Mincemeat? In muesli? Well, quite.

It started with a Moroccan-style smoothie recipe I found last year – combining dried fruits, orange, bran flakes, oats and milk. Spiced up with a generous dousing of cinnamon it was delicious. 

Being a big fan of the traditional overnight Bircher muesli (I have to thank Hugh F-W for  waking me up to that) but slightly worn of the apple-raisin combination, it struck me that the Moroccan smoothie was barely one evolutionary step away from Bircher muesli.

So my first attempt at this combined:

• dried apricots 
• dates
• dried figs
• half an orange, cut into segments
• almonds
• cinnamon 

With a mix of oat & rye flakes, I blended all these in a small food processor, through laziness as regards getting a knife & chopping board rather than necessity but it made for a pleasing, almost flapjack-like, texture.

Moistened with the addition of the orange segments, a little almond milk and yoghurt I left this all to soften overnight. A perfect, mid-week instant breakfast. Make two portions or more – it keeps perfectly well for a second day.

You could easily omit the almond milk & just add more orange juice, or swap for any milk you prefer.

No added sugar or honey – the dried fruit & orange are sweet enough.

As I finished tidying up the blender and myriad of fruit jars, the ultimate time saving and food saving cheat dawned on me – mincemeat.

It had been staring at me every time I opened the fridge since Christmas. A welcome but as yet unused gift, I was struggling to think how I was going to get this eaten. I love a mince pie but February seems too early for both a Christmas warm up and too early to break the new year’s attempts to eat less pies of any variety.

And so on day three, I repeated the muesli process but with a tablespoon of mincemeat instead of all the fruit. I cut out the orange for fear of over-sweetening things but opted for a little zest instead. Perfect. This time I think the blender was necessary – distributing the mincemeat evenly among the oats would have been a struggle with a spoon.

Moroccan-style mincemeat muesli was born. It may have lost a little of its no-added-sugar credentials in the mincemeat variation but I love mincemeat and so to see this freed from its Christmas and shortcrust pastry shackles gives me hope that the jar won’t still be staring back at me when I open the fridge in June.

Read the recipe here or watch the highlights below.