Superfood Made Easy: Blissful Blueberry Breakfast Bowl

Do you have favorite meal or snack that seems weird but is so good you eat it everyday anyway?

It could have come from anywhere: Maybe you had to find an emergency sub for an ingredient you ran out of—and the sub made the recipe even better. Maybe you were jonesing for a snack but hadn’t grocery shopped, so you concocted a trail mix that ended up being divine.

Or maybe you decided, for unorthodox reasons, to try frozen blueberries on your oatmeal instead of raisins—and the hot-cold, sweet-creamy combination was ah-may-zing.

Oh wait, that last one is me. 🙂

Frozen blueberries on cinnamon-spiked hot cereal = pure bliss

Seriously, I’ve been eating this super-easy blueberry breakfast bowl pretty much every morning for the past three months. And when we run out of frozen blueberries and I can’t have my favorite breakfast?

I get really…blue. (Too much? 😉 )

Also, frozen blueberries have hidden superpowers, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Because the reason I switched to blueberries isn’t exactly what you’d expect.

A desperate swap

When I first made this bowl, I had no idea I was stumbling on a superfood.

I just wanted to stop itching.

You see, back in April when I came up with it, I was still dealing with on-and-off yeast issues. Itching—the crazy-making kind—had plagued me since taking Cipro years prior, and nothing ever seemed to help. So when a doc prescribed me 2-weeks of a strong antifungal called V-Fend, to maximize its effects I nixed refined sugar and cut way back on fruit sugar.

I figured one way to do that was to top my morning hot cereal with low-sugar blueberries instead of high-sugar raisins.

I chose frozen blueberries because they were cheaper than fresh. And that first time I dumped them on my brown rice cereal, it was due to impatience. Because despite the fact that freshly made rice grits are basically molten, I always want to eat them right away. (It’s embarrassing how often I burn my tongue.) I figured mixing in frozen berries would cool down the cereal, stat.

But when I went to stir the frozen berries into the steaming cereal, I stopped. There was magic unfolding in my bowl.

The piping hot cereal was slowly melting the bottom of the berries, releasing their gorgeous sapphire juice. I quickly dipped my spoon in and found the cool berries were sweet and rich, a luscious counterpoint to the hot vanilla creamy rice cereal. I was hooked. Never would I mix them in.

In fact, each bite tasted a bit like the blueberry muffin batter my mom and I used to make when I was little. Back then, we folded in can-packed wild blueberries with their beautiful purple juice into smooth vanilla batter, and this scrumptious breakfast bowl takes me right back.

In short, it’s blueberry breakfast heaven. And the only reason I discovered it was because I needed to ditch the itch! Speaking of which, the V-Fend helped a LOT. (I like to think the blueberries contributed. 🙂  )

Surprising superfood: Frozen blueberries

What I later learned is that this blueberry breakfast bowl isn’t just tasty: It supercharges your body! Blueberries are packed with powerful antioxidants that can boost your brain, heart, eye, and urinary tract health. (Not bad for breakfast.)

What’s more, frozen blueberries are even healthier than fresh. Sure, they’re frozen shortly after picking, which locks in nutrients. But there’s more to the story. The freezing process, which makes blueberries release all that gorgeous juice when they melt?

Blueberry juice boosts your brain, heart, eye, and urinary tract health.

That same process makes all those antioxidants even easier for your body to absorb. So you get more nutritional bang for your buck. Just from using frozen instead of fresh! Who knew?¹

Add that to the breast-cancer fighting power of the flax seed in this yummy bowl, and you have a superfood breakfast—in 5 minutes flat.

Be berry sweet

Be warned if you’re going to make this blueberry breakfast bowl: Your frozen blueberries must be sweet. This is not optional. If your blueberries are tart, you’re not going to want to be my friend anymore. And I’m kind of sensitive, so let’s not go there. 😉

So far, the only brand I’ve found that’s reliably sweet, bag after bag, is Whole Foods frozen organic blueberries. I discovered this after trying to use another brand (*cough*Kirkland*cough*). The result was not at all delicious.

So try a few frozen berries before dumping them on your brown rice cereal or oatmeal or whatever. If they aren’t delicious, thaw them a bit and sweeten them, or drizzle the final bowl with some maple syrup. It won’t be as good as if you’d used naturally sweet frozen blueberries, but at least you’ll still like me after breakfast.

Anyhow, here’s what I’ve been eating for breakfast for the past 3 months. Hope you like it as much as I do!

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Your turn:

• What’s the weird thing you eat that secretly tastes amazing?

Reference

1. Freezing Blueberries Improves Antioxidant Availability. Today’s Dietitian. http://www.todaysdietitian.com/news/081814_news.shtml. Accessed July 15, 2016.

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