Tackling the yogurt cup

As long as I can remember, I've operated under the philosophy of breakfast being the most important meal of the day. We try desperately to have good, hearty, well-balanced breakfasts before we head off to preschool / work in the morning, and I'm always on the lookout for the next best breakfast option to offer the kiddos. I'm not going to lie - when we decided to tackle this "real food" challenge almost a month ago, I figured breakfast would be our easy meal...until I started reading labels.

My goal for breakfast is pretty simple: serve the girls a dairy/protein, grain and fruit serving every morning. This is based off the recommendation from my pediatrician and I like the basic principle behind it. It leaves us some leeway as to what each day looks like (because variety is the spice of life when you have two kids under the age of four), but the framework is there.

Our fruit most days ends up being a banana - E gets 1/3 and C gets 2/3, and they are both happy. Bananas are packed full of vitamins B6, C, potassium and fiber, so it's a good start to the day. For our dairy, we have historically split a cup of Greek yogurt between the girls. However, now that I'm on this whole label-reading kick, I realized the yogurt I've been feeding my girls is packed full of sugar (15g in one 5.3oz cup!). Naturally, yogurt does contain some sugars (called lactose), but this particular brand also listed additional sugars in the ingredients (evaporated cane juice is indeed sugar with a fancy name).

So once we finished up the yogurt cups we had, we decided to try our hand at making our own "fruit on the bottom" Greek yogurt. I used Costco's Kirkland Signature plain Greek yogurt (two 32oz. containers for just under $7) as the base, which contains all natural ingredients:

We have a lot of fresh fruit that we picked and froze last summer, so logically I thought that was the best place to start with fruit topping. C chose blackberry for our first flavor test, and I was really pleased with the results! I used about two cups of frozen blackberries and stuck them in the microwave to defrost for about four minutes (if I had planned ahead, I would have thawed them in the fridge overnight). Once they had softened some, I added a tiny bit of water to the bottom of the blender, threw in the blackberries, and pureed it on medium-low speed for about 30-45 seconds (just until all the chunks were broken up and the consistency was pretty smooth). I added some plain yogurt to the bowls, added a spoonful of the topping, mixed it up and voila...fruit on the bottom yogurt that only contained natural sugars from the blackberries and lactose!

The two cups of blackberries made more topping than I needed, so I took a cue from a friend of mine and froze the extra into ice cube trays for future breakfasts:

My plan is to go ahead and puree some peach, strawberry and blueberry topping as well, and pull a different one out each night to thaw in the fridge for breakfast the next day. Honestly, it isn't any more time-consuming than the store-bought yogurt cups, plus it ends up being cheaper. The two cartons of Greek yogurt make approximately 12 small cups of yogurt, and I was paying at least $5-6 more for that same amount packaged in smaller portions. And two cups of fruit made eight days worth of topping, so that ends up being pretty affordable as well.

Best part of the whole thing...my girls ate that yogurt faster than I have seen them eat yogurt in weeks. Turns out eating healthy isn't all that bad. :)