My family is currently eating a mostly whole foods diet. We love feeling great but I don’t love spending hours in the kitchen every single day. I also don’t menu plan. So I need quick and easy last-minute meal options that don’t require fancy ingredients and that I can have ready in under 30 minutes, including clean-up time.
Today I’m going to share some of our go-to breakfast recipes that I sometimes make for dinner as well. All of the recipes I use are gluten free and dairy free, but those of you who can have gluten and dairy can also enjoy these ideas!
10 Simple Homemade Breakfast Ideas
Note: Add fresh fruit to any of these suggestions for a more well-rounded meal.
1) Sausage (or bacon) and egg biscuits.
We love this easy drop biscuit recipe and I just cook the sausage (or bacon) and eggs while the biscuits are in the oven.
2) Oatmeal with sausage.
This was an accidental recipe – we were on our way out the door one day and I needed a quick way to get a meal I’d cooked into the car. So I dumped a pound of cooked sausage into 4 servings of cooked oatmeal. No milk, no sugar, nothing else to flavor the oatmeal at all. I cringed as my family took their first bites because I wasn’t sure what they’d think but they all loved it and it’s now our favorite way to eat oatmeal!
3) Hard-boiled eggs.
A super easy breakfast I can make in advance then just grab-and-go as needed!
4) Muffins.
Muffins are some of my favorite items to serve when we’re out for the day. They’re perfect for an easy breakfast or even a snack to hold us over until we get home for a late lunch. I can whip up a batch of muffins the evening before or make a double batch for the freezer so we can just pull them out when we’re running behind. Plus they’re great to serve when company is over.
My current favorite muffin recipes are these applesauce muffins (they’re actually pancakes that we bake in a muffin pan) and these incredibly moist and easy banana-oat muffins. (These pumpkin muffins pull a close third – I want to try them with chocolate or cinnamon chips!)
5) Scrambled eggs with vegetables.
My kids love it when I quickly saute whatever I have on hand (like mushrooms, red peppers, and onions) then crack some eggs into the cooked veggies and scramble it all up together.
6) Smoothies.
Lately we’ve been enjoying smoothie recipes from the VitaMix recipe book I received as a gift with my blender, but we’ve also discovered that when we use bananas as a base, tossing a combination of any sweet fruits like kiwi, oranges, strawberries, pineapple, berries, or grapes into the blender is an easy thing to get right.
7) Breakfast cookies!
Just bananas and oatmeal. So easy. Not our favorite recipe ever but a lot of people really love these healthy cookies.
8 ) Cinnamon Bun Style Biscuits.
Okay so technically I’ve never made these (Lily made them). And technically they take a little longer than 30 minutes from start to finish, especially when cutting them into cutesy shapes (shown in photo collage above). But they are oh, so good and a lovely addition to any holiday or other-wise fancy breakfast!
9) Any one of the above items.
Some mornings we’ll just have muffins. Or scrambled eggs (without the veggies). Or oatmeal. Or fresh fruit. You get the idea!
10) When all else fails, we have Rice Chex with a dairy free milk.
(I want to try out this rice milk recipe!)
Additional Tips
Don’t always cook alone. Children can help out by making breakfast altogether, preparing one of the breakfast items, setting the table, and/or cleaning up.
Make sure to cheat plan ahead. When you make muffins for dinner, make sure to save enough for breakfast the next day. If you’re making biscuits for breakfast, hold some back to serve with dinner that evening. Oatmeal and sausage? Make at least double of what you’ll need and refrigerate some of it to have for breakfast the next morning.
Basically, when you’re already in the kitchen, try to make enough of at least one item to last at least two meals, thus minimizing your food-prep time.
What about you? What are some of your quick and easy breakfast or other kitchen short-cut ideas?
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[…] about simplifying meal prep in my free eBook. We usually have eggs or oatmeal with fresh fruit for breakfast, leftovers for lunch, and something like an easy meat with rice and a veggie for […]