but one thing we’ve realized is that we’d rather spend money on a restaurant for lunch or dinner than for breakfast. Breakfast is pretty simple but it’s one way for us to ‘win’ when it comes to eating healthy and starting the day off right. So a typical breakfast for Alan & I (not the kids) is to eat steamed oats with a sprinkling of coconut, along with egg whites.
WHAT IS PUTTU?
We’re not huge oatmeal people so we opted to eat steam oats with banana instead. It’s a twist on an Indian breakfast called “puttu”, which is usually made out of rice flour. Rice flour is dampened with water and put in a cylindrical vessel (mine is dome) with layers of fresh unsweetened coconut and steamed. Here’s an episode on Ellen where a kid has mastered it.
HOW TO MAKE STEAMED OATS
Oats is a bit tricky because if you dampen it too much, it gets gooey and sticky, however, you need to add water a bit at a time and mix it by hand to make sure the oats are nice and damp without being wet. That way, the steam cooks through it evenly and doesn’t turn it into oatmeal!
I use 1/2 a banana and mix it in the cooked oats. Yum! Sometimes it tastes like dessert. You can make the oats ahead of time and store it in the freezer and just pop it in the microwave.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST
For the egg whites, use olive oil spray in the pan and season the egg whites with some black pepper and chili/cayenne pepper. No salt!
That’s all for the George typical weekday breakfast.
