I read that January, 1994, is National Oatmeal Month.
What do you like to do with oatmeal?

38 responses total.

bake it into breads.

I second that motion.  I also like oatmeal chocolate cookies.

Personally, I like to turn my back and go the other direction from
oatmeal as such, but I used to use oats in a meat loaf -- until oats
proved to be one of the things whose consumption on my part made the
infant wake up screaming.  (Now I use wheat-or-triticale flakes)

I like hot oatmeal for breakfast in the morning.  I avoid the instant
variety though.  Either Quaker's Old-Fashioned or stronger stuff such
as Elam's Steel-Cut.  I occasionally mix in a bit of wheat germ too,
but I like it best just with milk -- no sugar or other additives.

My daily oatmeal recipe, which has been posted in this conference more
times than anybody should have to look at it, is this:

1/3 cup rolled oats (organic ones from the co-op)
1 cup water
handfull of raisins (organic ones from the co-op)

nuke for 2 minutes on high and 5 minutes on low.  Let sit while you
shower.  Reheat for 10 seconds on high.  Add some soymilk, stir, and eat.

Does "nuke 5 minutes on low" translate to "5 minutes on defrost"?
I hate recipes like that...our microwave only has two speeds.

For those with less time to spend on cooking oatmeal for breakfast--

        1/2 cup quick oats (from co-op)
        1/2+ cup boiling water
        sliced fruit (kiwis, strawberrys, peaches, etc)
        honey to taste
        a dusting of allspice

        pour boiling water over oats in bowl.  Stir in water until
        all oats are soaked.  Cover oats with sliced fruit.  Dribble
        honey over fruit (tupelo or orange blossom is really key).
        Dust final product with complementary spice--allspice for most
        berry fruits, peaches and nectarines; ground cloves for kiwis;
        cinnamon and clove for stewed apples--you get the idea).

        Voila'! Breakfast before you know it!

re 6: my nuker has a whole bunch of levels: High, Defrost, Med, Med-Low,
Low, and I think it has a Warm and maybe a Med-High.  When I say to nuke on
"Low", as far as my nuker is concerned, i mean it.  Adapt as needed for your
own nuker.

By the way - the reason for changing the heat to "low" is because if you
leave the oatmeal nuking on "high" it boils over -- all over the microwave,
while if you switch to "low" the microwave cycles on and off, causing the
oatmeal level to rise and fall within the bowl without leaping over the
sides of it.

So, then is the strategy for single-speed nukers to heat (on high/default)
for X minutes (up to the boilover point ?), then let the oatmeat sit for
a while before returning to another round of high/default nuking?

Cooking several bowls of oatmeal (for the whole family) at once may suffice.

We feed oatmeal to the crickets in the terrarium in my
daughter's room.  (The frog in the terrarium eats the
crickets.)

Oatmeal Sucks.

 Not really. If baked in cookies, or muffins, it is tolerable. I prefer mine
in a bowl, hot with a little milk and sugar on it.

oatmeal whole wheat bread (from the recipe in the first Donna German
breadmaker book) is pretty amazing

yum! oatmeal! the real winter breakfast. 

To combine electronic gadgets (earlier topic) and oatmeal (this topic) for
the people who take their showers the night before so they dont have to get
up so early in the morning:  Put 1/2 C oatmeal and 1/2 C water, a few dried
fruits into a 1+ C container. Put container in very small crockpot (the 1 qt
size).  Plug crock pot into electric outlet.  Go to bed.  Get up. Eat oatmeal.

(We would not want to see Valerie's hair the day after a night-before shower.)

(Although the oatmeal crock pot idea sounds kind of yummy.)

I shower every night and then go to sleep.  My hair the next morning requires
serious gluing.

I used to shower every night, but my hair the next morning was always
unreasonable (which is saying something, 'cause I've got short hair!  Well,
my hair-dressers (is that the right term) are always saying I've got thick
hair...)  Recently I discovered that I only have to get up 20 minutes earlier
to shower in the morning.  Plus, it gives me more time at night to get stuff
done.

hi Valerie, we either have a lot in common or you are everywhere!  If you are
going to be eating oatmeal and raisins for breakfast every day, just like we
do, you should not be paying co-op prices.  We order them, organic, through
a buying club, in 50 pound bags and 25 pound boxes.  Would you like to split
an order with us, or stop by for breakfast some late morning?  A former
housemate showed us how to cook oats on the stove top.  Boil the water, turn
off the pot, add oats, cover pot.  Wait 10-15 minutes.  My stove takes a long
time to cool off (think burner elements, Frigidaire) so I have to turn it off
just as it starts to bubble, otherwise it will boil over when the oats are
added.  For variety, we sometimes crack wheat with our hand grinder, then
pressure cook it at 5 pounds, turn off the cooker once it reaches pressure,
let it come down to pressure at once.  Millet the same, rice 15 pounds.  Use
less water than for regular boiling:  millet 2.5:1, rice 1.3:1.  Experiment.
Cracked wheat takes a lot more water.  Couscous do not pressure cook, they
burn (they are made of flour).  

Wow, this is another item I haven't looked at in years.  I last worked
at a full-time 40-hours-a-week gotta-be-there-from-8-to-5 job in 1993.
When I stopped having to get up so early, I also stopped eating breakfast.
So my daily oatmeal habit has vanished.  I kind of miss the oatmeal, but
I don't at all miss getting up at some unholy hour of the morning to hustle
off to work.

(Are we free-lance computer people annoyingly smug about working weird hours,
or what?)  :)

Yep.

oatmeal is not just for breakfast, makes a quick supper, and is high in
protein.  

Re: #22
Enjoy your freedom while it lasts.  The stork has a sure-fire cure for
such smugness.
;)

If not for breakfast, i usually have oatmeal for lunch or late-night
snack.  It tastes better & is better nutritionally mixed with wheat
bran in about a 3 oat / 1 wheat ratio, then cooked with skim milk
instead of water.  Even yummier with dark brown sugar added, but 
hard to rationalize that nutritionally... 

Molasses!  Molasses turns up on half the lists of things with lots of good
minerals and other healthy stuff.  And it's in brown sugar, especially the
dark brown kind.  :)

Molasses is what's left behind when sucrose is spun out of
sugar cane, I believe.  Something like that, anyhow.

At least to my palate, molasses has a very different taste from brown
sugar.  I skew the molasses/brown sugar ratio way toward the former
in stuff like baked beans, but i don't like it in places where brown
sugar or honey might be put on something.  

My point was that the molasses in brown sugar could be used as a
justification, although a rather sketchy one, for putting brown sugar into
one's oatmeal.

Ah.  I don't figure on sweeteners (honey, brown sugar, molasses, etc.)
having any nutritional value at all.  (I'm *not* underweight.)

Molasses turns up on a surprising number of lists of foods that contain one
nutrient or another.  I wouldn't go swallowing great galoomphing gallons of
it just because of that, but it is an intriguing factoid about which
sweeteners are good choices.

We will be trying Scott's granola recipe as soon as we get more rolled
oats from the food bank.

...this will in turn provide incentive to get old-fashioned oats at the
store for breakfast.  More fiber and more filling, yum yum.

What is the difference between 'rolled oats from the food bank' and
'old-fashioned oats at the store'.  Can't you boil either for breakfast?
We add fruit and/or nuts, chopped first.

We can and do, Sindi.

It's that Scott's recipe calls for rolled oats, and it turns out we had
some on hand.

My point was that since we were getting rolled oats from the food bank,
we didn't have much reason to get old-fashioned, for breakfast, which
pretty much answers your question.

You can get regular oats, or thick-cut oats, or steel-cut oats (chopped, not
flattened) or the predigested quick oats (add hot water, it turns into a soupy
sort of liquid).  All but the steel-cut oats are rolled, which means passed
between two rollers which also heat them while flattening them, precooking
them.  You can add the regular-cut to boiling water and turn it off if you
don't mind them slightly overdone.

My bad.  I should have said, we used quick oats instead of thick-cut.

Thanks, Sindi, for the clarification.

Quick oats won't give you the same texture, it will be mushier.

Right.

Now, wonder how the granola recipe would have turned out had we used
thick-cut...

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