Winter breakfast quinoa

This morning I took my egg timer for a run. I’ve been on a ten-week scheme to learn to run for twenty minutes- for about seven or eight months now. Last week, I decided enough was enough and that the scheme will be finished by the end of the year. This means I have to go running about every other day or so. Normally, I time the intervals on my phone’s stopwatch. Yesterday I forgot my phone at my man’s house, though, so I was faced with a choice: skip my run or find something else to measure time.

The obvious choice, you might think, would be to strap on my watch and call it a timepiece. And it would be, except for the fact that my watch has been sitting in the windowsill for months with a broken strap. (Yup, I have an unfortunate tendency to let small tasks take forever. Moving on.) A search of my box-of-useful and my cupboard-of-miscellaneous did not yield a stopwatch or other such device. I’d almost given up getting any timed exercise when I wandered through my kitchen and the egg timer caught my eye. Aha! Not only would I be able to time my run, there would be sounds to tell me when to stop. You know, because I have a tendency to keep running and not heed time. (And by “keep running and not heed time” I mean obsessively checking my timer every twenty seconds or so, pouting when time obviously slows down just to spite me.)

So I took my egg timer for a run. Around the block and into the park we went, beeping and huffing and puffing along nicely. I was feeling quite pleased with myself, hiding the timer up my sleeve, only surreptitiously pulling it out when it made noise. To the casual onlooker, I might have looked like a real (if red-faced and panting) runner. And then I ran into these folks, just as I had the timer out, shooting it pleading looks to slow down so I didn’t have to start my last stretch of jogging. Right. Okay. Maybe they thought it was a mini-dumbbell?

Anyway. To take this story back into the realm of the culinary, I could liken the color of my face at the end of my run to red cabbage, or maybe an anemic egg plant. But that would be lame, so I won’t. Instead, I will share with you the recipe for my post-exercise breakfast: warm quinoa with cinnamon, maple syrup and apple (based on this recipe Heidi at 101cookbooks.com brought us). Another fitting use for my egg timer, if I do say so myself.

Warm breakfast quinoa
Adapted from 101cookbooks.com

Serves 1

¼ cup of quinoa
¼ cup of milk
¼ cup of water
dash of cinnamon
1 apple, peeled and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 tbsp of maply syrup (or more to taste)

Combine quinoa, milk and water in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and let simmer for about 15 minutes (stick around, because the mixture is prone to bubbling up and you might need to remove it from the heat briefly to prevent spills) or until most of the liquid has been absorbed and quinoa is cooked through. Add more water if liquid is absorbed before quinoa fully cooks. Remove from heat and let stand for a couple of minutes.

Stir in cinnamon and maply syrup to taste. Put apple in a bowl and pour quinoa over the top. Serve warm.