The Soaked Bean

Seeking Nourishment, Finding Traditions

Oven-Baked-Overnight Oats

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soakedoats

If I knew how to needlepoint, I’d probably stitch this on the nearest pillow: The best breakfasts in life are simple. And if it was a particularly large pillow: And are enjoyed for far longer than they’re prepared.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good pancake breakfast.  Home-made eggs benedict?  Heck oui!  It’s just that I don’t love spending a good portion of my morning making those things.  I want to do other things like water my plants, leaf through On Food and Cooking, or think about what to make for dinner.  It’s for these reasons that I understand why the bowl of cereal has became such a venerable American tradition.  One bowl, one spoon, a few gestures et voila!  You’ve broken the fast and you’re ready to start your day.

However, the bowl of cereal just isn’t cutting it, nutritionally speaking. Even whole-grain, minimally processed cereals go through a process called extrusion–where a high temperature and a high amount of pressure combine to create flakes and orbs and alphabet-letters while simultaneously creating chemical changes in the grains making, for example, certain protein chains toxic.

Well, heck. What about granola?

Even granola has its issues, as most of the store-bought varieties haven’t been traditionally processed, or soaked to release anti-nutritive compounds found in grains like oats, overnight making it harder to absorb valuable minerals like iron, zinc and manganese. (If you’re new to this space, read more about the importance of soaking your grains here).

Enter the bowl of overnight, or “soaked”, oats which are simply, a bowl of oats covered in a liquid (like raw milk or water or even runny yogurt) and left to soak overnight. One of the easiest, healthiest breakfasts, ever.

In Winter, I add another step.  I put my oats in the oven.  Not all night, mind you, just for 15 minutes, as soon as I wake up.  This was the breakfast that saw me through the wet Vancouver Winter during my nutrition studies when time in the morning was precious. A housemate of mine had come into kilos and kilos of frozen blueberries through work (no, he wasn’t a farmer #Canada.) and I started incorporating those into my recipe, too. When my oats and berries were ready, I’d add a huge knob of butter, a good glug of maple syrup and a handful of hemp seeds et voila!  A nutrition-packed breakfast to be enjoyed for far longer than it was prepared.  The real breakfast of champions, if you ask me.

Oven-baked-overnight-oats.  Get on board, y’all.

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Oven-Baked-Overnight-Oats

  • Oats
  • Water
  • Frozen berries (optional)
  • Raw butter
  • Honey or maple syrup
  • Nuts and seeds (optional)
  1. In the evening before bed, pour oats in oven-proof bowl.
  2. Cover oats with water.  I like to use a bit less water to cover my oats because I like them thick.  If you like them runnier use more water.
  3. Go to sleep.
  4. Wake up, pre-heat oven to 250C
  5. Give oats a good stir.  If you have frozen berries, add them now.  Place oats in oven for 15 minutes or until nice and toasty.
  6. Take oats out of oven. Add knob of butter and/or raw cream, knob of honey or glug of maple syrup, and other delights of your choosing (flax seeds, toasted almonds, tahini).
  7. Stir and enjoy.

 

Poppy-Seed Pancakes + Applesauce for Grandma Stella

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sliced pancake

My grandma Stella was a great home-cook.  In fact, she was a professional one, working as a caterer for dinner parties at a time when the dinner party, for some folks, was a catered affair.

She learned all she knew from her mother Rose, who had immigrated to New York from the Ukraine and who made everything–including moonshine(!)–the traditional way; from scratch.

Stella was a woman of the 50s, and after a childhood spent soaking beans, canning tomatoes and fermenting fruit into alcohol with her mama, it’s not surprising that she sometimes got on board with the convenience foods of her era.  Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, lime Jell-O, canned kidney-beans and the odd cube of bouillon all come to mind when I think of her kitchen.

For the most part, though, my grandma, like her mother, cooked from scratch, simmering bones for broth, stewing tomatoes for sauce, stuffing cabbages and onions with meat and rice, mostly without recipes or measurements.  From scratch meant, for her, to cook by feeling, intuition, taste and smell.

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This is how we should all be able to cook, free from the restrictions of a recipe, guided by our senses and able to just enjoy the rhythms of the task at hand.  Cooking was, I believe, a meditative process for my grandma–so completely focused she was when onion-chopping, potato-roasting, cabbage-braising.  S0 completely connected to her mother, her mother’s mother, her roots on the other-side of the world in the Ukraine.

So simply was she able to make meals that were nourishing, in so many senses of the word.

Cooking like this, it takes practice.  My grandma started when she was young because she had to–her mother needed her help.  These days, families spend less time in the kitchen and when a meal is prepared at home, the lil’ ones are often left out of the fun.

Bringing kids back into the kitchen means more-fun for everyone.  They’ll grow up knowing how to make themselves a nourishing meal from scratch and will eventually pass that knowledge on to their children–keeping us all linked together in this onion-chopping, potato-roasting nourishing-ourselves-and-each-other chain.

poppyseed

My grandma’s intuitive approach to cooking led her to believe that she was a terrible baker.  Maybe she was, but, to be honest, I can’t remember her attempting to bake, ever, not even once, just for the hell of it.  I think there were just too many other more-enticing ways to get a hold of something sweet or doughy in her developed neighborhood.

We’d visit her there in her robin’s-egg-blue house every summer and while week-day breakfasts were simple–cereal or scrambled eggs–, on week-ends us grand-kids would walk to the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts (yep, we were truly children of the 90s) for a half-a-dozen box and a tray of iced-coffees for the grown-ups.

My grandma loved sweets and especially jelly doughnuts.  Sometimes we’d split one (not to not have a whole doughnut, but to have a second half of a lemon custard [her], or a chocolate glazed with rainbow sprinkles[me]) and those moments–cutting into a shimmering doughnut on a summer morning–are some of my sweetest memories.

jamsselectingpancake

This is why instead of recreating one of my grandma’s recipes, I’m cooking something for her–the breakfast I would make her if she were still here.

I chose pancakes because they fall somewhere in-between cooking and baking (they are cakes, after all) while still being something you can truly cook from scratch.

I learned the golden ratio for pancake-making years ago and haven’t looked back since.  I mean, who wants to follow a recipe on the kind of morning that calls for pancakes, anyway?

jamz

The Golden Ratio for Pancakes:
x=1
Mix x cup flour with x tbsp baking powder and a dash of salt.
Mix x egg with x cup liquid (raw milk, nut milk, water if you’re in a pinch) and 2x tbsp something sweet (maple syrup, honey)
Mix wet ingredients with dry ingredients.  If you’re adding something else (chocolate chips, blueberries, poppy seeds) mix that. 
Let rest (so the baking powder can work its wonders) for at least 30 minutes.

Voila!  You’ve just been pancaked.

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Poppy-Seed Pancakes + Applesauce

Ingredients

  • 1 cup whole-grain flour (we used a light spelt)
  • 1 tbsp baking powder
  • dash of salt
  • 1 egg
  • 1 cup milk (we used raw almond-milk)
  • 2 tbsp honey
  • 1 tbsp poppy seeds
  • knob ghee

Directions

  1. Mix dry ingredients together in a bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg, then add the milk and honey and mix.
  2. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry bowl, mixing thoroughly. Add the poppy seeds and give a good stir. Let sit for at least 30 minutes.
  3. Heat oven on low.
  4. Heat a cast-iron skillet on medium, greasing with a good knob of ghee. Wait until the skillet is good and hot, then pour batter into center of skillet. Let cook for a few minutes--tiny holes will start to appear in your batter around the edges. Flip and let cook for a few more minutes. Place on oven-proof plate while cooking the rest of the pancakes.

Serve savory with an egg, pickles and sour-cream or sweet with berry jam or applesauce.

cinnamon

Quick Applesauce

Ingredients
2 soft, sweet apples (we used golden russets), diced
tbsp freshly grated cinnamon
1/4 cup water

Directions
Dice apples and place in heavy-bottomed saucepan.  Add 1/4 cup water and cinnamon.  Heat on medium-high heat, stirring occasionally. Once apples have started to soften, turn heat down and cover simmering for 8-or-so minutes or until soft.