Gingerbread Steel Cut Oats

Gingerbread can be the ultimate in sweet comfort food. It has warming, fragrant spices and a deep caramel-like sweetness that can easily be imparted on a healthy bowl of oatmeal, making it more enticing on frosty, cold mornings. Steel cut oats cooked with almond milk thicken up into a dense, gooey and warm nutty-flavoured oatmeal full of fiber and protein to keep your belly satisfied and feeling full.Besides ginger, the key ingredient for gingerbread is molasses, a dark thick syrup and byproduct of sugar refining. Molasses is what is left over when sugarcane is turned into crystallized white sugar. While white, refined sugar has absolutely no nutritional substance and is consequently very hard on the body, (it hits us like a drug, lighting up the same parts of our brain as illicit drugs like cocaine) molasses contains all the nutrients that were originally in the sugarcane. A famous dentist named Dr. Weston Price did numerous field studies over many years comparing indigenous diets to industrialized diets on several continents and how they affected the people who consumed them. In areas of high sugarcane production he found that the poor field workers who harvested the sugarcane and regularly munched on it whole didn’t have notable amounts of cavities or rates of diabetes, in contrast to those who ate the end product, the refined white sugar. We call the processed white sugar so widely available now “refined” because when it first it the market it was very expensive and could be afforded only by the “refined” classes, the ones who had large food budgets. Technically, molasses is more refined than whole sugarcane, which looks similar to bamboo, but since it is nutrient dense it is worth consuming from time to time. Blackstrap is the most nutrient dense but it is slightly bitter so it may require some additional sweetness from maple syrup or fruit. Fancy molasses is a lot sweeter and lighter and cooking molasses is a combination of the two. Blackstrap molasses is most notably high in iron and has a low enough glycemic load to be safe for diabetics. Women of childbearing years need around double the amount of iron that men do and it is important to get this from a range of different sources. For women who are active this is even more crucial and adding molasses into oatmeal and smoothies from time to time can be a good way to include some extra iron.