How to Make Purple Porridge

Purple Porridge As your child gets older they're going to be tempt to buy all those brightly colored cereals in the supermarket and they find it as a treat but they can be quite high in sugar. So although it’s great that your child wants breakfast, you may find that they got sugar heat and then a sugar low in about 11 o’clock in the morning. Now, how do you get them to eat a wholesome, hearty breakfast and you know you really want and do eat something like oats and maybe even porridge but it doesn’t sound packed on those free gizmos. Do this recipe is called purple porridge sounds a bit more intriguing no we’re not adding food coloring but what we are adding is really delicious nutritious fruits and berries and it’s the fruits and the berries the dark berries that really give it’s amazing color. The dark berries, a high antioxidants for all purple foods and even things like beet fruit, antioxidants are really fantastic for staving of disease and even could help prevent cancer. So purple porridge is the simple one pan recipe, so a medium or even small saucepan is fine and we start off by adding some rolled oats. So put those into pan and then we’re going to add some whole milk and whole milk is such a great start of the day, lots of fantastic nutrients like vitamin D and calcium and vitamin A. Make sure that all the oats are completely covered you're not ending up with any dry lumps just pour that in. Now, I like to add some seeds like pumpkin seeds and some flaxseeds into these depending what your little ones like beets. If your little one doesn’t like beets then either you can leave them out or if you like again when you're bleaching the oats just to make a little bit small pieces you could put the nuts and the seeds in there and that will help them not notice you got some beets in. They had a really nice flavor to this as well. And then what makes this a purple porridge is the fruit. Now, if they’re in season you can use some fresh fruit like strawberries, raspberries and some currant like black currants. If you have black currants it really would give that dark purple color and if then aren’t in season then you can get some really lovely summer fruit mixes that are frozen. It’s perfectly fine to get these and in fact once they’re frozen the fruits go quite soft and so you don’t end up with any large pieces in the porridge which runs in to it that makes it really quite smooth. There is no added sugar at all. So we’re going to put some of this fruits in. I’m keeping this pieces quite big but if your little one doesn’t like larger pieces then you can always cut up because it’s cooked though you’ll find that the fruit does cook down and kind of disintegrate. We have some juice in there as well. Stir as usual, you can see it already starts to get that beautiful perfect color and it gets stronger as it cooks. Let’s just give it a gentle heat. You want to bring it up to a slight bubbling and then drop it down to simmer for about five minutes. You really don’t need to stand over this pan, in fact if you stand stirring you end up with the wrong glute, you bring out the starch in the oats and you end up with glute starch. So give it a good mixing to make sure it’s covered and then allow it just to come up to a boil and drop it to a simmer way. You get on the double a things in the morning. So you can see it’s starting to bubble right in the edges. Now I add a little bit of honey in this recipe and I just want to put word about honey. Honey is fine as a sweetener for children that are 12 months but if your little ones are not quite at that stage yet then avoid honey. It’s thought to have some things in it that a little baby’s immune system really can’t cope with. So instead if you want to add some sweetness to things apple juice is really quite sweet you can add, just that sweetness to bring the flavors out. Okay I think our porridge is ready now. So just simply serve hot in a bowl. If you have a child you have a let it cool off a bit. You see the real perfect color coming through. Now if your child really likes creaminess then you want to add a few spoons of yogurt and just swirl those through that help cool it down because by now you can be sure they’re ready to tuck in. So, that’s purple porridge.