Baked Blueberry Oatmeal

Well, it will be cool enough to bake on Sunday, so I can start posting baked things again 🙂  This could be baked in a little toaster oven on the countertop as well in a 8×8 or 9×9 pan easily.  I have posted Pumpkin Oatmeal and Simple Baked Oatmeal, but pumpkin is not really on sale anymore.

Instead we have blueberries.   Blueberries are a super food!  Plus, people have lowered their cholesterol levels simply by eating oatmeal for breakfast.  This may take a little time to bake in the morning, but you can prepare it at night and let it sit in the fridge until morning.  I made a double batch and simply reheating it made it last for 4 days.  This one is definitely a keeper.  Next time I plan on using peaches instead of bananas.

Baked Blueberry Oatmeal
yield 4 servings

1 or 2 bananas sliced (cover the bottom of the dish)
3/4 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen
1 cup Old Fashioned Oats
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup milk
1 egg, slightly beaten
1/4 cup honey or maple syrup or about 1/3 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 cup nuts (optional), chopped

1.  Preheat oven to 375 degrees if making the same day.  Spray with cooking spray a 8×8 or 9×9 dish (I usually use glass) or a 1.5 qt. dish.
2.  Put the sliced bananas on the bottom as a layer and sprinkle a little over half the blueberries on top.

3.  Mix your dry ingredients:  oats, cinnamon, baking powder and salt.  You can sprinkle this on your fruit layer and mix with the wet ingredients.  It didn’t seem to matter either way.

4.  Mix the wet stuff:  milk, egg, sugar/honey, vanilla.  (I measured the milk first then added the honey until the measuring cup hit 1/4 cup at the bottom since honey sinks.  Then added the egg and vanilla to it and stirred.  One less dish to wash.)
5.  Pour wet stuff over the dry stuff.  Add the rest of your blueberries and then your nuts (optional).   Bake about 35 minutes.

6.  Serve warm.  You can put warm milk on this or be bad like me and put maple syrup on instead.  Or brown sugar, etc.

Additional notes:
–  I have doubled this recipe and it works great.  I use my 2.5 qt. pyrex casserole dish.  I’m sure anything that holds 2 cups of oats will work.
– Since I put syrup on top, I doubled everything but the sugar/honey.  I just used 1/4 cup in the doubled recipe because I was adding syrup at the end.
– I made this using fresh berries and frozen berries.  The fresh blueberry oatmeal looked prettier, but there was no noticeable taste difference between the frozen and fresh.
-When doubling you don’t necessarily need to bake it any longer.  I don’t know why, but when I double this recipe it bakes fine in 30-35 minutes.  When I let it go longer the edges get crusty and overbaked.