Hello, beautiful people! The Vegan Month of Food (MoFo) 2015 has finally arrived. That means I am back at it creating healthy, vegan dishes each day for the entire month of September. My goal is to try and post 5-6 times per week.

This year, the organizers changed up the structure of the event, by providing prompts for each day. This allows for vegan / vegan-friendly social media folk to participate in MoFo without having a set theme. However, I will still have a theme (because themes rock, lezbereal). This year’s will be Half-Marathon Training Fuel. I am currently training for the Rock ‘N Roll Philadelphia Half-Marathon on Halloween, so I am going to provide tips and recipe ideas for accomplishing a half-marathon propelled by plants. I also wanted to mention that I am actually not vegan! I support veganism, and eat vegan ~70% of the time, but am just a vegetarian. I love participating the MoFo because it challenges me not only to create a slew of recipes, but also to eat even more vegan food, which is a thumbs up in my book.

This will be the second year that I will be participating in Vegan MoFo. Please feel free to search my blog for “vegan mofo” to locate all of my recipes from last year. Alternatively, you can just check out the September 2014 posts, of course 🙂  2014’s theme was “Salads” (Oh yes, I ate a lot of lettuce).

So, let’s get eating! Today’s prompt is: “Rise and Shine! It’s MoFo time! Tell us about your breakfast.” This recipe was created based on an adventure I had picking approximately 20 lbs of peaches from Linvilla Orchards. Yes, I am insane. But, I actually ended using every single peach, so I am also ingenious. Hehehe.

I figured, hey, we go crazy stuffing apples- why not stuff some peaches in a similar manner? The peaches are cut in half, partially scooped out, and filled with a chia-cinnamon-cardamom oatmeal mixture.

Here are some of my peach babies. Look at that glorious, wispy fuzz. Just makes me want to nuzzle them.

Here are the halves, scooped out and ready to be covered in oats. I left a decent amount of flesh so that the peach would not collapse in the oven.

You can see that the day progressed into night as the photo shoot went on… (cue “Day Man / Night Man” song).

I enjoyed these for breakfast with a scoop of non-dairy yogurt and a spoonful almond butter. They also make a fabulous healthy dessert, topped with some vegan vanilla ice cream. They’re lightly sweetened, so feel free to add an extra drizzle of maple syrup if you have a need for uber sweetness.

These will fuel you through your run with the slow-digesting carbs from the oats, as well as the rapid-digesting carbs from the peaches. Chia seeds are anti-inflammatory and will help your body adequately recover from all of that pavement-pounding.

Oatmeal-Stuffed Peaches with Cardamom and Cinnamon

Serves 3

Ingredients

• 3 large peaches
• 1 cup oatmeal
• 2 1/4 cup water
• 1 tbsp chia seeds
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4-1/2 tsp ground cardamom
• 8 drops of stevia, optional
• 1 tbsp maple syrup, or more if desired

Directions

1. Cut peaches in half. Remove pit and using a small melon ball scoop, or a metal spoon, scoop out chunks of peach flesh and set these chunks aside. Leave enough flesh along the sides and bottom so that the peach does not cave in (I left about 1/2 inch).
2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Add remaining ingredients and the peach chunks to a medium size saucepan and bring to a boil. Lower to a simmer, stirring frequently. Cook for 10 minutes, or until mixture thickens and oats are cooked.
3. Fill eat peach with the oatmeal. Spread extra oatmeal in between the peaches. Cook for 25 mins. Devour!

P.S. The orange stuff in the jar, and on top of the peach, is homemade peach butter. Part of my Demolish 20lbs of Peaches Plan. If you are interested in the recipe, please let me know and I’d be happy to share it!