Healthy Batch Cooking - Breakfast Routine - Whole Food Vegan - How To Cook Delicious Meal

Having a routine with some of your meals is the best way to make food prep a little easier so you stay successful on a whole food vegan diet. Batch cooking is a great way to maintain this lifestyle and in this video I'll show you my steel cut oatmeal and easy morning smoothie routine. We'll also cover a few other ideas in case those aren't your first choices for breakfast.

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Today I’m showing you my breakfast routine. I think one of the biggest hurdles for most people when switching to, or trying to maintain, their whole food vegan diet is all of the food prep, and this can be pretty daunting especially if you're not used to cooking at home. You can’t rely on restaurants or packaged convenience foods, especially if you're trying to be SOS-free because all of those products are going to be full of the types of things that you're trying to avoid.

But I think one of the best ways to overcome this challenge is to have a routine with some of your food. Now don't confuse routine with boring, what I mean is you have a template and that is your routine. So it's the base of your meals, and then you mix and match what you add in every day so you still have lots of variety.

Batch Cooking Steel Cut Oats

So like I said I'm going to show you my breakfast, which is oatmeal and smoothies. Now I know those aren’t for everyone, and if that's you stay tuned to the end of the video where I'll give you some other ideas that you can build a breakfast routine around.

Starting with our oatmeal. So every Sunday I get out my six quart Instant Pot, and I'm gone add two cups of steel cut oats. And then I'm goanna add five cups of water. I’ve already measured this out so I'm just goanna pour it in, and if you want you can do a combination of water and milk. I don't really like to use plant-based milks just in general, but if you did want to do that, I would start with maybe one cup of a plant-based milk and four cups of water.

But even with just the water, I find that this is very creamy. I have a model of Instant Pot where it automatically switches to sealing when the lid is closed, but if you have a different model, just make sure your valve is turned to the sealing position. And then I'm gone set my Instant Pot to pressure cook at high pressure for six minutes.

I like to turn the keep warm setting off. And you can do four to six minutes depending on how you like your oatmeal, just keep in mind that as the oats sit in the fridge through the week they will absorb any extra water and may become a little mushy.

So then I'm just going to hit start. This will take about 10 to 15 minutes to come up to pressure and then after it cooks, I let it natural release for about 15 to 20 minutes, and if there's any remaining pressure I'll just quick release that.

So now I usually go do a little bit of yoga and gather the rest of my ingredients while this cook. So I'll see you when it's done. I forgot to mention, if you don’t have an Instant Pot, that's totally fine.

You can batch cook your steel cut oats on the stove top. I really like the Instant Pot because I am notorious for letting my grains boil over on the stove top, and with the Instant Pot, you can just throw them in and walk away. But you can do that as well, just follow the instructions on your package. So my oats are done now so I'm going to go ahead and show you what it looks like.  At there you have to options

You can either leave your oats plain like this and go ahead and put them in a storage container in the fridge, and then every day you can just throw in whatever toppings you want. I’m going to link down below a series I did on my blog of five days of no repeat oats with my favorite toppings. So you could try that. Lately though I've been going for option two for maximum convenience, which is to go ahead and throw everything in at this point.

So you still can have variety from week to week, you would just be eating the same thing for the whole week.

This week I'm going to start with this bag of frozen mixed berries. You don't have to defrost this, I took it out when I started cooking the oats to give it a little head start, but we’re going to dump it right in here and the residual heat of the Instant Pot will help to defrost that. I’m also going to add about a third a cup of dried barberries. These are tart little berries that I've started eating and I really like them, so I dump that in there.

I have five Medrol dates that I have chopped up.  If you use different kinds of dates, you might use more or less and just depending on how much sweetness you like. So you can put as you want. And then I'm going to add about a teaspoon or two of my oatmeal spice. I'll puta link for this in the description box below, but it's very similar to a pumpkin pie spice, so you can use that as well, or just cinnamon or whatever spices you like really. And finally I'm going to put a whole can of pumpkin puree.

I started adding either pumpkin or sweet potato or butternut squash puree into my oats because it just makes it really creamy and it's extra vegetables so why not? Then I'm just going to mix everything in here.I make my oatmeal on Sunday and then I keep it in the fridge. This will last me for five days, so the other two days of the week.

I just microwave rolled oats. So at least for five days I have breakfast all ready to go every single day. I keep tons of different frozen fruits in my freezer at all times so I never have to think about it, I can just grab something and add it so that I always have lots of different variety for my oatmeal and for my smoothies.

Smoothie Routine

I’m going to go ahead and put the lid back on just for a minute or two to help those frozen berries defrost and then we'll be back in a minute. Okay next I'm going to show you my smoothie routine. Now I know smoothies aren't for everyone, but they work well for me.

And I just have a little tiny smoothie because I like to get beans and greens in with every meal, so that's a really easy way for me to do that. So I start with just a little bit of frozen fruit. Today I'm using mango. I'll often use mango, pineapple, or banana because those are extra sweet so I only have to use a small amount. And then I'm adding about a third a cup of cooked whole soybeans.  I'll use any kind of beans, but these are soybeans that I batch cooked in my Instant Pot. And then I get giant containers of greens and then I freeze them so I always have them on hand.

So I’m just going to add some big handfuls of that. And then I like to use my smoothie as an opportunity to get some more spices into my diet because spices have tons of antioxidants. So I’m going to do a little ground ginger, about a quarter teaspoon, and about a quarter teaspoon of ground turmeric.

let me know, do you pronounce both Rs? Are you team "turmeric "turmeric"? Let me know in the comments. And finally I also add some dulse flakes. This is seaweed and the reason I add this is to make sure I’m getting enough iodine.

 Since I don't salt my food, I'm not getting it from iodized salt, so I just add that in there, and about a quarter teaspoon of that as well. And finally a little crack of black pepper, yes, I put black pepper in my smoothie, and that's to help absorb the curcumin that's in the turmeric. So then I'll add some water and blend that up.

Breakfast Recap and Tips

Alright so here's my breakfast, so with the oatmeal I put it in a glass storage container that I'll keep in the fridge, and then I scooped out my portion for today. I always also usually add some ground flaxseed or chia seeds and I wait to add those at the end just because like I said, the oats will continue to soak up any liquid, and flax and chia tend to do that as well, so I don't want to turn this into a complete brick in the fridge.

Other Easy Breakfast Ideas

So every morning I’ll scoop out my portion, heat it in the microwave, it usually takes about two minutes in my microwave, and then I'll add my flaxseed. And then I've got my little green smoothie here. Alright so that was my breakfast routine, and like I said I know that smoothies and oatmeal aren't for everyone soI have a few ideas for you.

First of all you could of course do either a smoothie or oatmeal. If you wanted to do a much larger smoothie that could be a meal replacement and that might work very well for you, especially if you need something really fast and convenient to take with you.

You could just do the oatmeal, and if you don’t like the sweet oatmeal, you could do a savory oatmeal. So you could try adding beans and greens right into your oats along with some nooch and some spices and whatever else you like. Another idea would be a tofu scramble, which you can also batch prep and keep in the fridge for a few days.

So you can do this either in a skillet or on a sheet pan in the oven. Like with the oatmeal where I would batch prep my plain oats every week and then add different toppings, with the tofu scramble you start with the base of your tofu and then add different vegetables every time.

There are lots of tofu scramble recipes out there, I like the one from SimMet Nutrition, if you check out his YouTube channel and look for tofu scramble you'll find some great options there. Another idea would be pancakes. So there are so many vegan pancake options or waffles anything like that. Find your favorite recipe, make a whole bunch of them at once, and then you can freeze them and just pop them in the toaster.

I also like to make a hash brown out of frozen shredded potatoes, just make sure there's nothing added to the potatoes. So you can also do that on a sheet pan with a bunch of vegetables, and I like to have that with some tempeh that’s cut up into really thin slices and just marinated in a little bit of soy sauce or other seasonings. Now some people will call this tempeh bacon, I don't like to call it bacon because it’s really nothing like bacon, but it is a nice, crispy treat.

Last but not least, might I also suggest rethinking breakfast all together? Maybe you want to eat a big bowl of fruit, or some steamed veggies, even a salad. Maybe you want to eat last night's leftover stew. Food is just food, so it doesn't really matter what you eat for breakfast as long as it's whole plant foods.

I hope you all got something out of that and enjoyed seeing what I do for my breakfast routine. Ifyou have any questions about why I eat something, or what I eat, or how I prepare it, let me know in the comments. And I'll see you next time. Where I'll give you some other ideas that you can also create a "breakfast".