Breakfast is an important start to your day, and many of us are “too busy” to eat this essential meal. I have a good option for my readers: a highly nutritious powdered mixture of nuts and seeds, added to freshly homemade soymilk. It’s fast, really easy, tastes great, and gives you all the energy you need for the morning.

First, Make Your Own Soy Milk

Many expats already love soy milk and get their hometown brands at the local expat markets. But it is surprisingly easy to make your own soy milk! I’ve been doing it for a couple years now and I love it. There’s nothing like the rich taste of warm, freshly made soy milk. It’s also much cheaper than buying the imported brands, and there are no additives as well.

All you need is to buy one of the machines, which are readily available at all of the big stores like Walmart, Carrefour, Suning, etc. The best Chinese brand is Joyoung, and it should be around 350-450RMB for a good one. It’s better to get the metal casing instead of plastic.

Preparation is super easy; you simply pour in a tiny cup of soy beans, then press the button, and the machine grinds and cooks the beans. Presto, within 10-15 minutes you and your family have fresh milk! There’s usually enough left over for another day or two. You can first soak the beans overnight as well, but I’ve found the taste to be the same either way.

You can also experiment with any beans you like, or even add nuts for extra taste.

Now For The Superfood

I also add a couple tablespoons of grounded nuts and herbs to my morning soy milk and make a nice protein and nutrient-rich superfood. Readers can do this themselves quite easily at local supermarkets such as Walmart, Ole or Carrefour; they all have a booth with bins of nuts, seeds and other foods, and all you do is pick and choose your foods and they will instantly grind them down for you and stuff into a deliciously fragrant and warm bag of goodness.

There seems to be one famous company in Beijing that runs most of these booths. They also sell a refrigerated jar, called Yi-Yuan Bazhen powder, which includes Chinese yam, red bean, black sesame, oats, walnuts, dates, wolfberry, apple (dried), and honey. We tried this once and it was tasty, but we prefer making our own custom batch. We usually mix black sesame, walnuts, dates, almonds and yam, but we always mix it up and experiment.  The cost of a freshly ground bag usually ends up to be 80-120RMB.

You can click here for the usual list of nuts and seeds and print this to help decide; you should also Google Translate that page to get the English descriptions, which helps a lot.

If you’re on more of a tight budget, you can simply buy these same products in bulk and grind them yourself. I like April Gourmet for this, as they carry prepared bags of many nuts, dried fruits and other common items.

Why Is This A Superfood?

This breakfast combo is much more nutritious than any sugary cereal or coffee-and-bagel combo. The fat, protein and nutrients in such a mixture can really give you a morning boost — especially for schoolkids, who notoriously skip out on breakfast and drag around in their morning classes until lunch. Also, there’s even more evidence than before that nuts (such as walnuts and almonds) are very healthy, and can even help lower cholesterol as well as regulate diabtes and blood pressure.