Advertorial in association with Quaker Oats

I went through a stage last year of being totally overwhelmed by the amount of oats I had in the cupboard. I don’t know what went wrong with my shopping, but every time I’d go to look for something for dinner, all I could see was the Quaker Oat man smiling up at me. I swear I had about six different boxes at one point. It was bonkers.

Oats are brilliant of course. They are tasty, nutritious* and really versatile. You can’t get as far as I have down the parenting road without having made about 27,000 batches of flapjacks.

And then I really got into making granola and my oat problem was solved. I found a recipe in a book that made it look so easy I couldn’t believe I’d never done it before. Normally about half of the mixture makes it to the oven and the rest goes into my mouth in warm little squished up balls, but that’s okay, because breakfast IS the most important meal of the day.

Overnight oats are the next step up from making your own granola, (which is basically like making a giant flapjack and passing it off as breakfast). Overnight oats are what that mum at school that you want to be like makes for her family. They are the stuff that Instagram dreams are made of – those beautiful layers of colour and texture, all laid out on a wholesome looking wooden board, sprinkled with oats and toasted seeds.

If you make overnight oats you know that you have WON at life.

The thing with overnight oats you see is that they are actually SUPER EASY to make.

The only tricky bit is remembering to do it, but once you manage that, you’re practically there – you pretty much just need a jar and some oats. And yet… the effort to reward ratio here is HIGH. For relatively little effort you can be the envy of all your social media followers! You can be THAT person, who probably does yoga at 6am outside on the lawn, watching the sun rise over the sea between your legs and you pull off the most perfect downward dog ever seen. This is an aspirational breakfast if ever there was one.

Forget overnight oats, this will be overnight gloats.

(See what I did there?)

How to make PB & J overnight oats

Fiancé’s absolute favourite breakfast is a toasted crumpet or four, spread thickly with peanut butter and raspberry jam, so I decided to take this as the inspiration for my PB & J overnight oats recipe. I wanted to incorporate some chia seeds, partly because they’re an amazing source of nutrition all packed into a tiny seed, but mainly because including chia seeds in anything automatically qualifies you for being super cool.

I took it one step further and made my own raspberry jam with no refined sugar. This sounds like a right faff but I promise it isn’t. The jam has chia seeds in it too, as they swell when you’re cooking them and give the jam its jammy consistency.

If you want to though you can just use shop bought jam and pretend you made your own. I won’t tell. You can make the jam in advance so it has time to cool. Don’t worry about making too much, it’s great on a crumpet too.

To make PB & J overnight oats you will need:

• About 3/4 – 1 full cup of Quaker oats, depending on the size of your jar
• The same amount of milk
• About 1tbsp of chia seeds
• The same again of peanut butter. (You could use any sort of nut butter for this. If you wanted to maximise gloat points you could even make your own! Fancy!)
• Raspberry jam
• Fresh raspberries to garnish

If you decide to make the raspberry jam yourself you’ll need:

• 150g Raspberries
• 2 tbsp chia seeds
• 2 tbsp natural fruit syrup (I used Sweet Freedom dark fruit syrup. Maple syrup would work too.)

Make the jam in advance by simply adding everything into a pan and simmering it until the raspberries have broken down and everything looks nice and jammy. (Technical term.) Transfer to a sterilised jar and you can keep this for several weeks in the fridge.

 

To assemble your overnight oats

This bit is fairly open to interpretation.

If you want to, you can just chuck everything in the jar and hope for the best, but as I wanted to be just a little bit more inspirational than that, I took a bit more time. I used one of the very cool mason jars, designed by MissPrint, that Quaker Oats are currently giving away with 1kg packs of Quaker Traditional Rolled Oats. There are five to collect and mine is the grain design.

In fact, I put together this short video, just to show you how easy it is. Please have a watch:

In the morning, wake up with a yawn, a stretch and a warm glow because you’ve remembered what you did the night before. Garnish your overnight oats with some fresh raspberries and present them to your awe-inspired family.

Tada!

You could even take them with you on the school run and casually eat them on the playground with a spoon.

‘What these? These are just my peanut butter overnight oats with home made raspberry and chia seed jam. I had to bring them with me as I’m in a rush – I have to get to the gym for my spin class before my very important, high-powered meeting.’

Want in on the overnight gloats action?

Quaker Oats have an on pack promotion running at the moment, where you can claim one of their gorgeous MissPrint mason jars with every purchase of 1kg Quaker Traditional Rolled Oats. I’m going to be giving away a COMPLETE SET of these gorgeous Quaker Oats overnight oat jars in a few days time though, so you can create the breakfast of dreams for the whole family.

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