Persimmon Porridge

Creamy persimmon porridge might be my new favourite way to start my day this winter. This is the first time I’ve tried adding persimmon to porridge and I gotta say, it’s good. Easily in the top three ways to eat persimmon for me and fruit in oatmeal is always a happy thing.

Graham and I eat vegan oatmeal almost every morning for breakfast, with different fruits and toppings. In the fall we cook apples with the oats, in the winter either bananas or winter fruits like persimmon, and in the summer we always have berries. He swears by adding coconut oil to the finished porridge and the times that I’ve left it out, I get hungry a lot faster, so a little added healthy fat (coconut milk in this case) can help to keep you full longer.

Cooking the persimmons with the oats softens them and makes the whole dish sweeter without adding any sugar. All of the toppings go really well together but you could change them to suit your tastes, like switching out the pumpkin seeds for hazelnuts or pecans. The bowls look prettiest with all the toppings on them but I like to mix everything together right before I eat so that the nut butter swirls through the porridge and I get little surprise bites of fresh fruit.

A serving of this porridge, with all of the toppings in the recipe, has about 15 grams of protein and over 20% of the iron you needed in a day. In addition to the healthy fats, fibre, and a whole host of other nutrients like magnesium, it’s a solid start to the day. I find that my eczema is significantly improved if I eat oatmeal every day, which is especially beneficial in the winter when lots of people have dry skin in any case. If you’re gluten free this is a great option, just make sure you’re choosing gluten-free oats (they naturally are in any case).

One of my favourite bloggers and a virtual friend, Susanna of Eat Sleep Green, is currently hosting a virtual persimmon party on her instagram. I have a google doc going with winter recipe ideas, and one of them was for a cozy persimmon breakfast oatmeal with coconut milk, pomegranate seeds, and coconut sugar. Much of the time I write these ideas down (hundreds of them) and don’t get around to posting the recipe before the season is over.

I’m thankful to Susanna for giving me the kick in the butt I needed to get this done! One of my new years resolutions was to post twice a week, too. Most of Susanna’s recipes are in German but she does speak english so if you see a recipe you’re curious about, I’m sure she’d be happy to translate it for you. She’s just released a new book if you’re located in a German speaking country, all about chia, which you can find here.

I only recently started eating persimmons, and the research I did said that the type I used (more elongated than squat) are supposed to be overripe when they’re eaten, or they’re very astringent. I just chose orange fruits and didn’t let them ripen for a week or anything like that before eating. They weren’t sour or and didn’t dry my mouth out.

I’ve come across a couple of people who write that if the flesh has tiny black specks in it then it doesn’t need to be mushy before you eat it, and you can see that these do. It might be that I got lucky and the store was selling persimmons that were already the right amount of ripeness.

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