Weekend Plans Post: Relearning What My Grandparents Knew About Oatmeal, Of All Things
(Featured image is “Steel-Cut Oatmeal with Berries 1” by Foodie In Disguise and is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)
When I was a kid, oatmeal was seen as pretty much the least appetizing breakfast you could possibly ask for. It didn’t matter how you dressed it up… apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, milk, cream, butter, berries… it was all “bleh”. I mean, prunes beat it out. Just barely, of course. But it did.
(I looked for the clip from Punky Brewster where George serves stewed prunes for breakfast and Punky says “gross-a-roo!” but couldn’t find it.)
Anyway, as I grew up, I learned the occasional joy of oatmeal as a hot breakfast that sticks to your ribs. I mean, if you’re going to go out and play in the snow for a couple of hours, you are going to need a belly full of oatmeal. By the time I got to college, 3-minute oatmeal was a thing and those little packets where you just add boiled water were cheap (not ramen cheap, but cheap) and fast and pretty utilitarian.
It wasn’t something that you actively *WANTED* to eat, but, you know, it beat being the type of hungry that 19 year-olds constantly are.
The other day, Maribou mentioned something about eating oatmeal for breakfast again and, that day, I got to go to the pharmacy to pick up some of our prescriptions and I happened to walk down the cereal aisle and, at the end there, there were those tubes of Quaker Oats. It was, like, four bucks. What the heck, I thought. What could go wrong? I’ve got one of those silly little one-button rice cookers. I’ll give it a shot.
Well, the instructions on the side of the tube had recipes for a quarter cup of oatmeal and for two cups of oatmeal. A quarter cup of oatmeal gets thrown into the pot with a cup of water and some salt, eh? Well, let’s double that. Two cups of water, half a cup of old-fashioned steel-cut oatmeal. Press the button, come back in 20 minutes. Well, of course, the water bubbled over during the boiling period and I went through half a dozen paper towels cleaning it up. Bummer. I learned that oatmeal gets made in the sink from that moment forward (seriously, that has worked out very well). And I made myself a bowl of oatmeal and sprinkled some brown sugar on top of it and HOLY COW WHERE HAS THIS BREAKFAST BEEN ALL MY LIFE?
This 20-minute breakfast was downright *AMAZING*. It tasted sweet, stuck to my ribs, kept me warm during a chilly morning, and, most importantly, kept me full until after my normal lunchtime.
You know how the doctor says that you should eat more stuff like oatmeal and less stuff like bacon? Well, lemme tell ya: That’s not necessarily impossible advice that nobody in their right mind could possibly follow. If you make oatmeal the old way, the way that Gran-gran made it (well, by making it slow rather than by making it in the microwave), you’ll find that oatmeal is actually pretty good, all things considered.
So that’s probably the last major discovery I’ve made in cooking over the last year of the quarantine. Holy cow. The old-school steel-cut oatmeal made slowly (well, 20 minutes) in the rice cooker is actually pretty good.
And since this weekend is the weekend where we will have achieved two weeks since the first shot in the arm, we’re going to need a breakfast that sticks to our ribs. So, this weekend, I’m going to fiddle about and see what can be done with apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, milk, cream, butter, berries…
The only thing that really irritates me is that I finally discovered this in, like, the first freakin’ month of spring instead of the last freakin’ month of autumn. This autumn is going to be awesome, though. Breakfast-wise.
So… what’s on your docket?
1/2c oatmeal, 1/2c frozen blueberries, 1TB brown sugar and water, 4 min in the microwave I add some pumpkin spice too. Great breakfastReport
I have a bunch of blackberries in the fridge. I will try that tomorrow.Report
Love steel cut and am eating it right now in fact. I do mine in batches overnight in a mini crock pot. 1 cup oats, 1 cup milk of your choosing, 3 cups water and let it cook on low or warm for 10 hours. I also throw in dried cranberries and sliced almonds. Makes 4 servings which last great in the fridge for days and days and only take 3 minutes to heat up in microwave.Report
The crock pot? 10 hours?
I’m intrigued.Report
Trader Joes has some thick rolled oats for pretty cheap, and they are wonderful.Report
So does Bob’s Red MillReport
I use Bob’s Red Mill corn meal for my homemade pizza.
I will check their stuff out.
I mean, part of me is saying “I looked at the ingredients on the side of the Quaker Oats tube and it had one ingredient and that ingredient was ‘Steel Cut Oats'” and going from there to “how much variance is there between types of steel cut oats?”
And then I realized that, maybe, there is enough variance to enjoy them even more.Report
If you can find it, I also recommend Bob’s 8 or 10 grain cereals.Report
I like McCann’s steel cut oatmeal. Very nutty flavor. Nothing needed to be added. Lasts for days in the fridge and good for cleaning out the lower gi trackReport
If you really want to take your oatmeal to the next level, there are two things you need to do: Ferment it, and cook it in yogurt. To ferment it, you put it in a jar with enough water to cover it by an inch or so, and also a couple tablespoons of yogurt as a starter culture. Then you cover it loosely and leave it out at room temperature. Overnight is okay; 24 hours is better. As an added bonus, this will help it cook much faster.
Cooking in yogurt is self-explanatory; just use yogurt instead of or in addition to water. I use plain yogurt; sugar-sweetened is okay if you were going to add sugar anyway; but aspartame breaks down and turns bitter when heated, so you don’t want to use aspartame-sweetened yogurt.
Also, a lot of people will put fruit in the oatmeal after cooking, but if you cook the fruit with the yogurt, the juice will spread out and flavor the whole pot.Report
Amazing how many things bump up a notch with some fermenting. Not sure we’ve tried it with oatmeal, but I’m primed to believe you.Report
weird tip from a trip to ireland: a half shot of whiskey in irish style (steel cut) oatmeal after cooking is actually delicious. i was extremely dubious when the inn owner on inishmore suggested it (it was 7 am!), but she was right. I think she felt bad that i refused the full breakfast* and “settled” for some amazing oats with fruit, a tipple, and very, very fresh milk.
* i barely like bacon as it is, and something that looks half cooked is not my jam**
** the jam was also good, and the scones*** were delightful
*** good scones are nothing like the dust rocks the uk tends to produce, much less the horrid nightmare that is american scone productionReport
Isn’t ‘put a half shot of whiskey in it’ the standard recommendation for everything in Ireland?
‘Soup not to your liking? Put a half shot of whiskey in it! Toddler won’t finish his vegetables? Give him a half shot of whiskey and he’ll be right as rain!’Report
often, yes. but in this case it’s actually very good. it brings out the nuttiness in the oats and made the hike up to dun aonghasa (sp?) warmer than it would have been given the ocean winds.
otoh, i have never been laughed at so hard in my life as when i asked the bartender at a dublin hotel what time the bar closed (the answer is never, obviously). he called his colleagues over to help him laugh at me. it was illuminating.Report
Most of my time doing European drinking is in rural Germany where it is orderly, efficient, humorless, and mandatory.
But from your description it sounds like the Irish approach might be more to my liking.Report
Pretty sure that was a standard recommendation in the US before prohibition took hold.
Bonus, a half shot of whiskey will probably reduce any harmful bacteria in the food to levels you can tolerate!Report
Before I was married I dated a girl who had been in the Navy. She gave a similar explanation for why she took a shot of tequila before (and after, and during) every meal. Sounds like you and her must have been in the same class!Report
You only need to get dysentery once, my friend…Report
Made a bowl this morning, used the cinnamon and sugar grinder to give it a nice little note or two and glanced over and saw the red pepper flakes.
Continued grinding and looked back at the red pepper flakes.
Not today.
But not never.Report
IMO, most sweet foods taste better with chili pepper. I actually haven’t found an exception to this rule yet.Report
Red pepper flake and brown sugar == RESOUNDING SUCCESS.
I went into blackberry oatmeal hopeful and left disappointed.
I went into red pepper flake/brown sugar oatmeal skeptical and left delighted.Report
Microwave oatmeal is a crime against humanity.
Try a spoonful of peanut butter melted into your oatmeal after cooking. It’s fab.Report
AGREE completely. And ditto microwave grits . . . .Report
*looks around sadly*
(small voice: I microwave my oatmeal. It’s about all I can manage at 6:15 am. Half cup of the rolled flat stuff, small handful dark chocolate chips, “enough” milk, zap for 2 minutes. Also it means I only have a bowl to wash, not a bowl AND a pan)
look, if I had someone who loved me who wasn’t rushing between exercise/preparing to go to work/packing the Sad Work Lunch/practicing piano, maybe I could ask for “real” oatmeal or a “real” breakfast….
I can’t do cold cereal any more; a combination of bad teeth and bad sinuses means crunchy foods are unpleasant to me.
also living alone, it feels like more effort than I want to go to to get an Instant Pot and do the steel cut thing.Report
The $20 rice cooker thing works. Put the pot and the lid in the dishwasher between uses, each batch fresh and new.
And if you use a quarter cup instead of a half cup like me, it might not even boil over.Report
Something I often have for breakfast in winter is Weet-Bix (I assume you have something like this in the US). Heat 1/2 a cup of milk in the microwave and pour it over three of the biscuits. They soften into mush immediately. It’s not exactly porridge, but because they’re made of wheat, not oats they don’t turn into a gloppy mess like porridge tends to when you cook it quickly.
FWIW, I got a multicooker recently and it’s well worth it for a single person. You can make any number of things that freeze readily so you can cook enough of something to eat it every few days for a couple of weeks.Report
Here it’s Shredded Wheat.Report
The texture seems different, but that’s pretty much what I’m talking about.Report
we can get Weetabix here, in a few stores, I assume they are similar? I don’t know, the oatmeal works for me because it also reduces the decisions I must make down to nil. More and more these days I find I vapor-lock if I am in a hurry and I have to make too many decisions.
I used to sometimes do the “hot” Grape-Nuts, which is pretty good, except Grape-Nuts has been remarkably hard to find of late.Report
Attempted Blackberry Oatmeal this morning. Just throw 4 ozs or so of blackberries in after measuring out water and steel cut oats.
It was not a success. I would have had more joy from eating the oatmeal plain and eating the berries separately.
Will attempt with green apples.Report