You wake up in the morning and you’re over the usual cereal, oatmeal, smoothie routine and you want something simple and quick. All of a sudden you think “I’ll have toast with jam!” After all, what is easier and quicker than stuffing a piece of bread into your toaster and smothering it with raspberry or strawberry jam? Especially when you have time to cook some eggs on the side… yum. However, do you really know what’s in your jam? Probably not. When you go out to every American café or breakfast joint I’m sure you are always reaching for the stack of teeny weeny Smucker’s jams to spread on your toast. However, all of Smucker’s regular jams and jellies include both high fructose corn syrup and regular corn syrup. Probably the most hazardous chemicals you could put into your body. (There natural brand does not include these)

Of course there are jams and jellies on the market these days that are “all natural” but still include a heavy dose of sugar. When the ingredient list just contains fruit and sugar, the sugar is more than likely white processed sugar. Instead of spending money on store-bought jam or jam injected with processed chemicals, I decided to make my own with lovely little chia seeds. One of my favorite bloggers Melissa who runs My Whole Food Life created a recipe for blueberry chia jam and I knew I had to try it. The recipe I used is pretty much the same as hers although I made a smaller batch by using 1 cup fresh blueberries, 2 tbsp chia seeds and 1 tbsp (eye-balled) of pure maple syrup.

This jam really required no effort at all which college kids will love to hear. The most effort it took out of me was cleaning the leftover chia seeds out of my Vitamix blender. Those little guys did NOT want to come out of there.

You can check out Melissa’s recipe for step-by-step instructions but pretty much all I had to do was combine my three ingredients in a blender until well combined and then I placed them into a mason jar over night to refrigerate. Within that time period I mixed it around after a few hours to just make sure all of the ingredients were thickened and combined well. The cool thing that makes this jam come together is that when the chia seeds are immersed in the blueberry blend, they expand and thicken into a gel (or jam-like substance). You can add as much maple syrup or coconut sugar (low-glycemic index sweetener) to your liking but I found one tablespoon did it for me!

 Of course I couldn’t eat it plain, so the morning after I made it I paired it with my Trader Joe’s crunchy almond butter on some Food For Life Ezekial Sprouted Whole Grain Bread. It was better than any normal peanut butter and jelly on toast I’ve had and it tasted extremely fresh and simple. Blueberries, almonds, maple syrup and chia seeds were the only ingredients stuck in between my bread. Corn syrup and processed sugar-free. Woo. I’m sure you would agree it looks very similar to jam and smells like it even too! This would make an excellent gift for the holidays if you made a few different flavors (strawberry, raspberry, peach?), especially packaged in mason jars.

Not to mention tasting beautiful, the combo looked beautiful as well. I had a banana on the side because I’m an almond butter/banana addict and can’t resist putting a banana with literally everything. I ate this before my first morning class and then went to workout after and the protein kept me full for a good few hours.

Creamy almond butter and gooey homemade jam with chia seeds. Mmmm what’s not to love? Taking less than 5 minutes to make, this is a great go-to breakfast. Enjoy!

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-Addie