Recipe: Sweet Potato Chocolate Porridge

It's like dessert for breakfast.

It’s really hard to take a photo of porridge that looks nice and not like mush in a bowl.

Sweet Potato Chocolate Porridge

Ingredients:

2 cups steel cut oats

3 Tbsp chia seeds

1/3 cup cocoa powder

2 cups grated sweet potato

2 bananas - sliced or just broken into bits

6 cups of water

Mix the steel cut oats, chia seeds and cocoa powder together before adding the sweet potato and banana. Then add the sweet potato and banana, stir again and add the water.

Bring to a boil and then reduce and let simmer until the water has absorbed and its nice and thick and gooey.

This is a big batch. I have a family of five and we can go through a lot of chocolate porridge. Even my non-porridge loving daughter will eat this one every time I make it.

Here is an easy trick too: I often use boiling water from the kettle. I pour the boiling water over the mixture and let it sit for a bit and then turn on the burner and let it cook down.

This is an easy recipe to make the night before. Use boiling water, pour it over the mixture, put a lid firmly on the pot, and let it sit over night. Depending on how much water you have used it often doesn’t need to be cooked in the morning - just heated up a bit.

The time really varies on this depending on your oats and where you live. If I don’t use boiling water from the beginning it takes about 30 - 45 minutes. If I do the time is considerably less, maybe about 20 minutes. This can also be made with quick oats or rolled oats and the time and amount of water you need will be much less but I haven’t tried either of those out yet because I like steel cut oats the best.

You can add sweetner but if you are watching your sugar intake this porridge is quite sweet on it’s own with the addition of the sweet potato and bananas. I don’t usually add any extra sweetner but my kids do and they like both maple syrup or brown sugar on theirs - it really tastes like dessert when you add additional sweetner.

For a smaller batch half all of the ingredients.

Moira and I like to add peanut butter to ours and I also add cocoa nibs because I like the added crunch they provide.

This is one of our favourite family meals. When the girls were really little and we were teaching them to cook they often chose this as their dinner of choice when it was their time to cook (or blueberry porridge). In those early days of parenting we ate this for dinner a lot!

Let me know if you make this recipe or have any questions - I would love to hear from all of you.