It’s almost autumn. The leaves are starting to change. School buses are back on the road. The fresh berries are dwindling on the produce shelves at the grocery store. I even had drag a pair of jeans out of a storage bin from the basement this morning.

This bums me out. The berry part, mostly. I’m not ready to say goodbye to summer fruit just yet. I guess the jeans part bums me out a little too. Thanks for not noticing that I pulled said jeans out of the maternity clothes bin, even though I haven’t been pregnant for 2 months now.

(And for the record, I think everyone should be wearing jeans with a wide elastic waist band. I am sure it was tight jeans with buttons and zippers that gave someone a reason to coin the term “cranky pants”. Maternity Pants For ALL! This is my solution for world peace.)

ANYWAY. Frozen berries are holding me over while I come to terms with the fact that summer is just about over, and maybe the fact that my old jeans don’t fit just yet.

The only thing I really do with frozen fruit is throw it into the blender for smoothies. I either don’t remember and/or am not patient enough to let it thaw properly to do anything else with it. Because if I put it in the microwave to thaw? Well then I have to deal with all the gagging and yakking and convulsing at the thought of eating that sad, warm, slobbery strawberry. You might as well just feed me a slug.

But then we happened upon that bag of mixed berries in the freezer case and thought it looked like an easy way to get a little more variety into our standard strawberry-blueberry-banana smoothies we make quite regularly.

And then those blackberries on the package started looking really good to me. So good that I was soon picturing myself eating a breakfast of perfectly-textured, thawed, frozen berries in overnight oats while spring birds flew around my head and weaved a beautiful braid into my hair with colorful ribbons and twigs and old fishing line near a field full of daffodils with a small fawn who served me coffee with cream, no sugar please.

Or maybe I just made overnight oats and loaded it up with those frozen berries and then went to bed.

The standard overnight oats ingredients: 1/2 cup rolled oats, 1/2 cup vanilla yogurt, 1/2 cup of milk and a shake of cinnamon.

You’ve seen overnight oats plenty of times here before, but it’s the berries that are the exciting part.

It’s the berries that are the reason I’ve been eating this breakfast for 10 straight days in a row.

I must now interrupt this blog post with a picture of something sweeter than a summer strawberry.

(And the main reason my old pants are still a little snug.)

Thawed berries and soaked oats dragged out of the fridge this morning in time for crafts.

With a spoonful of almond butter sunk into berry bliss.

I told you 10 days in row, right? Let me say it in caps. THIS HAS BEEN MY BREAKFAST FOR 10 DAYS STRAIGHT, PEOPLE. (Now in italics.) 10 days straight! I run squealing to the fridge when realize it’s time to eat. I hoot and holler and dance around my kitchen over this cold, creamy, sweet, filling, breakfast concoction and all the wondrous things that these berries do to this bowl. And it’s not at all like eating a slug! What more could a girl ask for!

Maternity pants for all and world peace I guess? Thanks.