10 Vegan Breakfast Ideas (Compilation #32)

What do you do when you very rarely buy perishable groceries? You improvise. I didn't set out to do this at all, and it may reflect that it is both winter and more toward the end of my grocery cycle, but the colors are more muted here than usual or tend to have a lot of orange things. These are all still delicious and satisfying (or were to me), even if many of them are more brown and orange than usual. That's winter for you!

I noticed, too, that I apparently gravitated much more toward dessert breakfasts than I think is typical for me, including explicitly dessert-like things like cobbler and cookies, but all things should be in moderation. I definitely don't eat cookies for breakfast all the time. But we're adults who have to deal with a pandemic and snowstorms and stressful jobs, and sometimes cookies help.

1. Naan Breakfast Pizza with Veggie Bacon, Scramble, and Mushrooms

Of course you know I'm more into sweet things at breakfast than savory, but that doesn't mean I don't seize the opportunity for a good savory breakfast at times. This one is especially good! I am not the progenitor of this idea, nor am I the first to veganize it, but this is my own spin on it. First, I pulled a piece of naan I'd made a while ago out of my freezer the night before. In the morning, I topped it with some shredded Violife cheddar, JUST Egg scrambled with onions and peppers, Sweet Earth bacon, and sauteed mushrooms, then popped it in my toaster oven for about 10 minutes to get nice and hot. When I pulled it out, I added some cashew-based cheddar sauce I had left over from another recipe that I thinned with some warm almond milk and finally added some chopped scallions. This was amazing and I will definitely be exploring more naan breakfast pizza combinations.

2. Nutty Nordic Breakfast Pies with Almond Butter and Spiced Apples (Gluten Free, Soy Free)

You may remember that in my last breakfast compilation I included these nutty Nordic breakfast pies, but with soy yogurt, kiwi, and pomegranate arils. Well, I had a shell left from the original recipe at Karla's Nordic Kitchen and it was too cold for me to want a breakfast that wasn't warm, so I added almond butter and some cooked spiced apples instead. This all went together beautifully! It already had a lot of protein but I rounded it out with soy milk for a little more.

3. Leftover Cornbread Casserole

If you're a savory breakfast person, this could be right up your alley. I gave you this recipe not too long ago. I love it for a slow weekend morning, and the leftovers can carry you a few days into the week, too. For extra protein, I had this alongside a veggie breakfast sausage patty.

4. Fried Apple and Almond Butter Oatmeal (Gluten Free)

Having thoroughly enjoyed the combination of cooked apples and almond butter, I of course had to make this recipe from Two Spoons. The chia seeds in the oatmeal made it very thick. I do like that sometimes but if you want a thinner version you'll want to add more liquid. 

It was really good! I didn't put a whole apple on my bowl because that wouldn't leave room for all the other toppings, but that was fine because then I could save some apples to have more of this the next day. I loved having some cardamom in the oats and the apple, and all the toppings went together super well. I used a pink lady apple, almond butter, Siggi's vanilla protein yogurt, cacao nibs, and a drizzle of maple syrup on top. I haven't had cacao nibs in a while and I need to use them more--this was such a nice way to get some in!

Because I also used soy milk for cooking my oatmeal instead of almond, I didn't flag this as soy free, but you could easily make it soy free if you needed to. To make it nut free, I'd recommend sunflower seed butter instead of almond, cooking the apples in a vegetable oil other than the coconut oil requested, using an allergy-friendly plant milk (such as oat), and an allergy-friendly yogurt (though I am not keen on oat milk yogurt, you might find one you like, or you could also try flax yogurt).

5. White Chocolate Macadamia Pancakes

I know my coconut whipped cream looks a bit weird; please disregard the result of the fight I had with the end of the can! This recipe from the Minimalist Baker aims to recreate a popular cookie in pancake form. Though I recommend chopping your macadamia nuts a bit more finely than I did, and take care to keep your flame low and be patient to cook these slowly (otherwise the white chocolate immediately sticks to the pan when you put it in, because the sugars caramelize--it can be messy), I really enjoyed these. It's been far too long since I had a good white chocolate macadamia cookie, and although these were supposed to fill that void, what they ended up doing was to make me want one! But I have no objection. Macadamia nuts are awesome. To boost the protein, I had my pancakes with a glass of soy milk.

6. Carrot Cake Cobbler

I found this omnivore recipe at Lauren's Latest that was super easy to veganize. Helpfully, vegetable oil is already listed as a substitute for the butter, and you can swap in a non-dairy milk for the milk, and everything else is already vegan. This is one of those recipes that makes you feel like wizardry is happening, because you pour hot water over the batter and then bake it and end up with a moist cake on top of a rich, carrot-infused caramel sauce. It may but more decadent than you want every day to have something like this, but you'll get applesauce and carrots and walnuts, and if you do as I did and have some soy milk to boost the protein of the meal, to me (not a medical doctor and not someone offering such advice) it seems pretty good. I rarely eat dessert after a meal, which may explain my tendency to have it for breakfast, but hey, we do what works for us!

7. Turmeric Latte (Gluten Free, Nut Free, Soy Free Option)

I'm having a lot of fun exploring hot breakfast drinks that aren't coffee-based, and this one is delicious and soothing. I found the recipe at Simple Vegan Blog and knew I had to try it. I used soy milk but you could use any plant-based milk of your choice. Just heat up the milk, add your turmeric, cinnamon, and maple syrup, and enjoy! Turmeric is also anti-inflammatory (note: I am not a medical doctor and am not giving advice here!), so that's a good bonus when I need to tone down my immune system a bit.

8. Crumpets with Cream Cheese, Blackberries, and Vegan Honey

For this meal, I didn't quite stick with seasonal fare--not that there really is much we can consider seasonal in February!--and instead went with rebellion. (This was a meal eaten the day after a major grocery stock up trip.) I bought some fresh blackberries and had them on a toasted crumpet spread with cream cheese, drizzled with vegan honey (a rice nectar-based one in this case). This is a good accompaniment to a turmeric latte!

9. Lavender Apricot Crisp (Nut Free, Soy Free)

I rarely buy canned fruit, but the situation being what it is, I decided to make this apricot crisp recipe from Plant Based on a Budget with canned apricots. I did so in part because I had purchased a little jar of culinary lavender blossoms who knows when and it is virtually impossible to find recipes that involve lavender, but also because I knew that this would be one of many things that helped me stretch out the time between physical shopping trips. It was so good! I'd love to try it out with fresh apricots in season, too.

10. Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal No-Bake Cookies (Gluten Free)

Although I don't think that you should eat cookies for breakfast every day (although if your doctor says you should, be sure to take that advice over mine!), pancakes with syrup have every bit as much sugar, so why not? The primary ingredients are oatmeal and peanut butter, after all. This is a nostalgic recipe for me that I found veganized at Nora Cooks. These were the main reason why my childhood home had oatmeal in it--certainly we almost never, if ever, cooked oatmeal on the stove for breakfast, favoring all those instant packets instead. But sometimes we'd make these very quick cookies, and we almost never really let them cool before eating them, the way I did this time.

These were sweeter than I remembered, but having them with some soy milk really hit the spot when I needed energy for shoveling snow in the morning. I was so glad I'd whipped up a batch the night before. Sometimes we just do what we have to do, right?

This was a really satisfying group of breakfasts. I do love the colorful meals of summer but there is also something wonderful about the ironically warm colors of winter foods--oranges, reds, yellows. Tell me, what's your favorite winter breakfast?