More Cheese More Chocolate

It took me 26 years and plenty of bowls really bad oatmeal to really appreciate how great oatmeal can be.  As a kid I was a fan of apple-cinnamon oatmeal and maple & brown sugar oatmeal, but part of that was just liking anything that came in an individual serving-sized packet.  I was always jealous of my friends whose parents bought the variety packs of individual cereal boxes and Doritos, which my mom refused to buy.  For some reason oatmeal was another story, and we always seemed to have a box of assorted flavors in the cupboard next to the cereal.  Maybe they were OK becasue they were little packets inside of a box instead of little boxes shrink-wrapped into a big box?

As time has gone by I have become less enchanted with the packets of flavored oatmeal and their in-your-face sweetness and dehydrated bits of fruit.  I discovered a vanilla flavor in college that I was pretty into for a while, but even that grew old.  Also, who is really satisfied for more than 20 minutes after eating one of those tiny servings?  Not me.

After spending countless hours clicking through food blogs this past year, I discovered a new way to eat oatmeal that involves minimal sweetness and maximal flavor.  The answer?  Peanut butter.  Or almond butter.  Instead of flavoring a bowl of oats with sugar or syrup or the like, a big spoonful of peanut butter gives it flavor without making it achingly sweet.  I usually add some kind of fruit and flaxseed or chia seeds, and I’ll occasionally add a spice like cinnamon as well, and that’s my breakfast at least 3-4 times a week.  Try it out.  Hopefully you will love it, too.  (Sorry, Garin!)

Note: Not all almond butters are created equal.  A vast number of them taste like cardboard, and some of them take a little getting used to.  Most importantly, you can’t go into it expecting to taste peanut butter.  I first realized this when I bought a jar of sunflower seed butter (not really sure why) a couple of years ago, and I was disappointed that although it looked like peanut butter it tasted nothing like it.  For some reason I had it in my head that people would only make other nut butters to replicate peanut butter and that there was some magical way of making a sunflower seed taste like a peanut, never stopping to consider that people might just really like sunflower seeds and want to smear that flavor on a piece of toast.  It was only then that I realized that peanut butter really does (or at least should) taste like peanuts.  It wasn’t just some arbitrary flavor someone in a lab came up with one day.  After that realization I got to trying out a wide variety of nut butters – some good, some bad.  I occasionally buy the freshly ground almond butter at my co-op, but it’s a little pricey.  My current favorite and most reasonably priced one is Trader Joe’s creamy almond butter with sea salt.

What you’ll need:

1/2 cup old-fashioned oats

1 cup water, milk, or a mixture of the two

1-2 tbsp peanut or almond butter

Fruit, nuts, seeds, spices (optional)

Microwave version:

Combine the oats & liquid and microwave for about three minutes, keeping an eye on it as it tends to bubble up and spill over the edges of the bowl around the 2:00 mark.  Or maybe that’s just my microwave.  When it nears that point I just stir it and let it rest for a few seconds before starting it again.  You can prevent this by turning the power to medium, but it alters the texture a bit.  Once it’s cooked, add the other ingredients.

Here are a few combinations:

Oats, milk, almond butter, boysenberries, chia seeds (with a side of banking law)

Oats, milk, almond butter, chia seeds

Oats, milk, water, almond butter, pear, chia seeds

Oats, water, peanut butter, blueberries, chia seeds, flaxseed

Overnight version:

After several months of regular oatmeal consumption, I discovered overnight oatmeal.  You just throw the oats and liquid together the night before, stick it in the fridge, and by morning the oats will have absorbed the liquid.  When your peanut butter jar is almost empty, you can just pour the oatmeal ingredients in the jar and you’ll scrape up all of the peanut butter you wouldn’t normally get to as you are eating your oats.  It eliminates the painful process of rinsing the stubborn bits out the jar before tossing it in the recycle bin.  Eat it cold or warm it up, but try to avoid warming it up in an old peanut butter jar as it will likely a) warp from the heat or b) set off sparks in your microwave if bits of the foil-lined seal remain on the rim of the jar.  I have learned both of these lessons from experience.  The latter is an extremely smelly lesson to learn.  In an almost-empty nut butter container (or just in a bowl – you don’t have to wait until you’re running low on peanut butter to use this method) add 1/2 cup of oats.

Then add 3/4 cup to 1 cup of liquid.  I’ve found that overnight oats don’t absorb as much liquid as microwave ones, so I generally reduce the amount of liquid.  Also, the difference between using water and using milk is great, with milk easily winning out.  Water is still great, but it produces a less creamy result.

In the morning, breakfast will be waiting.

Any other oatmeal-eating suggestions?