Despite my country’s great tradition of the full English Breakfast, I full-on refuse to cook food in the morning.
Here are some breakfasts that score highly in Easiness (time and effort involved), Cheapness, Deliciousness and Healthiness.
What it sounds like. Ready-made cereal with milk or milk substitute of your choice. Stats here are for whole wheat cereal with little or no added sugar. Bump it up to H4 by adding an easy-to-eat fruit such as banana or grapes.
Mix oats with milk or yogurt, as if making porridge (with milk, generally the milk should cover the dry oats plus a little extra). Add flavours as you like - cinnamon and honey, honey and raisins/nuts, maple syrup, cocoa power - then cover and stick in the fridge overnight.
In the morning, the oats should have absorbed the liquid and you have tasty porridge you can eat as-is or heated in the microwave.
Bump up to H4 with a serving of fresh or dried fruit.
I know Americans use the word ‘flapjack’ to mean something else, but this is flapjack in the British sense, which basically means ‘granola bars only edible’.
This is one that you bake on a weekend, then cut into bars and you have them ready to go and they keep for like a month.
1.5 cup butter
1/2 cup golden syrup
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 cups oats
Pinch of salt
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ground ginger (or half that amount of fresh/tinned minced ginger)
1/2 tsp allspice
Handful of raisins or other dried fruit
Handful of chopped nuts
Replace golden syrup with honey
Melt butter and sugar in a large pan and add salt and spices. Let it bubble for a while until the sugar starts to caramelise a little bit and smell amazing. Add the amount of golden syrup in the recipe, then go ‘eh’ and ass about a tablespoon more because golden syrup is awesome.
Stir, then take off the heat.
Add the oats and any mix-ins a bit at a time, adding extra oats if there seems to be excessive liquid not picked up by the oats. Spoon the mixture into a greased baking tray and cook at 180c (350f) for 20 minutes (20 freedom-minutes), until it starts getting all brown on top.
Let it cool, then cut into granola-bar sized pieces.
Eat for breakfast with a glass of milk or the hot drink of your choice.
Bonus: When you slice up the flapjack and remove it from the tin, there will inevitably be little crumbly bits of flapjack that refuse to adhere to any of your bars of flapjack. Use these delicious crumbly bits as topping for yogurt or vanilla ice cream.
