Note: I made this oatmeal a few days ago because today I am actually fasting as part of the jewish holiday called Yom Kippur (which means day of atonement). Jews pray and fast on this day to repent for the bad things they may have done the previous year which helps to start the new year right.

With the cold weather coming, oatmeal is the perfect breakfast that just warms you up so nicely. My mom used to always buy oatmeal packets from the store and I would love them. My favourite was brown sugar and cinnamon. As I got older though, I started looking at ingredients labels and I realized there were lots of weird additives in that oatmeal. After that, I rarely had oatmeal because I was just too lazy to make it myself. But boy am I glad I made this oatmeal recipe. I’m going to talk about this in 2 parts: preparation and cooking.

The preparation was super simple and took 5 minutes. I put oats, dried cranberries, chopped almonds, unsweetened shredded coconut and pepitas (pumpkin seeds) then flavoured with cinnamon and brown sugar (instead of coconut sugar). If you didn’t want all the nuts/seeds/fruit, you could just have the oats and flavourings. It would still be delicious but not have all the texture. I wanted a variety of textures so that’s why I put everything. I mixed everything together and stored it in a container. Whenever I wanted, I could be a few minutes away from a nice bowl of oatmeal. Side note: I put a picture of the dry mix at the bottom of this post.

The next morning, I got my water boiling (2/3 cup) then scooped 1/3 cup of the mixture (remixing everything before scooping) into the water. It took 6 minutes of cooking to get the water fully absorbed and it was super creamy. It was so quick and easy to make.

I know 1/3 cup of oatmeal might not sound like a lot of food (nor did it look like enough) but it was quite filling. It tasted really good and wasn’t overly sweet either. I loved all the slight crunch of the nuts and seeds and the chew of the cranberries. I think for my remaining bowls of oatmeal, I will add some chopped apple or berries just to give some fresh fruity flavour.