Breakfast for Lunch: Steel-Cut Oats with Dates, Coconut, Cinnamon and Pecans

Faith Durand
Faith DurandSenior Vice President of Content at AT Media
Faith is the SVP of Content at Apartment Therapy Media and former Editor-in-Chief of The Kitchn. She is the author of three cookbooks, including the James Beard Award-winning, The Kitchn Cookbook. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband and two daughters.
updated May 3, 2019
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Do you ever eat breakfast for lunch? Today we wanted a bowlful of those pearly steel-cut oats, hot and fragrant. Here are the other things we threw in…

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

We’ve waxed rhapsodic about steel-cut oats in the past and we’re not about to quit. Steel-cut oats are far less gummy and thick than flat-rolled oats. Read all about the differences between oats here:

What’s the Deal With Oatmeal?

For this particular batch of steel-cut oats we boiled two cups of salted water, then threw in a cinnamon stick, a handful of chopped dates, and about a 1/4 cup of flaked coconut. We slowly stirred in one cup of steel-cut oats, turned down the heat and let them simmer for about half an hour.

When they were thick and creamy we heaped them in a bowl, sprinkled on some pecans, a touch of sugar, and some butter and milk. Breakfast for lunch!

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

The dates got all gooey and oozey when they cooked – rather like sweet, natural caramel in the oatmeal. You can see a bit of it in the photo above.

We’ve blogged about oats and breakfast for lunch before here: Brown Bag Thursday: Breakfast for Lunch. More oats below…