Breakfast As Easy As Apple Pie

If you are like me your mornings are filled with rushing to get yourself ready and the kids ready and out the door!  In fact most of the time I am so rushed I'm lucky if I remember to grab my purse (I've actually taken to stashing money in my laptop bag).  Trying to lead a healthy lifestyle means getting breakfast and getting it from home not a drive thru or cafeteria.  A couple of weeks ago I came across this recipe on a site called Cooking with Jax.   I decided to give it a try and the worst case scenario was that no one but me liked it but EVERYONE liked it, the kids even ask to have it as an after school snack!

I made a couple of tweaks to the recipe:

Ingredients

1 cup of steel cut oats (sometimes called Irish Oats)
3 diced apples (I used Red Delicious)
1 cup apple juice (I used Mott's)
3 cups water
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 cup raw sugar (not the white stuff)

Just a couple of notes here

I did not peel my apples, it was fine with out peeling them but if you have texture issues then you probably should peel them.  I don't have the time or the patience for that ;o)

If you prefer to use quick oats please check out the Cooking with Jax link above as she does have a version that can be done with quick oats as well as on the stove.  

I make this in a large crock-pot but I also double the recipe as I am making it for a family of 4.

Directions
Put oats in crock-pot, add apple juice, water, cinnamon and raw sugar.  De-core the apples.  Dice, slice or however you like your apples cut, toss them in and stir.  Turn the crock-pot on, put the lid on and forget about it!  Wake up in the morning and enjoy a hot yummy breakfast. 

10/23/12 - I like this much better when I only cook it for 4 hours and then put it in containers and just reheat it in the morning.  When I left it overnight it was way too mushy for my liking.

I put the leftovers in 1 cup containers and put them in the refrigerator (they don't stay around for longer than a couple of days so I don't know how long they would actually last).

Nutritional Info is approximate and not verified.

Nutritional Info

• Servings Per Recipe: 6
• Amount Per Serving 1 cup
• Calories: 152.7

• Total Fat: 1.8 g
• Cholesterol: 0.0 mg
• Sodium: 3.6 mg
• Total Carbs: 33.2 g
• Dietary Fiber: 4.6 g
• Protein: 4.1 g

Have you heard? There's gold in them chickens!

Yes corny, but oh so true. I use chicken stock in many of the dishes I make and I think it just makes things taste better. BUT oh my goodness so expensive! I happen to take a cooking class at my local gym in which they talked about how to break down your own chicken and how to make your own chicken stock. Which I promptly did, just to prove I could, but I honestly struggled with getting it just right.

After a bunch of searching and trying things I found that this is what worked for me:

In my crockpot I put:

1 whole chicken
onion, roughly chopped (whatever you have on hand)
carrots, roughly chopped (whatever you have on hand)
celery sticks, roughly chopped (whatever you have on hand)
parsley (if I have fresh I do one or two stems but if I don't I put enough dry in the palm of my hand until it gets to nickel size)

(if I happen to have mushrooms hanging out in the fridge they go in too)

I add salt & pepper too but I really don't know how much... I just go with my gut (if I had to guess I would say about a 1/4 teaspoon of each)

Cooking time... well I generally do this after the kids go to bed so I start it around 8:30pm and then I let it cook until about 5pm the following day. I pull out the chicken (or as much as I can without it all falling apart on me). I take a large bowl or stock pot and put a strainer on top of it... the very important thing is to line the strainer with cheese cloth. Then I pour the liquid into the strainer.

Now comes the fun part... storing the stock! The best method I have found is to let the liquid cool slightly and put it in freezer bags. A word of caution... Sandwich bags are not a good substitute unless you let your stock cool down a whole lot. I like to lay the bags flat when I freeze them... mainly because the first time I did this I put them in the side door and when they froze they sort of molded themselves to the space and it wasn't easy getting them out... let's just say it involved a blow dryer and a whole lot of swearing (in my head of course).

OK so now I have all this chicken too. We typically just shred it and put it in a container to use during the week in enchiladas, mix it with pesto and pasta, salads... etc. Again, I have to say I do not like chicken BUT it is a huge time saver during the week most of the time AND it keeps me from going through the drive thru!