The smell of breakfast baking in the morning is one of life’s great tiny luxuries.
Jump to RecipeThere’s really nothing I love so much as waking up to sweet smells wafting through the kitchen. Cinnamon + sugar caramelizing, or bread baking, fruits mingling with spices, warming the house from the inside out. It’s the stuff that Saturday morning dreams are made of, but Monday, Tuesday + Wednesday morning dreams too.
It used to be that a treat like this delineated the days in the week – weekends were when I would pull something special from the oven. I can’t say that this make-ahead wonder does anything to prevent the days from melting into one another, but it certainly helps to make the most of the times that I’m at home.
It’s an easy-to-pull off, nourishing breakfast that’s as satisfying as it is special, perfect to fill you up before heading out into the wintery world, or just to dive into work.
Those of you who saw my share about Ayurvedic wisdom and fruit over social media last week may be saying “I thought fruits + foods were a no-no?!” Let’s explain that a little more in depth.
According to this ancient yet prescient philosophy, eating raw fruits with other ingredients – literally any other ingredients to include our common yogurt, nut butter, grains, vegetables, and dairy – can be a negative factor for digestive/gut health. The reasoning lies in the flavor of fruits (they’re sweet,) and the understanding that all foods we consume have a pre-digestive flavor and a post-digestive effect. Essentially, the way that our digestive system breaks down different foods depends on the flavor of the foods, and that becomes the post-digestive effect.
If you’ve ever had fiery bowels after eating spicy food, you have experienced a pungent post-digestive effect. Sweet foods become sour in post-digestion, and if they stay in our digestive systems too long, they begin to ferment. In the case of fruits, because of their high fructose content, they break down very quickly in the gut and become sour. But if they’re consumed with other foods they will travel through the digestive tract at the same rate as those foods, becoming fermented as they go.
The effect that this has on the body differs for everyone – for some with very strong and healthy digestive systems, this may not be a factor at all. For others, this may be a very big deal. But one thing is certain and that is that no one is hurt by aiming to consume fruits separately, nor will anyone die from eating apples and peanut butter together once in a while (unless you’re allergic to peanut butter, ya know?)
There are VERY few exceptions to the fruit-alone rule.
The first is that cooked fruits don’t instigate quite the same fermented effect in the gut as raw fruits.
The second is that apparently dates and figs are the only two fruits welcome to be combined on account of their very juicy sweetness. (I’m still digging into why this is true.)
The third and best news for those of us that like waking up to sweet-smelling breakfasts is that when we cook fruits together with the other ingredients we plan to consume, this makes the fruits much more friendly in our guts. This is to say that banana bread, blueberry muffins, and yeah, this Cherry-Apple Oatbake are all wiser ways of trying out this new way of getting your fruits.
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