Resurrecting chia pudding from the depths of 2013
And some thoughts on breakfast perfectionism
Hello and an official welcome to sweaty season in the Northeast! Things are…sticky here.
First, a fun thing: Last week I crossed off a “personal life goals” bucket list item when I was featured in my very own Grub Street Diet(!!) If you’re not familiar, it’s a weekly New York Magazine series in which New Yorkers chronicle what they eat in a week. For anyone who loves this particular flavor of food voyeurism (what people have in their fridges, how much they spend on food in a week), it’s a must-read. If you want to know what someone who writes and cooks for a living *really* eats (sour strawberry edibles and Coney Island boardwalk chicken tenders), click through. And to those of you who found your way here via the GSD, welcome!
I’m trying to stay apace with my goal of developing 25 recipes per month for the cookbook through the rest of the summer, which means any cooking I’m doing in my life that’s not directly related to recipe testing has become more abhorrent to me than laundry, or flossing. So today, you get the recipe for my current favorite breakfast for busy people: chia pudding. Yes, chia pudding, that blobby poster child of the c. 2013, peak diet-food-disguised-as-wellness movement. It’s 2024 and we’re smarter now and no longer pretending that chia pudding tastes “just like pudding,” or pie filling, or any other dessert made delicious by, well, sugar. Chia pudding, no matter what they say, is not dessert. It is, however, a perfectly fine breakfast that’s good to eat when you’re short on time. It’s easy to make (mix everything together in a bowl or big jar and let sit until chia seeds plump), can be prepared in a big batch that keeps for a week, packs an honorable amount of fiber/protein/omega-3s, and it’s filling and easy to digest. Its greatest merit lies in its forgettability.
Back in 2013, the last time I was regularly eating this utilitarian slop, I was very lost and unhappy in my first media job as a baby business reporter (a baby reporting on business, not a reporter reporting on the baby business). I remember a story I wrote about the daily routine of a very #girlboss female CEO of a successful financial planning startup. She woke up at 6 a.m. every day, sent emails while on the elliptical, and ate the same thing for breakfast (Greek yogurt and berries) and lunch (salad) every single day as a way of maximizing efficiency by minimizing decision fatigue. At the time, I thought this was absolutely psychotic, not to mention SO BORING. But I also remember feeling like this level of hyper-productivity was something to aspire to, and that maybe starting each day with the same sensible, sugar-free breakfast would be a step toward Successful Person enlightenment. So I dutifully ate my stupid little jars of homemade sugar-free slop while sending useless emails, albeit not while on the elliptical. I wanted the act of eating the chia pudding to somehow turn me into a different person, a more productive and successful person. And if that didn’t work, at least I could present like one. I hated every bland bite.
A decade later, in my current chia pudding renaissance, I can finally accept it for what it is: A reliable way to fill myself up for a couple of hours in the morning without too much effort or thought. A convenient vehicle for yummy things with SUGAR in them, like fruit preserves or granola. A meal that makes me feel good in my body and stable in my brain, both of which are nice things to feel at the beginning of the day. A breakfast I don’t really have to think about, which is an increasingly more valuable criteria for me these days.
My friend the writer and artist Marian Bull who writes
wrote about her own chia pudding journey (lol) a year ago, and said it well:“I recently realized I didn’t want to burden myself with the daily question of breakfast. That absolving myself of choice at the nine o’clock hour would mean more time for reading, writing, thinking, and sending stupid emails. I have long had an obsession with how to start my day—mornings could be huge, as they say on poog—and this is just the most recent iteration of that obsession. It conceptually commingles with morning pages and meditation and keeping my phone turned off (yes OFF) for at least an hour after waking, but it sets itself apart by tasting good.”
I’m better now about not deriving my self-worth from what I eat for breakfast anymore, but I’m still very much trying to let go of former stipulations I used to give myself for "acceptable” breakfasts, especially the ones that involve counting calories, or grams of protein or sugar. Having my chia pudding with a spoonful of compote made with sugar doesn’t make it a morally inferior meal. If anything, it makes it more likely that I will continue to incorporate chia pudding into my breakfast rotation, which is a net positive benefit when I consider that it is a food that provides my brain and body with the inputs they need for me to do the things I want to do.
So, after all that, naturally I’m sure what you want more than anything is a recipe for utilitarian slop. (Once you accept it for what it is, it’s pretty good! Are you convinced yet??) This recipe is for cheerful fruit-on-the-bottom pudding cups, in which you layer rosy rhubarb compote in a jar with the chia pudding for a convenient grab-and-go breakfast. This is a slightly fancied-up recipe, in that it calls for you to make your own milk. Or, rather, mylk. Equal parts raw cashews and coconut flakes blended with water and a scoop of coconut oil or coconut butter yields a rich and fragrant mylk with a naturally sweet flavor. Importantly, it also adds luscious body to the pudding because you’re not straining out the nut meat (how is that a real term) from the milk, which means the final pudding is nice and thick, which isn’t always the case when using a thinner store bought mylk. But if coconut is not your thing, or if you just don’t feel like mylking at home, you can swap the cashew-coconut milk out for four cups of any other homemade or store bought plant milk—almond, macadamia, or pistachio (if you’re a millionaire) come to mind.
Of the endless ways to top chia pudding, I do highly recommend adorning your pudd with spoonfuls of something fruity and bright and cheerful, like this five-minute rhubarb compote (also written out below). The jolts of sweet-tart flavor in every spoonful add intrigue and make the whole experience a lot less punitive. Rhubarb is everywhere in NYC right now so that’s what I call for in the recipe below, but any jam or preserve or compote would be lovely, maybe garnished with a handful of berries or chopped peaches later in the summer.
