17 September 2015


It's time for this month's Improv Challenge.  The premise of the Improv Challenge is easy: each month there are two assigned ingredients.  The participants must make a recipe using both ingredients and blog about it.  


This month's assigned ingredients were apples and oats.  Is it that time of year already?  Yes, it is!  The kids are in their third week of school and I have been on the lookout for easy, convenient breakfast recipes for them. I saw this recipe for overnight oats and a light bulb went off! I have seen this all over blogland for a while now, but for some reason had not gotten around to trying it. This challenge gave me the perfect opportunity.  The inspiration came from a great blog called Super Healthy Kids.  I changed up just a couple of things; here's my version.

Peanut Butter Apple Overnight Oats

Ingredients:
1½ cups milk
½ cup vanilla yogurt
2 cups old-fashioned or rolled oats
½ cup peanut butter
1 cup grated apple
½ tsp apple pie spice

Directions:
Stir milk and yogurt together.  Add oats.  Stir in peanut butter until evenly mixed.  Add apple and apple pie spice.  Pour into a container with a lid.  Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Enjoy the next morning, garnishing with an extra sprinkle of apple pie spice if you like.

Makes 5-6 (1-cup) servings.

If you are not familiar with overnight oats, it's all kinds of awesome. Instead of cooking the oats, you are soaking them overnight.  They keep their shape, but soften by morning.  You eat them cold, which sounds weird until you try it.  You can add all kinds of things and make any flavor you like.  Yummy.  I thought peanut butter and apple would be the perfect way to introduce this to my kids.  They were used to eating oatmeal warm, of course.  But throw some peanut butter in anything and a kid will try it, I swear!  Eva, my kindergartner, finished her bowl lickety-split.  Lena, my second-grader, would have too, but she bit her tongue and that was the end of breakfast for her that day. :(

Unfortunately, my husband and I are doing low carb (down 20 lbs, yay!), so I wasn't able to enjoy these as much as I would have liked.  I did sneak a few bites though and was cursing the carbs!  It is so good.  It will last in the fridge for several days, but you might need to add some milk after the first day if it looks a little dry, as the oats continue to soak up the liquid.

 This dish really has everything you or your kid needs to get going in the morning. Calcium from the milk and yogurt, protein from the peanut butter, and fiber and complex carbs from the oats.  You can feel good about sending your kids off to school with this in their tummies!

Be sure to check out all the great apples and oats recipes below and come back next month to see what kind of orange and black thing I make.  Spooky!