Everyday Systems

shamrockmommy wrote:I have been craving hot cereal lately, and with my recent low carb escapades, have been avoiding grains like the plague!

Anyway, how do you do your oatmeal?

As an aside, I feed my dogs a natural diet, and part of it is a porridge meal, which is grains ground into a flour with some nuts and seeds and such.
Today's batch was quinoa, oats, flax, pecans and OMG, it smelled SO good. I took a taste, and I believe they'll be sharing their porridge mix with me in the morning!

What should I top it with? raisins? Dates? hot milk or water? How do you do yours?

Off-topic, but I'd just like to thank you for not following the recent trend and making the subject into two sentence fragments. If this were an ad on a billboard or in a magazine, it would almost certainly have been "Oatmeal. Revisited." Drives me nuts! (Every time I see one of those, I think, "Sentences. Fragmented. Why?")

DaveMc wrote:Off-topic, but I'd just like to thank you for not following the recent trend and making the subject into two sentence fragments. If this were an ad on a billboard or in a magazine, it would almost certainly have been "Oatmeal. Revisited." Drives me nuts! (Every time I see one of those, I think, "Sentences. Fragmented. Why?")

I'm going to talk about one particular intelligent default that's been working well for me for years, I call it "optimize your oatmeal." Optimize is another computery term. And on one level, it's meaning is obvious, "to make better." But it also has the connotation of "optimize for what?" There's this implied question. And there's a whole science of optimization that has to do with managing and balancing competing concerns. I think optimize your oatmeal does this rather brilliantly. And I'll get into that in a minute. Let me just explain quickly what it is exactly that I do.

For one thing, I eat my "optimized: oatmeal for lunch at work, not breakfast. I'll get into why in a moment. It's rolled oats, not instant, but the way I prepare it is more or less instant. I pour some oatmeal in a bowl, mix in some kind of nuts, some kind of seeds, and some kind of dried fruits. Then I go to the hot water water spigot by the coffee machine and cover it with hot water. By the time I'm back at my desk it's ready to eat. The oats don't really cook much. They just get sort of warmed up and a little softened. I like them this way. It gives you something to bite on. In fact the kind of oatmeal I buy, "Old Wessex Scottish style oats," advertises itself as "chewy chewy chewy" on the box. And I buy it for that reason. Other varieties of rolled oats don't necessarily stay chewy enough for me, even with this very mild warming up.

OK, first off, this is quick. Most of the prep time is walking back and forth to the hot water spigot. It's so quick in fact that I have a good 45 minutes left over on my lunch break to walk around outside and practice my urban ranger system. It's convenient. I don't have to store anything in the nasty communal refrigerator at work. All the ingredients are dry, I can buy them way in advance, and store them in a drawer at my desk. I don't even have to use the nasty communal microwave, cause it's just the hot water spigot. The reason I eat this for lunch at work rather than home is because at home I've got all these great resources: a non nasty communal refrigerator (well, it's kind of nasty, but it's my own nastiness at least), an oven, pots pans. I might as well save the resource intensive eating (which I do like) for when I actually have these resources, and the quick convenient stuff for when I don't.

Oatmeal is cheap. They feed this stuff to horses. Oatmeal is horse food. I mean that's cheaper than cat food. Yes, the dried fruits and nuts can add up, but we're still talking less than a dollar a day for lunch.

Oatmeal is healthy. It's whole grain. It's relatively unprocessed. I guess the steel cut kind would be better, but it loses too many points on convenience. I tried it. I tends to explode in the microwave, which does not make you popular with the communal kitchen crowd. Dried fruit may not be as healthy as fresh fruit, but hey, it's still fruit. And I have plenty of fresh fruit with other meals.

Oatmeal with seeds, nuts, and dried fruit tastes reasonably good. It's not the most delicious thing in the world, but it's OK. Yes, it would taste better if I cooked it properly in a pot and poured in some cream or slathered it with butter, but again, consider the convenience. Does it get too monotonous? Not if you vary the fruits, seeds, and nuts, which I do. If you have a trader joes near you, they are fantastic for this. Get Blenheim variety apricots, if you do. They're much tarter than ordinary dried apricots, which can be sickly sweet, to my taste. And dried gooseberries are another unusual nice and tart fruit you can find at trader joes.

Oatmeal is filling. It's like eating cement. The first time you prepare oatmeal like this you won't be able to finish it because you'll have made too much. No S dieters in particular pay attention here: if you eat oatmeal for lunch, you will not be hungry until dinner time.

Over43 wrote:I find oatmeal and "tasty" in the same sentence as almost a challenge.

Over43 wrote:I have just seen jook on a travel show (Globe Trekker?) on PBS. The show was highlighting a San Francisco Chinese restaurant. (I know DiMaggio's, Scoma's and the House of Prime Rib...) It looked good, possibly be made with the oatmeal eh? I'll try it some morning...

shamrockmommy wrote: Anyway, how do you do your oatmeal?

bluebunny27 wrote:I know oatmeal is becoming more popular now. There was an article in the newspaper the other day about this and they even started sellin' it at McD. (They probably add a lot of SUGAR there though, so it makes you want to get it all the time, like an addict, you know !!)

bluebunny27 wrote: I haven't been to McD in years even if there's one 5 minutes from here actually (It's next to a grocery store where I go more often than not) ... yesterday I even had 2 coupons in the mail, buy one Big Mac get one free ... I put 'em in the recycling bin ... The deal was sweet, half price but I thought I would regret eating all those calories later on anyway so I recycled 'em ...

NoSRocks wrote:Sorry- can't stand oatmeal - wish I did!!

montanajack wrote:BTW, as for oatmeal being healthy, I've got a friend who is a 'recovering' Type 2 diabetic. His blood sugar usually shoots up over 100 after eating oats. So, I think it depends on the individual.

marygrace wrote:I like to take a bag of frozen berries and cook them down into a sort of syrup-y compote (this makes enough for a week or so). Then I stir a few spoonfuls into my oatmeal along with some chopped walnuts and honey. The combo is also really good with whole milk yogurt.

Sometimes I'll blend up my cooked oatmeal with a banana (this is really easy if you have one of those hand blenders) to make it extra creamy and sweet. Then I'll top it with tahini (sesame seed butter). Sometimes I'll even blend in a few handfuls of raw spinach--it sounds gross, but once it's blended you don't taste it.

Oatmeal cooked in milk with chopped apricots and maple syrup is also really good.

On another note, the best oatmeal (they called it porridge) I ever had was at breakfast on my honeymoon in London. It was so incredibly smooth and creamy, but I've never been able to make it like that at home. UK posters, is there a secret to making great porridge?

montanajack wrote:BTW, as for oatmeal being healthy, I've got a friend who is a 'recovering' Type 2 diabetic. His blood sugar usually shoots up over 100 after eating oats. So, I think it depends on the individual.

bluebunny27 wrote:Thanks, BrightAngel.

Oh, I was just checkin' out your BLOG too earlier today.
Good tips there, good information, thanks for your hard work. Diet Hobby.

Marc

KCCC wrote:This sounds so good! I've been "off" oatmeal and on a Greek yogurt binge for a bit, but this may take me back to oatmeal.

The way I'd been eating it was not to cook it at all, but to soak overnight. I use 1/2 cup of old-fashioned and 1/2 cup of milk, a pinch of salt, a dash of cinnamon, and dried fruit and/or nuts. Mix together and put them in the fridge the night before. By morning, the oats have soaked until they're soft. You can heat them until warm, or eat as-is (which I usually did.)

I've had something quite similar in flavor that was touted as Swiss Muslei (probably some different, but not much!) at a restaurant.

overly beige wrote:You could always combine the two. I cook my oats with frozen berries. After cooking I spread the oatmeal with berries out and then add a layer of greek yogurt, then I sprinkle some brown sugar and chopped walnuts on top of the yogurt.