Recipe: Pumpkin Seed Breakfast Quinoa

’Tis the season to line your insides with pumpkin slurry.

What light through yonder quinoa breaks?

As a very wise man once wrote: “It’s decorative gourd season, motherfuckers.”

Once upon a time, I avoided pumpkin items for fear of being “basic,” but I’ve since thought better of that. What’s the point of looking down your nose at people for an indulgence that’s practically instinctual? Save your scorn for something else, I say to my younger self, like people who bag up their dog’s shit but leave the bag full of shit on the side of the road.

That was only one of the self-limiting beliefs that I had to shed before throwing together something like the Pumpkin Seed Breakfast Quinoa below. After many years going into debt, poor health, and disordered eating over the difficulty of making food choices, I have more or less found an approach that works for me, most of the time.

I try to choose foods that are delicious, filling, nutrient-dense, and pretty-ish. I also try to eat locally, carefully and mindfully, so as to minimize waste and not give into the tendency to compulsively overeat. This is not only good for your body, it’s also a way not to let the one-two punch of the food industrial complex and expensive healthcare costs ruin your life. It also supports farmers and more ethical food companies whose operations support the environment, animals, and the end quality of your food better than low-quality foods do.

That’s to say nothing about the importance of eating for pleasure. There is absolutely no reason not to enjoy it. Living at the top of the food chain in 21st century developed countries might make it difficult to make wholesome food choices 100% of the time, but goddamn it, it has some wonderful perks too.

Case in point: the seasonally inspired yet shelf-stable and largely unfucked-with ingredients that make up the recipe below are all readily available. Thanks to supermarkets and the internet, you can easily have all this stuff on hand even if you’re a unglamorous lump in a one-bedroom apartment.

Combining ingredients like ancient grains and pumpkin with modern marvels like collagen peptides and high-quality nuts and spices gets me chuffed at maintaining a grounded, of-the-earth feeling while capitalizing on the fact that we live in a plush and industrialized world. It makes me feel like a slick urban homesteader. An apartment-steader? But maybe that’s just me.

Pumpkin Seed Breakfast Quinoa

Makes one large serving.

• 1/2 cup quinoa, rinsed
• 1 cup milk of choice (I used this jazz from Trader Joe’s)
• 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup pumpkin puree
• 2 scoops collagen peptides (optional)
• 1–2 Tbsp. maple syrup, honey or sweetener of choice
• 1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp. ginger
• 1/4 tsp. cloves
• 1/4 tsp. nutmeg
• Big pinch salt
• 2 Tbsp. shelled, unsalted pumpkin seeds
• 1/8 cup chopped walnuts

Directions

1. Place milk, quinoa, and salt in a small saucepan over medium or medium-high heat. Once it reaches a bubble, give it a good stir and turn down the heat. Milk, even non-dairy milk, tends to bubble over more easily than water or broth. You probably don’t want to crank this sucker up to a boil on high heat.
2. Add the vanilla and spices (if you don’t want to use this blend, you can also use 1–2 Tbsp. of any pumpkin pie spice). Stir again and cover. Continue to cook until the grains have absorbed nearly all of the liquid.
3. Add the pumpkin puree, collagen, and sweetener. Stir again and cook another minute or so, until everything is well-incorporated and heated through.
4. Scoop into a bowl and top with the pumpkin seeds and walnuts.

Overall, this quinoa is like a really heady spin-off of oatmeal. Whole grains, warm and sweet and simple, it shirks processed foods the way somebody’s old-school brown rice-eating self-righteous aunt in Vermont would, but it’s got enough nourishment and and gloppy goodness to be enjoyed by a busy 20 or 30 something who’s just trying to keep it together physically, emotionally, and financially.

A couple more tips:

• If you have a fresh apple on hand, I implore you to chop up about half of it and stir it in. The earthy pumpkin spice brightens up and takes to the crisp sweet-tartness absolutely wonderfully.
• If your weekly meal prep/menu planning includes cooking a bunch of quinoa ahead of time, you can use plain pre-cooked quinoa that has been prepared with water. Simply heat up the cooked quinoa with a little milk (or even better, a few dollops of coconut milk), and then throw in the spices, pumpkin, collagen, etc.

Comments? Questions? Hit me up at wellnesswithcharacter@gmail.com or on IG @wellnesswithcharacter.