Back in early 2014 I got really into strength training and nutrition. My wife and I gave the South Beach Diet a try and it worked pretty well for the first few months. The more palpable gain of the experience was piquing my interest in various diets and nutrition beyond just simple calorie counting. This led me to looking up information about the Paleo diet, which brought me to this neat website called Nerd Fitness. Though I never dove into the Paleo diet (or the associated Crossfittery that goes along with it), I pored through all of the content on the site. Eventually this led me to a website of a guy by the name of Anthony Mychal. I really dug his content and the way he presented fitness so I purchased a few of his strength training and nutrition eBooks over the last few years. His post on how to build your own gym inspired me to go out and acquire a barbell, olympic weights and a squat rack to finish my own training area in my basement. But the most lasting effect finding his content has had on me was by far his post on making Oatmeal Volcanoes.

At the time being on a protein powder kick myself, I experimented with making these. Which was surprising in and of itself since I had probably never eaten oatmeal before in my life. I enjoyed the end result, but not so much the process of making them every day or even every three days or the attention to detail needed to not end up with burnt oat paste nightmare.

Eventually I ditched the protein pudding aspect of this combo and added cinnamon, (some) salt and raisins to the oatmeal and cooked it in bulk in a casserole dish. This made enough “oatcakes” to last me 7-8 days as my breakfast.

Cinnamon Raisin Oatcakes

600g Oats
6 TBSP Cinnamon
1.5 TBSP Salt
120g Raisins
20-24 oz of water

1. Preheat the oven to 375.
2. Using a (wooden, but it doesn’t really matter) spoon mix the oats, cinnamon, salt and raisins together.
   
3. Add in the water and stir, bringing the mixture to a semi-paste consistency.
   
   
4. Spray the casserole / pie dish with nonstick cooking spray and then add the mixture to it, spreading it evenly with the spoon.
5. Place the dish into the oven and bake for 30-34 minutes.
6. After removing from the oven, let sit for a few minutes and then cut into 8 equal pieces.
   

Here is the nutritional breakdown:

Calories: 2608
Protein: 80g
Carbohydrate: 500g
Fat: 46g
Fiber: 64g

Split into 8 pieces, here are the values (rounded for sanity) per serving:

Calories: 326
Protein: 10g
Carbohydrate: 63g
Fat: 6g
Fiber: 8g

Let’s talk about the costs:

Oats – Costco Oats are $0.06 per oz, 40g to an ounce (from label). 600g for the recipe, divided by 40g yields 15 oz per recipe – $0.90
Cinnamon – Costco cinnamon is $6.95, this should last 10 batches or so – $0.69
1.5 TBSP salt – Not worth counting?
Raisins – $11.99 per package, 45 servings per package, 1 serving is 40g, so 3 servings per batch. $11.99/45 = $0.2664 per serving. 3 * $0.2664 = $0.80
Total for Batch: $2.39
Total per Serving: $0.30

I like to have 1 serving / slice of this for breakfast every morning. I normally will reheat it for about 1 minute 15 seconds in the microwave. Though, when in a rush or traveling, these are still very tasty cold. When heated up, I have found that it goes really good with peanut butter. In fact I will admit that I regularly would eat my oatcake with way too much peanut butter.

This led me to modify the recipe by baking the peanut butter flavor into the dish in the form of powdered peanut butter. I also dropped the cinnamon and salt to let the peanut butter flavor shine through. I still tend to add some salt to the finished product after reheating.

Peanut Butter Oatcakes Recipe

600g Oats
96g PBfit (or PB2)
120g Raisins
20-24 oz of water

The batch cost of this modified recipe is:

Oats – $0.90
Raisins – $0.80
PBfit – from Amazon @ 13.87 for a 30 oz, 70 servings per container, $0.20 per serving, 8 servings per batch = $1.60
Total for Batch: $3.30
Total per Serving: $0.41

The nutritional value per serving is:

Calories: 376
Protein: 16g
Carbohydrate: 67g
Fat: 7g
Fiber: 10g

Obviously this is a little more than the original recipe, cost and calorie wise, but with the original recipe I was adding at least 1 servings of actual peanut butter (188 calories per serving) on more days than I should have.

No matter which recipe you try, this ends up being a very inexpensive breakfast (or whatever meal you so choose). In a given month, this will cost between $9 and $12 per month for a very filling, nutritionally dense breakfast. Compare that with people that eat $2.00 “nutrition” bars for breakfast, or buy a $3.00 fast food breakfast sandwich every day. This recipe costs less in a month than those options would run for 5-6 days.