National Breakfast Month: Healthy Chocolate Peanut Butter Breakfast Shake, General Mill’s BFAST, and a GIVEAWAY!!!

I have this really cool friend. Her name is Meg. She is really good at making sugar cookies. We swap cookie cutters, squeezy bottles, and food coloring markers. If I need a super good variety of big cupcake frosting tips, I call Meg. If I need some hazelnut flavoring, I call Meg. If I need some company while I am flooding cookies, I call Meg and she comes over and floods and pipes with me.I am going to confess a secret to you and you can’t laugh; I really like that her name is Meg because between the two of us we make up all but one of the March sisters from Little Women. Meg, Amy, and my middle name is Jo. Haha. It’s a stretch, but it works in my mind. We actually have a good friend named Beth, too. We just need to get her in on our sugar cookie antics and we would be complete. We could call ourselves The Little Women Cookie Company. Ok, now I am getting silly.

Anyway, I bring up my friend Meg because she got me hooked on her easy Chocolate Peanut Butter Breakfast Shake that she makes all the time. It is so easy, healthy, and quite yummy. Now, its not a dessert shake, so it isn’t as sweet or thick as a milk shake. It gets all its sweetness from the banana! I think it is light and refreshing, which is perfect for me because I sometime feel nauseas if I eat early in the morning. I used to skip breakfast all the time because it just didn’t settle well with me, but this shake is great for those early mornings when I need to eat something, but can’t handle any thing to thick or sweet or salty.

Here it is:

PRINTABLE RECIPE

Ingredients:

• 1 banana
• 1/2 C. oat milk or almond milk, unsweetened (or cows milk, soy milk, rice milk )
• 4 ice cubes
• 1-3 tsp. natural peanut butter (I like 3 teaspoons, but I think Meg does 1 teaspoon).
• 1 TBSP. cocoa powder (I like dark chocolate cocoa powder, but its good with normal cocoa powder, too)
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla
• 1/3 C. oats
• 1/2 tsp. milled flax (optional)
• 1/ 2 tsp. chia seeds (optional)

 Directions:
1. Throw everything in a blender and blend until smooth. Oh, and you can throw in anything else you want. Can you tell that I am on a chia seed kick? Its just so easy to throw the the little guys in lots of things for an added boost of fiber and Omega-3’s. I am also a fan of flax seeds, but make sure you use milled flax because the whole seeds pass right through without our bodies absorbing all the nutrients. Feel free to leave out the flax and chia if you want or add twice as much if you want.

2. Drink up!

Pretty easy.

Guess who else liked it (I made it without peanut butter the other day and my little girl was just begging to taste it):

Speaking of breakfast shakes, did you know that General Mill’s recently came out with an on-the-go breakfast shake? It is called BFAST. It has 8 grams of protein, 3 grams of fiber, and 8 grams of whole grain. It has whole grain rice, whole grain oats, and even quinoa! It also has a really good amount of most vitamins and minerals.

It comes in chocolate, vanilla, and berry. General Mills, through My Blogspark, sent me some samples of it and I have to say that the chocolate and berry are the best. My husband was a hands down berry fan.

Now, I am trying to cut out processed food and added sugar from my breakfasts, so I am not one to keep these on hand all the time. But,if you are in the market for on-the-go breakfast shakes, I am all for BFAST.  To me, it is the best tasting on-the-go breakfast drink out there. I also love that it has lots of whole grains, vitamins, fiber, and protein. I mean, I don’t think there are any other breakfast shakes out there with quinoa as an ingredient (I may be wrong. Don’t quote me)! That’s pretty cool. I also felt full after drinking one, which I value in a meal substitute drink.

And you have to admit that these babies are pretty convenient. I mean, sometimes in the morning I end up just eating what ever is fast and available anyway, and surely one of these shakes would have been more healthy than those five chocolate chip cookies I had for breakfast today.
You can find BFAST in the cereal isle in most stores.

And…………………………General Mills through My Blog Spark are going to give one of my readers a fun little prize package!

Here is the prize:

A really sweet car cooler complete with cup holders and expandable space in main pouch. It also has a cool little area on the lid for utensils or any other odds and ends. They sent me one too and it is pretty neat. Perfect for long trips in the car. The winner will also be sent eight samples of BFAST, two of each favor. The whole package is worth $58 dollars!

Here is how you enter the giveaway:

1. Leave a comment telling me your favorite go-to breakfast.

2. You can also earn an optional additional entry by following/liking Edible Experiments on either facebook, pinterest, twitter, or bloglovin. Just leave second comment telling me that you liked or followed me. If you follow a lot of blogs, Bloglovin is a really cool way to see when all your favorite blogs publish a new post. Its pretty awesome! And if you are a pinterest addict like me, you would enjoy my pinterest boards. Its mostly food boards and it is pretty comprehensive! I have a sweet doughnut board with 220 different doughnut recipes!!! And I also have a really fun lunch box ideas for kids board. I can’t wait until baby girl is old enough to have a lunch box so I can leave her little fun surprises inside, like secret banana messages and silly faces out of cheese. I also have a new facebook page and a new twitter account! I don’t post a whole ton, so don’t worry about getting bombarded by a million tweets and such. To access my pages just click the links within this paragraph or click the triangles in the top right corner of the page.

3. Enter the giveaway by September 13th. It will be open till midnight (Eastern Time Zone)

4. Make sure you leave me a way to get a hold of you to tell you if you won, unless I already know you. I’ll announce the winner on September 14th.

Well, I’m off to make some chocolate peanut butter baked oatmeal (next post!). Have a happy Monday!

By Edible Experiments