Overnight Maple & Brown Sugar Oatmeal

The combination of pure maple syrup and brown sugar in this overnight maple & brown sugar steel-cut oat oatmeal makes for a delicious and healthy breakfast.

I like to send my kids off to school (and keep the tummies full of the little ones still at home) with a hearty and hopefully hot breakfast but sometimes (all the time!) mornings are hectic with lunch-packing and generally just getting out the door.

White bowl of cooked oatmeal topped with bananas and blueberries.

So imagine my delight when my sister, Emily, introduced me to the concept of overnight oatmeal. Um, huh? What? Where have I been?

Basically, steel cut oats cook in a slightly sweet bath all night long and the kids and I get to wake up to an instant breakfast. I was skeptical that it would really work and wondered if the oats would fall apart after cooking that long.

The key is using steel cut oats. They hold up beautifully to the long cooking time and the oatmeal, after a good, thorough stir, is ready for scooping and heaping upon lots of fresh fruit. The combination of pure maple syrup and brown sugar with the hearty oats makes for a fantastically, delicious and healthy breakfast.

We prefer our oatmeal with a sturdier consistency because we like to pour a bit of milk over it when adding fresh or dried fruit (I’ve included a note with the recipe below allowing for the right oatmeal consistency). I usually pull out the myriad of fruit options, stick them on the counter, chop up what needs to be chopped and my kids go at it.

I scoop oatmeal in their bowl and they load on the fruit and milk. It has definitely become a favorite breakfast around here and our fruit options consist of any of the following: raisins, dried cranberries or cherries, dried/fresh/frozen blueberries, sliced bananas, chopped apples or pears, chopped nectarines or peaches (when in season), fresh pineapple chunks, fresh orange segments, fresh or frozen strawberries…and probably others I am forgetting.

We eat breakfast around 7:00 a.m. so I set the oatmeal to cooking in the slow cooker around 11:00 p.m. and head to bed. It’s perfect right around the time we all wake up starving. I’m so happy to be able to add another do-able breakfast option to the list below. Enjoy!