Alternative Breakfast Bowl: Banana Bread Quinoa Porridge

When I've got bananas that have gone too far ripe to eat, I throw them in the freezer to save for later.  I end up stockpiling the over-ripe bananas to make recipes, my current favorite is banana pancakes.  We can only eat so many banana pancakes, so when this breakfast quinoa recipe came along that uses ripe bananas, I went for it.

Inspiration

Ingredients lineup

The Realistic Nutritionist Crock Pot Banana Bread Quinoa

Since over-ripe bananas are pretty sweet and I was adding non-dairy creamer, I ended up skipping the brown sugar.  I also skipped the nuts since I don't like nuts in my banana bread.

Typically I would refrain from using non-dairy creamer in a recipe like this and probably substitute water, but we had a nice big container and I wanted to see how it would turn out.

The original poster made this into 6 servings, but I thought that looked small, so I went with 4 instead. 

Ingredients

• 2 over-ripe bananas
• 1 cup quinoa, rinsed
• 1/2 cup almond milk
• 1/2 cup French Vanilla non-dairy creamer
• 1 cup water
• dash vanilla extract
• cinnamon

Before cooking

Directions

I put all the ingredients in my medium-sized slow cooker.

After cooking

You're supposed to mash the bananas and add all the other ingredients, but my bananas were frozen, so I cut them in half at the equator and then sliced each half the long way so I could peel the skin off.  I kind of cut them into bits as I put them in the slow cooker and figured I'd mash them up a bit with the spatula once they defrosted.

This was supposed to cook for 4-6 hours on low, but my slow cooker is a style that sits directly on the heating base rather than heating on the sides so my batch was done in three hours. 

Verdict

Banana goodness, but not amazing. 

I liked this, but didn't love it.  The banana flavor was nice and it was a good change to have it mashed in from the beginning rather than added to the bowl after cooking like I would do with oatmeal.  But all of that said, it didn't really seem a whole lot different than a bowl of oats with banana slices.  I would make it again, but I've got several other oatmeal experiments I would rather make first.  Plus I felt like I was starving only a couple hours after eating it, so it seems like the quinoa didn't tide me over like oats do. 

The creamer was nice, but I don't know if it was really necessary.  If I try this again, I might try 1 cup of water and 1 cup of almond milk for the liquid.

The "quinoa as breakfast cereal" concept was nice.  If you are interested in quinoa but have never tried it, definitely try this out.  And if you want a new recipe to add to your quinoa collection, this is worth a shot.