Forté Recipes: Apricot French Toast

This is a recipe that takes a healthy spin on your traditional French toast. Instead of butter and syrup as a topping, you use a creamy sauce made from yogurt, jam, and orange zest. Feel free to change up the yogurt and jam flavors so you can make it exactly how you want it to suit any cravings or aversions you may have. My family loves vanilla yogurt with apricot jam—plus I love making apricot jam with my grandma so I always get nostalgic when I eat it!

Apricot French Toast:

2 slices whole wheat bread

1 egg

¼ cup milk

½ tsp. vanilla

dash of cinnamon

Sauce:

¼ cup vanilla yogurt

1 tbsp. apricot jam

½ tsp. orange zest

Topping:

½ cup blueberries

Directions: Mix together egg, milk, vanilla, and cinnamon. Dip bread in mixture, and cook on a hot griddle until golden. To make the sauce combine together in a blender and blend until well combined. Serve over warm French toast and top with blueberries.

Blueberries

This recipe also calls for ½ cup of blueberries on top. Berries are some of our most nutritious fruits, but blueberries and blackberries are especially so. There has been a lot of research done on blueberries with a lot of exciting results. Blueberries have been linked with reversing age-associated mental decline and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke. They also have anti-cancer benefits. Berries are even more important during pregnancy because they are packed with vitamin C, potassium, folate, and fiber. Berries are so nutritious that I recommend eating a ½ cup of berries every day; frozen berries count too! In fact, many frozen berries are equally as nutritious as their fresh varieties as they are picked at their peak ripeness and flash frozen so their nutrients are well preserved.

Whole Wheat Bread

I recommend using whole wheat bread whenever you have the option. Whole wheat bread has many health benefits over white bread. The first is fiber. Whole wheat bread on average has 5gm of fiber per slice while white bread only has 1gm. Fiber is especially important during pregnancy to maintain a healthy digestive tract and prevent constipation. Constipation affects nearly 50% of pregnant women because of hormonal changes that relax the digestive tract as well as the pressure of your growing uterus. The main thing you can do to prevent constipation is to eat plenty of fiber and drink enough water. Physical activity is also important.

The second big reason to eat whole wheat bread over white bread is that whole wheat bread contains the entire wheat berry including the bran and the germ. This is where the bulk of the nutrients are stored. White bread is made up of only the endosperm, or starchy part of the wheat berry. Because of this, whole wheat bread has significantly more essential fatty acids, folate, vitamin B6, vitamin D, zinc, and magnesium than white bread does.

Orange Zest

Another benefit of this recipe is the orange zest in the creamy sauce. Like other fruits and vegetables, the peel of a citrus fruit is one of its most nutritious parts! The peel has many times the antioxidant content per weight than the flesh of the orange. If you don’t have a zester, I recommend you invest in one. You can keep the zest in the fridge for a few days or toss it in the freezer as it freezes well. A few other ideas on where to use citrus zest is adding it to marinades, sauces, smoothies, salad dressings, vegetables, salads, yogurt, pancakes, and waffles.

-Heidi

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