 I think most people would agree that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Yet, when I talk to adults and children, I hear that they go out the door every morning without breakfast. Why are they doing this? Well, a lot of times they simply don't have the time. But breakfast is your most important meal of the day. It provides you with calories and nutrients to help you get through your day. And this is especially true for kids. Before they go to school, they should be having breakfast. They'll do better at school and they won't run out of energy before they get to lunch. So if you're lacking time with breakfast, I'm going to show you how to make a baked oatmeal that you can bake once and you'll have a number of servings to take you through the week. And you can cut this up into individual pieces and you or your family member can quick heat it up or eat it directly out of the refrigerator and have it cold. And you can run out the door and you've got a nutritious breakfast without the weight. So the first thing that you will need to do is preheat your oven to 350 degrees. And then you're going to take an 8x8 baking dish, spray it with some non-stick cooking spray and get that all ready. I'm going to be using rolled oats to make this dish today. I prefer the rolled oats because it gives this baked breakfast a nice chewy texture. So I'll be using rolled oats. You can also use the quick cooking oats. I would not recommend using instant oatmeal for this particular dish, however. So I'm going to be putting the rolled oats into the bowl. And to that, I'm going to be adding a mixture. In this bowl I have 1.5 teaspoon of baking powder, 1.5 teaspoon of salt, 1.5 tablespoons of baking soda, and today I've decided to add 1.5 teaspoons of cinnamon. Now you can vary the spices in any way that you like if you like cloves or nutmeg or cinnamon or ginger or something else you can certainly improvise and make that a little bit different. Before I put this in though I made sure that it's all mixed together so you don't have any lumps of the baking powder so it's a nice smooth powder and then that goes into the bowl. Next I'm going to be adding two and a half cups of sliced peeled apples. Now today I'm using crispened apples. This is a local, I bought these apples locally. I like the crispens because they bake up very nicely. They're a nice crisp apple that maintains its apples shape after you bake it so I use it a lot in baking, making pies or applesauce or what have you and it works really well with this baked oatmeal breakfast. To that I'm going to be adding a quarter of a cup of fresh whole cranberries. Now I'm doing that just to add a bit of tartness and a little bit of color to this dish. The cranberries will not add much sweetness if at all because whole cranberries really have very very little sugar. Next a cup of 1% low fat milk. And then the next ingredient I'm going to put in there is a container of non-fat Greek yogurt. Now you can also use a container of regular plain yogurt. If you like it doesn't matter. I prefer to use the Greek yogurt. It's a somewhat denser yogurt and I like it because it's higher in protein than the regular plain yogurt. So you're going to get a little more protein out of this baked oatmeal than you would if you're using the plain yogurt but you can use either one. After that I'm going to add two whole eggs. And finally a third of a cup of pure maple syrup. Now I like to use maple syrup because it's a pure natural sugar. It will add sweetness to this baked breakfast and it will not make it overly sweet. You can adjust the the amount of maple syrup that you're using. If you have diabetes you may want to use a little bit less. You could actually get away with about a quarter of a cup of pure maple syrup instead. Also if you need a gluten-free breakfast and you want to make this oatmeal bake I would suggest that you purchase certified gluten-free oats before you start because the regular oats that you buy in the grocery store are generally not gluten-free. You have to look at the label and make sure that it says certified gluten-free. So I'm going to go ahead and mix this up and put it in the pan and then it'll go in the oven. Okay I have the ingredients all mixed and I just want to show you what the batter looks like. It is a little bit soupy at this point but you won't have to worry about that. It will firm up and solidify as we bake it. So before I put it in the oven I am going to cover it with aluminum foil. Now you need to do this because as the the batter heats up that will help to set the batter so that it's solid and you're going to bake this with the foil cover on the baking pan for 20 minutes. At the end of 20 minutes you need to remove the foil and continue baking at 350 degrees until the top of the baked oatmeal has a nice golden brown color. Okay I'm ready to put it in the oven and I'll show you what it looks like when it comes out. Okay it's about 45 minutes later. The baked oatmeal is out of the oven and while it was still warm I took a very sharp knife and I cut this into eight pieces. You should be able to see where I've cut it. That would be the approximate portion size for one serving of the baked oatmeal. You can see how nicely the baked oatmeal has set up and as I mentioned earlier you can eat this either hot or cold. If you would like to heat it up in the microwave about a minute should do it or you can just cut a piece and take it and go. The very nice thing about the baked oatmeal is that this recipe is actually under 200 calories. It's packed with nutrition and it's delicious. If you'd like to get the recipe in the full instructions go to my website www.nutritionexpert.com. I have the recipe posted there on my recipe page.